1977The five overseas subsidiaries turn a profit for the first time
1982TOMY UK Ltd. is established
1983Tomy joins Tokyo Disneyland as an official sponsor
1986Two plants, at Tokyo and Nagareyama, close; some 600 take voluntary redundancy
1988Yujin (now Takara Tomy Arts) is established
1989The sales subsidiary is absorbed and the company renames itself Tomy
1991In-house toy manufacturing stops; production moves to Thailand and Hong Kong
1996Tomytec is established for model railways and hobby products
1997The shares are registered over the counter with the JSDA
1998TOMY Corporation opens in the United States; exclusive Hasbro rights in Japan
1999Listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
Tomy's first four decades were spent turning a small tin-toy workshop into a plastics maker with its own factories and sales companies on four continents, and then — after the 1985 Plaza Accord stripped its exports of their price advantage — spending ten years converting itself from a manufacturer into a planning, development and sales business. The listing of 1997 and the exclusive Japanese rights to Hasbro's lines a year later gave that reinvented company a second engine alongside Plarail and Tomica.
The founding of Sanyo Kogyo and the birth of Plarail
Tomy's origins go back to 1924, when the first-generation Tomiyama Eiichiro (富山栄市郎) opened a toy shop in a Tokyo burnt flat by the Great Kanto Earthquake. The business at first made metal toys out of tinplate, but during the war it was required to stop producing toys as a peacetime industry and shut down. In January 1953 it began again as a postwar toy manufacturer: the limited partnership Sanyo Toy Works was reorganised and incorporated as Sanyo Kogyo Co., Ltd., making metal toys from a base at Tateishi in Katsushika ward, Tokyo. In March 1959 the sales side was separated out into an independent subsidiary, Toyama Shoji Co., Ltd., putting manufacturing and selling into separate hands.
The company was early to switch its material from tinplate to plastic, and grew into the leading maker of plastic toys. In October 1961 it launched Plarail, a railway toy running on plastic track — the origin of what would become its flagship brand. In March 1963 Sanyo Kogyo was renamed Tomy Kogyo Co., Ltd. and Toyama Shoji was renamed Tomy Co., Ltd., and in April 1969 a new head-office building went up at Tateishi in Katsushika.
Going abroad, and sponsoring Tokyo Disneyland
In August 1970 the company set up TOMY (Hong Kong) Ltd., its first overseas subsidiary. In December 1982 TOMY UK Ltd. (now TOMY UK Co., Ltd.) secured a European base. In April 1983 Tomy joined Tokyo Disneyland as an official sponsor, the starting point for its build-up in the character business.
TOMY France SARL. in September 1985, TOMY (Thailand) Ltd. in October 1987 and the establishment of Yujin Co., Ltd. (now Takara Tomy Arts Co., Ltd.) in February 1988 assembled the base for the capsule-toy and character business, and in March 1996 the founding of Tomytec Co., Ltd. added the core of the model-railway and hobby business as well.
Listing on the First Section, and the exclusive Hasbro distribution rights
The sharp appreciation of the yen that followed the 1985 Plaza Accord stripped the price competitiveness from an export business that then ran four plants and 1,100 employees and drew more than half its sales from exports. Over the following decade, carrying surplus plant and surplus people, the company pushed through a structural reform that turned a head office built around manufacturing into one built around planning, development and sales — changing the profit structure, the mindset of its employees and the way the work was done. By 1997 its earnings were underpinned, in a toy industry of violent swings in fashion, by long-lived staples — Plarail in its 38th year, Tomica in its 27th, TOMIX in its 21st — and by the steady business that came with character licences from the Walt Disney Company and others.
In September 1997 the shares were registered over the counter with the Japan Securities Dealers Association, giving the company a footing for raising capital and a lift in public recognition. In February 1998 TOMY Corporation was established in the United States as the base for the North American market, and in November of the same year Tomy acquired the exclusive rights to distribute the products of Hasbro of the United States and its group companies in Japan. Winning the exclusive import rights to Transformers and other major overseas character lines laid the foundation for a channel of its own that would later sit alongside the Disney licence.
