ANA Holdings — Company History

Post-war aviation restarts — from two helicopters to a full airline

In December 1952, with the aim of reviving the scheduled air transport business that the Second World War had destroyed in Japan, Japan Helicopter Transport Co., Ltd. was established with capital of $416,667 (¥150m). It bought two small Bell 47D-1 helicopters, began trading in February 1953 with publicity flights, obtained its licence for scheduled air transport in October of that year, and from December set out carrying freight between Tokyo and Osaka. In November 1955 it introduced the Douglas DC-3 and moved to fixed-wing passenger service, and in December 1957 it changed its name to All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd. The early helicopters were also put to work patrolling power transmission lines and spraying chemicals for farming and forestry, and those earnings covered the losses of the fixed-wing passenger operation flown by de Havilland Doves and Herons.

In March 1958 ANA merged with Far East Airlines Co., Ltd., unifying under new capital of $1.7M (¥600m) a scheduled air business that had been split between east and west. Both predecessors — Japan Helicopter Transport and Far East Airlines — were thinly capitalised carriers thrown up in the crowd of the recovery years, and the inefficiency of two companies flying piecemeal routes across a small country had been seen as a problem early on. The Aviation Council’s report of December 1954 replaced the standing two-carrier policy with a single-carrier policy, and the government pressed hard for the two to merge. After the merger ANA gathered its resources onto the trunk routes centred on Tokyo–Osaka, and in November 1963 it absorbed Fujita Airlines Co., Ltd., raising capital to $12.9M (¥5bn). Revenue grew from $1.9M (¥700m) in the year to March 1958 to $37.5M (¥14bn) in the year to March 1965.

“Catch up, overtake” — a late-comer’s rivalry with JAL

What drove the conversion from helicopter operator into full airline was rivalry with Japan Air Lines, which had started earlier and with government capital. The gap in capability had earned the two predecessor companies mockery — Japan Helicopter Transport as 日本ヘリクツター, a pun turning “helicopter” into “quibbler”, and Far East Airlines as 極道航空, “gangster airlines” — and ANA set out as a late-comer taking on a rival with large aircraft while flying small ones. The motto of the first president, Midoro Masaichi (美土路昌一), destitute now, promising later, and the slogan that arose of its own accord among the staff, catch up, overtake, turned that sense of inferiority into forward momentum. At the board meeting of 25 October 1957 the new name was settled at first as 全日本航空 (All Japan Airlines), but in November it was sent back on the grounds that “All Japan” would give the impression of a company equal to or above Japan Air Lines and risked a conflict; taking in the view of Far East Airlines’ president Kanno Wataro as well, the choice came to rest on 全日本空輸 — All Nippon Airways.

The difficulty over the name extended to the English form. At the same board meeting of 25 October 1957 both “Pan Japan Airlines” and “All Japan Airlines” were put forward as candidates, and the former, which had the greater support, was chosen. The moment it was reported, however, an American, A. C. King, wrote in to say that “Pan” means running through the Americas from north to south, and for “all of Japan” the accurate form is All Japan; the company also sought judgements from Yamamoto Tsuri, a lecturer at Meiji University, and from Assistant Professor Nakamura of the University of the Arts. The conclusion was that there was no need to use “Japan” at all, since “Nippon” was understood worldwide — and the name came to rest as All Nippon Airways. On the ground, staff passed down the story of a driver who found himself instinctively overtaking a JAL bus running ahead of him on the Daini Keihin highway; “catch up, overtake” took root not as a slogan hung on a wall but as the feeling of the daily job.

Turning to jets, and the ordeal of 1966

In October 1961 ANA listed on the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges, opening a way to raise the money for new aircraft from the capital market. Following the Vickers Viscount 744 brought in from Britain in July 1960, it put the Fokker Friendship F-27 and the Viscount 828 into service in June 1961 and the Boeing 727 in March 1965, beginning the conversion from propeller aircraft to jets. The Viscounts raised capacity on the trunk routes, Tokyo–Osaka above all, and in May 1969 the Boeing 737 joined them. Revenue grew from $6.7M (¥2bn) in the year to March 1961 to $109.4M (¥39bn) in the year to March 1970 — sixteenfold in a decade.

