Building the brand on the world’s top players (2016)

A brand geared to the tournament calendar

From the year to March 2016, Yonex made a deliberate bet on visibility: it signed contracts with world-class badminton and tennis players and spent heavily on marketing, letting the on-court results of those players carry brand awareness. It was the modern form of the company’s founding logic — win a narrow field completely rather than spread across many — and it paid. Through the late 2010s revenue climbed and the operating margin recovered toward 7%, the strongest run since the group’s post-bubble troubles.

The weakness is the strength seen from the other side. A demand base triggered by tournaments and the fortunes of a few contracted athletes moves with events the company cannot control: when COVID-19 cancelled competition in 2020, sales fell and the margin collapsed to about 2%; when the calendar refilled — the 2024 Paris Olympics and a run of player wins — revenue set records four years straight. The same lever that makes Yonex a dominant, high-margin name in racket sports is what makes its results swing with a schedule and an economy it does not set. That is the company’s enduring bargain: total commitment to one niche buys both the leadership and the exposure.