In March 1999 the company listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and in March 2000 it completed its move onto the main board with designation to the First Section. In December of that year it signed a comprehensive licensing agreement with Walt Disney International Japan covering the domestic toy market, winning exclusive rights to Disney merchandise in Japanese toys. The exclusive Hasbro distribution rights of November 1998 and the exclusive domestic Disney toy licence of December 2000 combined to give the company a business structure that owned the exclusive Japanese channel for the major overseas character brands.
2015Harold George Meij becomes president — the first from outside the family
2017Meij steps down in December after operating profit more than quadruples
The defining act of these years was the 2006 merger that put Plarail and Tomica under the same roof as Licca-chan and Choro-Q, joining the two great postwar Japanese toy makers into one company. Consolidation alone did not settle the accounts, however, and it took a private-equity tie-up, a spread of production out of China, and finally an outsider in the president's chair to bring the numbers back.
The merger with Takara, and the reshaping of the industry
In June 2004 the company set up TOMY (Shenzhen) Ltd. as a production and sales base in China, and in July 2005 it took Wako Co., Ltd. (和興, now Takara Tomy Arts Co., Ltd.) as a subsidiary, widening the base of the capsule-toy and character business further. Mainland China was now added to an overseas network that had been assembled across Europe, North America and South-East Asia since TOMY (Hong Kong) Ltd. in August 1970, and Tomy opened its new production and sales base in Shenzhen to gain direct access to the Chinese market.
In August 2005 the company signed a merger agreement with Takara Co., Ltd., and on the merger in March 2006 it changed its name to Takara Tomy Co., Ltd. Takara (the Licca-chan doll, Choro-Q) and Tomy (Plarail, Tomica) were brought into a single company, a combination of the former two largest toy makers that consolidated the core brands of Japan's postwar toy industry. In August of the same year a new wing of the head office was built at Tateishi in Katsushika, completing the management structure of the new Takara Tomy. Under Tomiyama Kantaro (富山幹太郎), the first president of the merged company and the third in the line, the starting point for the reshaping of the industry was set.
The TPG tie-up, takeover defences and the spread of production into Vietnam
In March 2007 the company announced a strategic capital and business alliance with TPG, bringing in a major private-equity partner, and in May it took Kiddy Land Co., Ltd. as a subsidiary, adding a character-merchandise retail channel to the group. In June it introduced a takeover defence, putting a defensive structure in place against the unsettled shareholder register that followed the merger.
In September 2007, as conditions around its Chinese production bases changed, Tomy began production in Vietnam, completing a shift away from concentration on China alone. In February 2008 it entered a business alliance with Index Holdings Co., Ltd. and carried out a third-party allotment of shares, and in July of the same year it made Yujin (now Takara Tomy Arts) a wholly owned subsidiary.
Meij takes the presidency, and reform from inside
In June 2015, in the first appointment of an outsider from beyond the founding family, Harold George Meij (ハロルド・ジョージ・メイ) — Dutch-born, and formerly a senior executive at Coca-Cola Japan, Sunstar and Shinsei Bank — became representative director and president. He took on internal reform and internationalisation, leading the reorganisation of the company's structure and its product lines.
From consolidated sales of $1.5B (¥163bn) and operating profit of $24.8M (¥3bn) in FY15 (the year ended March 2016), the company recovered sharply to $1.5B (¥168bn) and operating profit of $69M (¥8bn) in FY16 (year ended March 2017), and $1.6B (¥177bn) and operating profit of $119.6M (¥13bn) in FY17 (year ended March 2018), leaving the restructuring phase behind. In December 2017 Meij stepped down, and Kojima Kazuhiro (小島一洋), formerly of Mitsubishi Corporation, succeeded him in January 2018 as the fifth president.