Growth was not smooth. On 4 February 1966 ANA Flight 60 from Chitose to Haneda, a Boeing 727, crashed into Tokyo Bay while on its landing approach, and all 133 passengers and crew were killed. It was at the time the worst single-aircraft accident anywhere in the world, and 1966 was a year of successive major accidents in Japanese aviation. Revenue fell from $47.2M (¥17bn) in the year to March 1966 to $45.3M (¥16bn) in the year to March 1967, and restoring trust became the management task even while jets were still raising capacity. The man who took charge of putting the company back together from around the time of the accident was Wakasa Tokuji (若狭得治), brought in as an adviser from the post of vice-minister of transport in 1969 and made president the following year.

Wakasa takes charge, and the wall called the 45/47 system

The “45/47 system”, established by a cabinet understanding in 1970 and a transport minister’s directive in 1972, was a regulation assigning international and domestic trunk routes to Japan Air Lines, domestic trunk and local routes to ANA, and local routes to Toa Domestic Airlines. ANA began operating non-scheduled international flights between Tokyo and Hong Kong in February 1971, but was not permitted to enter scheduled service. In March 1974 it set up Nihon Kinkyori Airways to carry the local routes, and spread its network inside the domestic market it had been allotted. The condition of holding aircraft with more than 300 seats and trained pilots while being unable to carry them abroad lasted fifteen years, until the Tokyo–Guam route opened in March 1986.

Even under the regulation, the domestic business went on growing in scale. In August 1972 ANA moved up to the first sections of the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges, and it took delivery of wide-bodies of more than 300 seats in quick succession — the Lockheed L-1011 in December 1973 and the Boeing 747 in 1978. Revenue grew fivefold, from $209.7M (¥65bn) in the year to March 1972 to $1.4B (¥308bn) in the year to March 1980. The Tokyo–Osaka route that had been its main earner, however, lost passengers sharply to the national railways’ Shinkansen, and by 1977 the aviation industry had been driven into what was called “the pinch in the sky”. Holding wide-bodies of over 300 seats and the crews to fly them, ANA could not put them onto scheduled international routes under the 45/47 system.

The phantom memorandum and Lockheed — falling one step short

A crack came close to opening in the wall around scheduled international service in the mid-1970s. When the Japan–China aviation agreement of 1974 shut Japan Air Lines out of Taiwan, ANA applied for five routes to succeed it, among them Tokyo–Taipei–Hong Kong. President Wakasa Tokuji withdrew the application after five days, and in exchange signed a memorandum with transport minister Kimura Muneo stating that ANA possesses the capability to operate scheduled international routes and will, in the near future, make efforts in that direction through the proper procedures (Nikkei Business, 8 July 1985). A former vice-minister of transport with thick pipes into politics and business, Wakasa held a gravitational pull inside the company that earned him the nickname “the Godfather”, and it was in negotiation with the regulator that he was at his best.

The promise in the memorandum was not kept. About seven months after it was signed the Lockheed scandal surfaced, and Wakasa himself was implicated in the corruption over ANA’s choice of wide-bodied aircraft. With the head of the company arrested and prosecuted, the talk of scheduled international service resting on the memorandum was left hanging, and entry receded by nearly another decade. Even so the staff went on supporting Wakasa — a course in contrast with Marubeni and the Grumman affair, where those involved were denounced by their own firms and left. Domestic expansion continued after the scandal as well, and revenue grew 2.3 times, from $633.2M (¥185bn) in the year to March 1976 to $1.8B (¥422bn) in the year to March 1983.

NCA as the black ship, and international flights in the 33rd year

What actually broke the wall was freight, not passengers. Nippon Cargo Airlines (NCA), the all-freight carrier ANA had set up with the shipping companies in 1978, flew its first service from Narita to New York, via San Francisco, on 8 May 1985 after hard negotiation. ANA held only 10 per cent of it, but 142 of NCA’s 262 staff had been sent across on secondment or transfer, making it a subsidiary in substance — and it opened a hole with freighters in the international business Japan Air Lines had monopolised. In the Japan–US aviation talks the American side used NCA as a “hostage” to press for route expansion, and that pressure became ANA’s foothold for entering scheduled international service. ANA itself introduced the Boeing 767 in June 1983, and revenue in the year to March 1985 had reached $1.9B (¥453bn).

