Company history

Takara Tomy dates its founding to 1924, when Eiichiro Tomiyama began making toys — the line its 2024 centennial counts from. The modern corporate story, though, starts in January 1953, when the postwar metal-toy business was reorganized and incorporated as Sanyo Kogyo in Tateishi, in Tokyo’s Katsushika ward. It split sales off into a separate company in 1959 — a make-and-sell division of labour it kept for decades — and in 1961 it launched Plarail, a plastic-rail train toy that became its first enduring brand. In 1963 the maker took the Tomy name.

From 1970 Tomy pushed abroad — Hong Kong first, then Britain, France and Thailand through the 1980s — and in 1983 it signed on as an official sponsor of the newly opened Tokyo Disneyland, an early bet on character business. Over these years it also built the capsule-toy and hobby operations (Yujin, later Takara Tomy Arts; Tomy Tec for model railways) that widened its range beyond its own boxed toys.

The decisive moves came at the decade’s end. In 1997 Tomy registered its shares over the counter, and in November 1998 it secured exclusive Japanese distribution of Hasbro’s products — Transformers among them — giving it a second engine alongside its own franchises: the world’s proven characters, sold on a channel no domestic rival could touch. A stock-market listing followed in March 1999.

Public and better capitalised, Tomy completed its move to the exchange’s first section in March 2000 and, that December, signed a comprehensive licence with Disney for the Japanese toy market. With Hasbro (1998) and Disney (2000) both in hand, it now held an exclusive domestic channel for the biggest foreign character brands, running beside its own Plarail and Tomica; it also built out production in China, setting up in Shenzhen in 2004.

The defining event was the 2006 merger. Japan’s toy market was shrinking with its birth rate, and Takara — maker of the Licca-chan doll, Choro-Q and Beyblade — had run into serious trouble after a run of misses. In August 2005 Tomy agreed to merge with it; in March 2006 the combined company took the name Takara Tomy. The core brands of postwar Japanese toys — Plarail and Tomica from Tomy, Licca-chan and Choro-Q from Takara — were now under one roof.

The rescue was costly. In the year of the merger revenue roughly doubled, but the company swung to a large net loss as Takara’s problems were absorbed, and Kantaro Tomiyama, who led the merged firm, faced years of restructuring before it steadied. The deal had consolidated an industry; making it pay was the next decade’s work.

The years after the merger were spent repairing it. In 2007 Takara Tomy brought in the private-equity firm TPG as a strategic partner, took the Kiddy Land retail chain in-house, adopted a takeover defence and — as costs in China rose — began shifting production to Vietnam. Results stayed volatile: net profit fell back to a loss in the year to March 2013, and again in 2015 and 2016, the hit-or-miss toy cycle reasserting itself.

In 2015 the company did something unusual for a founding-family firm: it handed the presidency to an outsider, Harold George May, a Dutch executive with a marketing background. He reorganized the product line and the company, and operating profit rose almost fivefold in two years. May left at the end of 2017; Kazuhiro Kojima, from Mitsubishi Corporation, took over in January 2018.

Beneath the swings the balance sheet was being rebuilt — interest-bearing debt cut by more than 90% from its mid-2010s level and the equity ratio roughly doubled toward 64% — the quiet groundwork that would later pay for the company’s long-term investment.

Under Kojima, Takara Tomy pushed further overseas and kept deleveraging, even as Covid-19 knocked sales in the years to March 2020 and 2021. The repaired balance sheet became the war chest for the next phase.

In June 2024, with the company marking its centennial, Kantaro Tomiyama — chairman and CEO for more than thirty years — stepped back to honorary chairman, and Akio Tomiyama, a second-generation member of the founding family who had come up inside the company, became president. After a decade run by outsiders, the founding family took the company back, now on sound financial footing.

Akio launched a mid-term plan, Strategy 2030, and a new purpose — that play can make the world better — widening the frame from “toys” to “play,” reaching for older “kidult” buyers and pushing abroad, with China the priority. Investment now concentrates on the core brands — Tomica, Plarail, Licca-chan, Transformers, Beyblade — paired with IP tie-ins, while the Hasbro alliance continues. The year to March 2025 brought record revenue of about $1.7B (¥250bn) and record profit. The unfinished task is quieter: in the following year a quality problem forced the hundred-year-old company to rebuild its quality-control systems — a reminder that the toy cycle it rides still sets the terms.