Company history

When Japan broke the state telecoms monopoly in 1985, three private satellite ventures appeared at once: Japan Communications Satellite (backed by Itochu, Mitsui & Co. and Hughes of the United States), Space Communications (Mitsubishi), and Satellite Japan (Sumitomo Corporation and Nissho Iwai). The regulator withheld Satellite Japan’s licence under the supply-and-demand clause of the Telecommunications Business Act, judging that three entrants in one market would ruin each other. The industry was thus treated, from birth, as one where the plant goes up before the demand does — and a satellite, once launched, is an asset you must keep using. How to fill the spare transponders was the question all three shared.

Japan Communications Satellite launched JCSAT-1 in March 1989, the country’s first privately owned communications satellite; Space Communications followed with Superbird A in June. Then the Mitsubishi venture lost two spacecraft in a row — Superbird B in a launch failure in February 1990, and Superbird A to an attitude-control fault in orbit that December. Its president ordered every customer transferred to the rival, and 3,000 registered antennas were re-pointed in a single night. Space Communications was effectively out of service for sixteen months; thirty Mitsubishi group companies had to inject $297.4M (¥40bn) in 1991 to keep it solvent, and accumulated losses near $521M (¥49bn) remained even after it returned to profit.

In August 1993 the two trading-house camps merged: Japan Communications Satellite and the still-unlicensed Satellite Japan combined into Japan Satellite Systems — a grand coalition to absorb a third force that was accumulating capital spending with no revenue. Capacity still outran demand, and by fiscal 1996 accumulated losses had reached $151.7M (¥17bn). The answer to the empty transponders was to become the customer: a planning company set up in 1994 became Japan Digital Broadcasting Services and launched the digital CS platform PerfecTV in October 1996. Twenty-one of JCSAT-3’s twenty-eight transponders went to it, and the satellite business finally saw a path to profit.

A rival never reached the air. In December 1996 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and SoftBank set up JSkyB on an equal footing, planning 150 channels; before broadcasting a single hour it asked PerfecTV to merge. On 1 May 1998 the two combined into SkyPerfecTV, a 170-channel platform whose five largest shareholders — Sony, SoftBank, News Corporation, Fuji Television and Itochu — each held exactly 11.375%. The symmetry that let nobody dominate also let nobody take responsibility: News Corp wanted early profits, SoftBank wanted a dignified exit, Fuji had terrestrial digital to defend, and only Sony pushed the business forward.

In 2000 the platform absorbed its remaining competitor, DirecTV Japan, and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market in October. But ending the competition did not fix the economics. Winning one subscriber cost $245 (¥30,677) in fiscal 2002 against a monthly fee of $12 (¥1,474) from the channel operators — more than twenty months to recover. Cutting the retail incentives shortened that to about sixteen months and, with the 2002 World Cup rights cost gone, fiscal 2003 swung from a $150.9M (¥19bn) net loss to a $38M (¥4bn) profit.

The relief was temporary. Registered subscribers fell month-on-month for the first time in October 2004, and in February 2006 the total shrank for the first time since the service began; the year to March 2006 brought an operating loss. Acquisition cost per subscriber had risen again, to $321 (¥34,680), and the payback period stretched towards two years. A platform with roughly four million subscribers — twice the largest cable operator — still could not turn scale into earnings. The answer the board reached for was not another broadcaster but the satellite operator itself: in October 2006 Sky Perfect Communications and JSAT agreed to combine under a holding company.

On 2 April 2007 the two companies executed a joint share transfer, creating SKY Perfect JSAT as their wholly owning parent, listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In March 2008 it bought 97% of Space Communications from Mitsubishi Corporation and twenty-seven others: the three ventures born together in 1985, each scarred by launch failures or licensing, were finally under one roof. In October 2008 the three operating companies merged into a single business company, also named SKY Perfect JSAT, beneath a pure holding company — a two-tier structure that would last more than seventeen years. Reporting was recast from “broadcasting” and “communications” into media and satellite operations.

The logic of the pairing was asymmetry. Broadcasting chased subscribers and had stopped growing; satellites leased capacity on long contracts and earned steadily. Most of the $95.1M (¥11bn) operating profit in the first full year came from the satellite side. Under Takada Shinji, who arrived from Nippon Television in 2011, the group stopped planning around subscriber growth altogether: the mid-term plan targeted profit, not scale, by ending the parallel operation of standard- and high-definition feeds and consolidating three broadcast sites into one media centre. Ending SD transmission in May 2014 cost $37.8M (¥4bn) of transponder revenue but removed as much again in migration and facility cost.

It worked in the numbers — consolidated operating profit reached $200M (¥24bn) in the year to March 2016 — but not in the subscriber base. Losing the J.League rights in fiscal 2016 cost roughly 100,000 of some 200,000 related contracts, and about seven in ten of those left the platform entirely; management refused to chase inflated sports rights into years of losses. Meanwhile a Ministry of Defense PFI project swelled consolidated revenue to $1.8B (¥193bn) in the year to March 2017 before it fell back the next year, and the X-band defence satellite DSN-1, launched in April 2018, came with a fifteen-year operating contract. The mid-term plan said the rest plainly: of a targeted $281M (¥30bn) operating profit for fiscal 2020, two-thirds would come from space.

Yonekura Eiichi, formerly president of Itochu’s metals company, took over in April 2019 as an outsider to media — which, he argued, let him look at the business without attachment. He found operations run without regard to whether they paid, and cleared out idle assets and loss-making lines one by one. Revenue shrank from $1.5B (¥164bn) in the year to March 2019 to about $852.7M (¥128bn) in the year to March 2026, while consolidated operating profit rose over the same span from $138.6M (¥15bn) to $235.9M (¥35bn). He was equally blunt about pay-TV: contracts would only ever fall in a shrinking country, so the task was to build a business that stays profitable down to one million subscribers.

What he bet the future on was space. A 50:50 joint venture with NTT, Space Compass, was set up in 2022 to build a space-based computing and communications network, with $100 million invested through it in stratospheric HAPS platforms. After the Cabinet Office adopted a space security strategy in 2023, defence demand did the rest: a Space Security business unit was created in January 2025, and in February 2026 a venture with Mitsubishi Electric and Mitsui & Co. won a $1.9B (¥283bn) five-year satellite-constellation contract from the Ministry of Defense. The group also moved from reselling optical-satellite imagery to owning it, ordering ten spacecraft for about $267.3M (¥40bn).

In the year to March 2026 the reversal became arithmetic: space revenue of $441M (¥66bn) passed media’s $411M (¥62bn) for the first time, with record consolidated operating profit of $235.9M (¥35bn). On 1 April 2026 the holding company absorbed its operating subsidiary and took back the name SKY Perfect JSAT, ending the two-tier structure after nineteen years. The satellite capacity once justified by inventing a broadcasting market had become the main business — though the demand now carrying it is defence, and the commercial market the company keeps pointing to has yet to arrive.