In November 1985 the Nakasone cabinet released international routes from Japan Air Lines’ effective monopoly and set out a shift to a multiple-carrier system permitting other airlines to fly them. In March 1986 ANA began scheduled international service between Tokyo and Guam, entering the multi-carrier international order in its thirty-third year from founding. It was the moment when a late-comer that had been called “the giant of the East” while confined to domestic flying went out into the world on the Narita–Guam route. Nakamura Taizo, then president, described the strategy this way: People often ask me which routes ANA intends to fly. I answer that I am going to do this worldwide (Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun, 3 March 1986), rejecting a staged plan limited to Asia.

Building out the international network and joining Star Alliance

Starting from Guam, ANA widened its international network, and consolidated revenue rose from $6.9B (¥875bn) in the year to March 1992 to $8.4B (¥1.02tn) in the year to March 1997, passing ¥1 trillion for the first time. In June 1990 it set up World Air Network (later Air Japan), and in December 1995 it introduced the Boeing 777 to renew the fleet on long-haul routes. Even so, consolidated recurring profit for the year to March 1998 came to only $1.5M (¥200m) and the bottom line was a loss of $41.3M (¥5bn), so that ANA passed its dividend for the first time in thirty years. And when the Japan–US aviation talks of late January 1998 produced an interim liberalisation package that allowed code-sharing, the physical wall of slots at Narita airport still remained.

In October 1999 ANA formally joined Star Alliance. It was the pillar of the medium-term plan running to fiscal 2002, “selection and concentration”, announced that June by president Nomura Kichisaburo, and a rebuilding measure taken from a hard position: consolidated accumulated losses had swollen to $527.1M (¥60bn) as of the year to March 1999, and ANA was the only one of the three majors expecting a further loss, of $222.8M (¥24bn), in that year as well. International service then ran to just ten flights a day; code-sharing with Lufthansa and United was expected to lift international revenue by 20 per cent over four years, and the benefit of membership was put at $83.5M (¥9bn) a year in operating revenue after deducting joint advertising costs. At the same time the aircraft purchase plan was cut from nineteen aircraft to ten, and $278.4M (¥30bn) was provided against withdrawal losses in related businesses, concentrating the group on flying. Consolidated results recovered from a net loss of $141.1M (¥15bn) in the year to March 2000 to recurring profit of $522.5M (¥64bn) and net profit of $331.6M (¥40bn) in the year to March 2001.

Group restructuring and resources concentrated on the airline

The Asian currency crisis of 1997 and the simultaneous terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001 struck air demand directly, and the consolidated bottom line sank to a loss of $75.8M (¥10bn) in the year to March 2002 and $244.1M (¥28bn) in the year to March 2003. Ohashi Yoji, who became president in 2001, declared his opposition in February 2002 to the plan to combine Japan Air Lines and Japan Air System, saying that the JJ integration as it stood was quite unacceptable. At home the group pressed on with tidying up and merging subsidiaries: in April 2003 it merged four travel companies, ANA Sky Holidays among them, to form ANA Sales & Tours; in August 2004 it established Air Next; and in November of that year it made Nakanihon Airline Services a subsidiary. Consolidated revenue marked time in the ¥1.2 trillion range, from $10.5B (¥1.28tn) in the year to March 2001 to $11.7B (¥1.29tn) in the year to March 2005, but the company returned to a profitable footing with net profit of $229.3M (¥25bn) in the year to March 2004 and $245.1M (¥27bn) in the year to March 2005.

In 2005 Yamamoto Mineo became president and narrowed the group’s resources onto the airline itself. In August that year ANA withdrew from the management of Nippon Cargo Airlines and sold its shares, switching to a policy of working air freight seriously in-house rather than leaving it to another company. It set up ANA & JP Express in February 2006; in June 2007 it transferred in a single block the entire shareholdings of fourteen hotel-related subsidiaries, together with the associated assets, outside the group; and in July 2008 it introduced the Boeing 767-300BCF, a converted freighter. Consolidated revenue grew from $11.8B (¥1.37tn) in the year to March 2006 to $14.4B (¥1.49tn) in the year to March 2008, and operating profit ran through the high ¥80 billions — $763.7M (¥89bn), $782.9M (¥92bn) and $816.8M (¥84bn). Net profit for the year to March 2008 reached $620.3M (¥64bn), the highest level to that point.