2025Interest-bearing debt down to $27.9M (¥4bn); equity ratio 64.2 per cent
2025FY24 sets records: sales $1.7B (¥250bn), net profit $109.3M (¥16bn)
2026Quality-control structure rebuilt after a quality-related incident
Under its second outsider president the company absorbed the shock of the pandemic while continuing to pay down debt, cutting interest-bearing borrowings to a fraction of their level a decade earlier and roughly doubling the equity ratio. That repaired balance sheet is what allowed the presidency to return to the founding family in 2024, in the company's hundredth year, with a ten-year strategy and a new purpose attached.
Kojima's tenure: a stronger balance sheet, and the impact of the pandemic
In the early part of the tenure of the fifth president, Kojima Kazuhiro (小島一洋), formerly of Mitsubishi Corporation, the strong results of FY17 (year ended March 2018) and FY18 (year ended March 2019) gave way in FY19 (year ended March 2020) to a slowdown caused by COVID-19, with sales of $1.5B (¥165bn) and operating profit of $100M (¥11bn), and then to a further fall in FY20 (year ended March 2021) to $1.3B (¥141bn) and $64.5M (¥7bn).
The strengthening of the balance sheet nonetheless continued. Total interest-bearing debt was reduced from $491.7M (¥60bn) in FY14 to $312.4M (¥34bn) in FY20 and $27.9M (¥4bn) in FY24, while the equity ratio roughly doubled, from 30.6 per cent in FY14 to 64.2 per cent in FY24. Alongside the fall in profit through the pandemic, the capital structure was put in order — and it became the source of the company's capacity to invest over the longer term.
The centenary, and the drafting of the Mid- to Long-Term Management Strategy 2030
In June 2024, timed to the hundredth anniversary of the founding that fell in the same year, the presidency passed from the fifth president, Kojima Kazuhiro (FY17–FY22), to Tomiyama Akio (富山彰夫) of the second generation of the founding family (FY23–; born August 1984, and a career employee who joined Takara Tomy). Succeeding the former CEO Tomiyama Kantaro, who became honorary chairman, President Tomiyama Akio returned the line of chief executives to the founding family, and — out of a career in the overseas and global-strategy side of the business — drew up and launched the Mid- to Long-Term Management Strategy 2030. The Integrated Report 2024 sums it up: In June 2024 the management structure was renewed, succeeding a predecessor who had served as representative director and CEO for more than thirty years. Taking the hundredth anniversary of the founding as the occasion, the company announced its purpose and the Mid- to Long-Term Management Strategy 2030.
The new strategy widens the base of the business from toys to play, and sets out an extension along the age axis with the Kidult segment in mind together with growth in overseas sales. The top priority is expanding sales into the Chinese market, monetising the core brands — Tomica, Plarail, the Licca-chan doll, Transformers, Beyblade and others — through investment in intellectual property, while the business alliance with Hasbro of the United States, in place since November 1998, continues. FY24 (year ended March 2025) set a new record: sales of $1.7B (¥250bn) (up 20.1 per cent year on year), operating profit of $166.2M (¥25bn) (up 32.2 per cent, an operating margin of 9.9 per cent) and net profit of $109.3M (¥16bn) (up 66.7 per cent) — the renewal of the management structure and the high-water mark of the results arriving together at the hundredth-anniversary milestone. The Integrated Report 2025 records that in pursuing the Mid- to Long-Term Management Strategy 2030, Takara Tomy, through continuous investment in its brands over many years, announced at the hundredth anniversary of its founding its purpose — Play makes the world a better place — and its new tagline, Dream, and fight for it.
In FY25 (year ended March 2026), the 101st year and the first past the centenary, the company is rebuilding in response to a quality-related incident that has made the strengthening of its quality-control structure an important responsibility. Under a serving chief executive drawn from the second generation of the founding family, the structural extension into the next decade, built around the Mid- to Long-Term Management Strategy 2030 and the new purpose, now stands as the test of its management.
The turning points, read in full: what was at stake, what was chosen and what the revenue did around it. The Japanese edition is the edition of record and carries the sourced dossier behind each decision — background, options weighed, outcome — linked under every decision.
