Company history

ANA began in December 1952 as Nippon Helicopter Transport, capitalised at $416,667 (¥150m) and equipped with two helicopters, formed to revive the scheduled aviation that the war had wiped out. It flew freight and won a scheduled-transport licence in 1953, moved to fixed-wing passenger service with the Douglas DC-3 in 1955, and in December 1957 renamed itself All Nippon Airways. In 1958 it absorbed Far East Airlines, unifying the small east–west carriers the government had pushed to consolidate, and built its earnings from Haneda on the Tokyo–Osaka trunk. In five years a helicopter firm had become a full-service airline.

The engine of that transformation was rivalry with a head-start Japan Airlines, which carried government capital and flew large aircraft while ANA started as a small-plane latecomer. First president Shoichi Midoroji’s motto — “poor now, promising ahead” — and the staff-born slogan “catch up, overtake” turned a latecomer’s inferiority into forward drive. Even the name reflected it: the board chose one that would not clash with Japan Airlines, and settled on the English “All Nippon Airways” after an American pointed out that “All,” not “Pan,” was the accurate word. The underdog’s determination to plant its own flag was baked in from the start.

Capital markets funded scale. ANA listed on the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges in 1961, took the Vickers Viscount (1960) and the Boeing 727 (1965), and crossed from propellers to jets. But growth was not smooth: on 4 February 1966, ANA Flight 60 — a 727 — crashed into Tokyo Bay, killing all 133 aboard in what was then the world’s worst single-aircraft accident. The price of safety amid the jet build-out was heavy, and rebuilding trust became a central task. Tokuji Wakasa, brought in from the Transport Ministry in 1969 and made president in 1970, would steer the next chapter toward the international dream.

The “45/47” regime — a 1970 cabinet understanding and a 1972 transport-ministry directive, named for the Showa years — assigned international and trunk routes to Japan Airlines, trunk and local routes to ANA, and local routes to Toa Domestic. ANA ran a single international charter, Tokyo–Hong Kong, in 1971, but was barred from scheduled international service for fifteen years. It kept growing at home — upgraded to the exchanges’ first sections in 1972, took wide-bodies like the Boeing 747 and Lockheed L-1011 — until its trunk capacity rivalled JAL’s. Yet those jets and trained crews could not be flown abroad, and the international-network gap with JAL widened into something structural.

The wall nearly cracked once. After the 1974 Japan–China aviation pact forced JAL off the Taiwan routes, ANA applied for five successor routes, then withdrew them within five days in exchange for a written pledge from Transport Minister Mutsuo Kimura that ANA would be allowed to run scheduled international service “in the near future.” President Tokuji Wakasa — a former transport vice-minister, called the company’s “godfather,” at his strongest in dealing with regulators — engineered the manoeuvre. But the pledge died: some seven months later the Lockheed scandal broke, implicating Wakasa himself over aircraft procurement, and international entry slipped nearly another decade. Tellingly, the company closed ranks behind Wakasa rather than cast him out — a mark of its unusual internal cohesion.

What finally broke the wall was cargo, not passengers. Nippon Cargo Airlines (NCA), set up in 1978 with the shipping lines, launched Narita–New York in 1985; ANA held only a 10% stake but seconded most of the staff, and in US–Japan aviation talks Washington used NCA as leverage to force routes open. In November 1985 the Nakasone cabinet opened international routes to multiple carriers — Japan Airlines would lose its monopoly and be fully privatised in 1987 — and in March 1986 ANA began scheduled international service on Tokyo–Guam, the dream realised in its 33rd year. President Taizo Nakamura rejected a cautious Asia-only start, insisting the aim was, in his word, “worldwide.”

From Guam, ANA extended its international network to major cities in the Americas, Europe and Asia, and consolidated revenue first topped $8.3B (¥1tn) in the year ended March 1997. But JAL had a decades-long head start in routes and operating know-how, and ANA had neither the time nor the capital to build a global network on its own. Results in the late 1990s swung with currency crises and fuel prices; a solo route map could not steady the growth. The handicap the 45/47 regime had imposed did not vanish when the regime did.

The workaround was alliance. In 1999 ANA joined Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline grouping, and code-shares and mileage tie-ups let it connect passengers to cities it did not serve itself — closing the network gap with JAL far faster than flying every route could have. When the Asian financial crisis and the 11 September 2001 attacks slashed demand, that partner reach cushioned revenue. It was proof of the era’s constraint: ANA’s lifeline in a downturn was traffic fed in by partners, not the depth of a network it owned.

The reversal, when it came, came through a rival’s collapse. ANA pruned its group — merging travel units, exiting NCA in 2005, concentrating on the airline core — and lifted profitability through the late 2000s, only for the Lehman shock to force its first-ever net loss in the year ended March 2009 and its first-ever operating loss a year later. Then, in January 2010, Japan Airlines — the protected first-mover — filed for bankruptcy, and the new Haneda slots were split in ANA’s favour, roughly eleven flights to ANA against eight to JAL. The latecomer that had started on “catch up, overtake” had, past its half-century, changed places with the leader.

ANA now bet on concentration and new aircraft at once. It sold fourteen hotel subsidiaries out of the group in 2010, entered low-cost carriers through an AirAsia joint venture in 2011, and in October 2011 flew the world’s first commercial Boeing 787, whose fuel economy and range flexibility became the backbone of its international growth. In April 2013 it reorganised as a holding company, renaming itself ANA Holdings and hiving the airline into a wholly owned All Nippon Airways. International expansion continued, and in 2016 ANA carried more international passengers than JAL for the first time — passing the first-mover in traffic as it already had in slots.

Under Shinya Katanozaka (president from 2015), ANA rebuilt its LCC strategy, folding Vanilla Air into Peach by 2019 for a single low-cost brand, and pushed the full-service network to a record: consolidated revenue first crossed $18.3B (¥2tn) in the year ended March 2019, its pre-COVID peak. Then the pandemic erased demand just as the full-service/LCC split was set. Revenue fell 63% in the year ended March 2021 and ANA booked an operating loss of $4.2B (¥465bn) as interest-bearing debt doubled. Katanozaka raised roughly $9.4B (¥1tn) in subordinated debt, equity and bank lending, and cut about 3,500 jobs, choosing survival over pride.

Recovery ran fast. Under Koji Shibata (president from 2022), the year ended March 2023 swung back to an operating profit and a restored dividend, and the following year set a record operating profit that beat the pre-COVID peak, as international fares stayed high and inbound demand surged. Debt was pulled down from its pandemic peak and equity restored above 2019 levels by March 2025. Having been shown how fragile a passenger-only base is, ANA moved back toward breadth — launching a third brand, AirJapan, in 2024 for the mid-service tier, and in 2025 re-acquiring the cargo carrier NCA it had sold in 2005.