Lehman and the JAL bankruptcy — the order of competition reverses

The global financial crisis struck air demand directly. With international passenger numbers down by double digits, ANA recorded a net loss of $44.9M (¥4bn) in the year to March 2009, its first bottom-line loss in six years. Consolidated revenue shrank to $14.9B (¥1.39tn) and operating profit came to only $81.3M (¥8bn). Ito Shinichiro (伊東信一郎) became president on 1 April 2009, and results hit bottom in the year to March 2010 with an operating loss of $617.5M (¥54bn) and a net loss of $652.8M (¥57bn). Revenue fell by $1.9B (¥164bn) year on year, to $14.0B (¥1.23tn). Domestic routes made up more than half of revenue, ANA’s slots on Narita’s A runway were less than a third of Japan Air Lines’, and its international business had long been unprofitable.

What turned the tide was the failure of its competitor. When Japan Air Lines filed for protection under the Corporate Reorganisation Act on 19 January 2010, the new slots at Haneda were allotted roughly eleven flights to ANA against about eight to Japan Air Lines. Saying that ANA had every intention of carrying Japan’s international traffic, Ito Shinichiro took over routes Japan Air Lines had abandoned, including services to China, and drew up a plan to raise international frequencies by about 15 per cent with the opening of Haneda to international flights in October 2010. In April 2011 ANA began a joint business with United Airlines of the United States under an exemption from the antitrust law, capturing US–Asia connecting traffic at Narita. The medium-term plan of February 2012 set out to raise international capacity in fiscal 2013 by 29 per cent over fiscal 2011, and consolidated revenue recovered to $15.2B (¥1.48tn) with operating profit of $1.1B (¥104bn) in the year to March 2013.

The holding company, and a single-minded focus on flying

In July 2010 ANA merged its consolidated subsidiaries Air Japan and ANA & JP Express, and in October it merged three companies — Air Nippon Network, Air Next and Air Central — into ANA Wings, while folding four companies including ANA Sales into one. In September 2010 it announced its entry into low-cost flying, deciding to launch a separate company based at Kansai airport with fares held to roughly half those of the majors. The decision rested on work by a research team stationed in Hong Kong from April 2008, which studied five of Asia’s strongest low-cost carriers and concluded that the low-cost airlines abroad were not a case of “cheap and nasty”. In August 2011 ANA established AirAsia Japan as a joint venture with AirAsia of Malaysia, and on 26 October that year it operated the world’s first commercial flight of the Boeing 787, a charter from Narita to Hong Kong.

In April 2013 ANA changed its name to ANA Holdings Inc. and spun off its air transport and related businesses into its wholly owned subsidiary All Nippon Airways. This was the structure declared in the medium-term plan of February 2012: under the holding company stood the operating airline All Nippon Airways, the consolidated subsidiary AirAsia Japan, and Peach Aviation, accounted for by the equity method. Ito Shinichiro moved across to the presidency of the holding company, and executive vice-president Shinobe Osamu became president of the operating airline. The joint venture with AirAsia was dissolved less than a year after launch, however; ANA bought out the 49 per cent stake, renamed the carrier Vanilla Air and restarted it in December 2013. On international routes ANA carried more passengers than Japan Air Lines for the first time in fiscal 2015 — the first such reversal since it began international service in 1986.

Under Katanozaka — consolidation, LCC integration, ¥2 trillion of revenue

Katanozaka Shinya (片野坂真哉) became president in 2015 and moved on the reorganisation of Japan’s mid-sized carriers. In August that year ANA became the sponsor for the rehabilitation of Skymark, then in civil rehabilitation proceedings, taking about 16.5 per cent alongside the investment fund Integral and others. It fought a rival rehabilitation plan in which the largest creditor, Intrepid Aviation, backed Delta Air Lines of the United States, and prevailed at the creditors’ meeting of 5 August, where the Skymark-side plan passed with 60.25 per cent of the voting rights and 77.8 per cent of creditors by number. After StarFlyer, Air Do and Solaseed Air, this reorganisation drew the last of the independents into the camp. To secure Airbus’s agreement, however, ANA had signed a document undertaking to consider introducing the A380; it announced three aircraft and their deployment on Hawaii routes in January 2016, and took delivery of the Airbus A380 in May 2019.