Key decision · 1977
We sell what we make ourselves — going direct, and becoming a miniature multinational (1977)
Two faces of a self-reliance that bet on the world
The core of this decision lies in the choice not to stay inside a narrow home market but to earn in the world, and what carried it was the founder's spirit of self-reliance: we sell what we make ourselves. Break free of dependence on buyers and hold a distribution network of your own, and both the profit and the market intelligence stay with the company. The mechanism of reshuffling where production sits as conditions dictate can be seen as the device by which a toy maker of modest size could compete with the giants worldwide. At the same time, as the unwinding of the joint venture in West Germany shows, an expansion carried along on momentum is expensive when it lacks prior judgement. That success and stumble sat side by side in the same period gives the true picture of this broad-front strategy.
The production and distribution network strung across the world became a burden, however, once the times changed. The multinational stance that was a strength while the yen was weak and exports were favoured appeared as surplus production capacity after the sharp appreciation that followed the 1985 Plaza Accord. The network built in the 1970s had to be folded back up by the company itself in the second half of the 1980s. The founder's will to compete on a world stage made the company's frame, but how to hold that frame, and where to rebuild it, went on being asked of the company amid the shifts in exchange rates and markets.
A second act out of the strong-yen crisis — two plants closed and manufacturing spun off in the reorganisation of Tomy Kogyo (1986)
A generational handover wagered as the crisis closed in
The point of this reorganisation was not simply cutting headcount. What shows the character of the decision is that, while a heavy axe was taken to the immediate crisis of overproduction, a handover to a 33-year-old successor was laid on top of it in the same period. The senior directors who had run the place stepped aside together, and a painful clear-out proceeded in an orderly way under a young president in whom the previous generation had placed its trust — the succession within the founding family and the structural reform running at once can be seen as having made responsibility unambiguous and kept the internal upheaval in check. Rejuvenating the management in the middle of the crisis was a wager that, in the event, made the first act work.
Even once the response to the strong yen had settled, though, the real weakness Tomy Kogyo carried lay not on the manufacturing side but on the product side. A style of selling staples over a long life, so as to keep the factories running steadily, can instead be a constraint when it comes to putting out new products quickly. In an era when Bandai and Takara were stepping outside toys altogether, how to hold the strength of the staples and the speed of development at the same time — that question trailed on into the later integration with Takara and the expansion of the character business. The reorganisation of the second act can be seen as the decision that stood at the entrance to that long question.
Leaving production in Singapore — folding up while business is good, and converting the site into a technical base (1991)
Managing an exit as something you design
The kernel of this decision is that withdrawal was treated not as clearing up after being cornered, but as an object to be designed while there was still room. Folding up in the middle of full operation on a hit product looks like a waste if only the immediate profit is considered. But since the trends of rising wages and labour shortage were not going to reverse, it does less damage to pay the severance while the company still has the strength for it, and to move while relations with the government and the employees are intact. What makes withdrawal hard to execute even when the reasons are plain is that it involves dismissing people; softening exactly that point through advance groundwork and re-employment shows the thoroughness of assembling even the manner of leaving as a single act of management.
Behind a withdrawal that looks amicable, however, lies the fate of a multinational manufacturer that must keep moving production to ever lower-cost ground. Tomy left Singapore and shifted production to Thailand and to Batam, but as the article itself points out, labour costs were rising in Thailand as well. Management that keeps re-asking where to make things will sooner or later face the design of the next withdrawal. The Singapore exit of 1992 can be seen, within that chain, as one instance that left behind a discipline for how to leave.
This English edition follows the Japanese one chapter by chapter. The Japanese edition remains the edition of record: it carries the source-by-source citations, the financial tables and the shareholder and executive records. 日本語版（詳細）— Takara Tomy full history in Japanese →
Takara Tomy Co., Ltd. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports), including the 沿革 corporate-history section.
Takara Tomy Co., Ltd. — 統合報告書 (Integrated Report) 2024 and 2025, on the change of management structure, the company purpose and the Mid- to Long-Term Management Strategy 2030.
Securities Analysts Journal — 証券アナリストジャーナル, Oct 1997: トミー／楽しい遊びのクリエイター by Tomiyama Kantaro, president. NDL Digital Collections.