In low-cost flying the question turned on what to do with Peach Aviation. Launched in March 2012 as Japan’s first low-cost carrier, Peach turned profitable in its third year, fiscal 2013, and by fiscal 2015 was earning an operating margin of 12.8 per cent, among the highest in the industry. ANA had held its stake at the equity-method level, on the reasoning that the world’s large low-cost carriers had grown as independents, but on 24 February 2017 it announced that it would spend $271M (¥30bn) to raise its holding from 38.7 per cent to 67 per cent, and in April it consolidated Peach Aviation as a subsidiary. The purchase valued the business at just under $980.7M (¥110bn), about forty times its most recent net profit, and some securities analysts said it had paid too much. In March 2018 ANA announced the integration of Peach and Vanilla Air, and in October 2019 it unified its low-cost flying under the Peach brand. Consolidated revenue passed ¥2 trillion for the first time in the year to March 2019, at $18.9B (¥2.06tn), and operating profit of $1.5B (¥165bn) was the pre-COVID peak.

The spread of the novel coronavirus in 2020 wiped out travel demand. In the year to March 2021 consolidated revenue fell 63 per cent from the previous year to $6.6B (¥729bn), with an operating loss of $4.2B (¥465bn) and a net loss of $3.7B (¥405bn) — every one of them a record. Interest-bearing debt doubled, from $7.7B (¥826bn) at the end of the previous year to $15.0B (¥1.64tn). Setting out a policy of surviving for the sake of society, Katanozaka Shinya borrowed $3.6B (¥400bn) in subordinated loans on 30 October 2020, and on 27 November announced a raise of up to about $3.0B (¥332bn) through a public share offering and other means. The new issue of up to 140 million shares amounted to roughly 40 per cent of the shares outstanding, and the money went to taking delivery of aircraft already under contract and to repaying debt. At the same time ANA cut its fleet from 309 aircraft to 276, about a tenth, halted graduate recruitment for 2021, cut annual pay by 30 per cent year on year and sounded out the union on a voluntary redundancy programme — while holding to a self-rescue position that assumed neither debt forgiveness nor an injection of public money of the kind seen when JAL failed.

The rebound after COVID, financial repair and redesign

In April 2022 Shibata Koji became president, moving the company to a structure that pursued recovery from COVID and financial repair at the same time. The year to March 2022 still carried an operating loss of $1.3B (¥173bn) and a net loss of $1.1B (¥144bn), but as passenger demand returned the year to March 2023 turned profitable with operating profit of $854M (¥120bn), secured net profit of $636.3M (¥89bn) and restored the dividend at ¥50 a share. Consolidated revenue also recovered from $7.8B (¥1.02tn) to $12.2B (¥1.71tn) in the year to March 2023. In December 2023 Shibata Koji set out the view that growth in international service was without limit and that it would head into renewed expansion from 2025.

In the year to March 2024 consolidated revenue was $13.6B (¥2.06tn) and operating profit $1.4B (¥208bn), surpassing the pre-COVID peak of $1.5B (¥165bn) recorded in the year to March 2019. The following year, to March 2025, brought revenue of $15.1B (¥2.26tn), operating profit of $1.3B (¥197bn) and net profit of $1.0B (¥153bn). Interest-bearing debt was compressed from its peak of $13.2B (¥1.74tn) at the end of March 2022 to $9.0B (¥1.34tn) at the end of March 2025, and shareholders’ equity stood at $7.6B (¥1.13tn), above the $9.9B (¥1.06tn) of the end of March 2020, before COVID. Total assets built up to $24.2B (¥3.62tn) at the end of March 2025, and both revenue and equity had returned to levels above where they stood before the pandemic.

The medium-term management strategy announced in February 2023 set an operating profit target for fiscal 2025 of $1.3B (¥200bn) or more, resting on expanded international passenger capacity and maintained yields. Operating profit for the year to March 2025 was $1.3B (¥197bn), a little short of that target. In February 2024 ANA began operating AirJapan as a third airline brand after ANA and Peach, dividing its customers across full-service, low-cost and mid-service brands. In international freight it agreed in principle in 2023 to acquire from Nippon Yusen the entire shareholding in Nippon Cargo Airlines (NCA) — the company it had let go in 2005 — and, after eight postponements for competition-authority reviews in several countries, completed the move to full ownership on 1 August 2025. It thereby returned to a structure holding both belly capacity on passenger aircraft and dedicated freighters, recasting the passenger-only business mix of the COVID years.