Company history

The banks wanted the debt cut, and cutting it meant selling. In June 2010 Intelligence — around 30% of consolidated sales and a genuine profit pillar — went to KKR for about ¥32 billion; the film distributor went to a fund the same year. Uno described the sequence as feeling like cutting into his own body. It was not a portfolio being curated but an accumulated deficit of roughly ¥110 billion being paid down, and selling in order of what fetched a price meant that what remained was what fetched none. In 2010 the asset for which no buyer appeared was the loss-making streaming business, U-NEXT: free ad-funded video had already failed, and a larger rival had taken over the GyaO brand in 2009.

Uno kept it anyway, on a judgement that had nothing to do with its price — that subscription video for the home was a market that takes a decade to stand up, and could not be valued on what it was worth that year. He called it, at 47, his third attempt. The company he restarted with had ¥1.54 billion of sales and a ¥1.1 billion ordinary loss in the year to December 2012. Service for PCs came in May 2012 and for smartphones and tablets that August; it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market in December 2014 and moved to the first section a year later. By the year to December 2015 sales were ¥33.96 billion with ¥1.0 billion of operating profit — its first profit.

Then, in December 2017, he put the pieces back together. U-NEXT absorbed USEN by merger — the smaller, younger company as the surviving entity — and renamed itself USEN-NEXT HOLDINGS, redistributing the operations into subsidiaries beneath a holding company. The logic was a specific one: USEN’s roughly 750,000 business premises paying monthly, and U-NEXT’s consumer subscriber base, could be sold to each other. Where Japanese companies of the era were dismantling conglomerates, Uno was reassembling one he had dismantled himself seven years earlier — but bound this time to a single measurable thing, the shop-front customer relationship.

The holding company was run on an explicit rejection of how the group had been run before. Having found in 2009 that he could not hold the whole thing in his own hands, Uno pushed operating authority down to the presidents of more than 25 subsidiaries and kept only group strategy, capital allocation and M&A. Underneath, the old background-music business was rebuilt into shop-floor technology — point-of-sale, serving robots, business lines, electricity retailing, digital signage — on the strength of already having a way to reach almost any operator opening a new location. The measure was cross-sell: contracts per shop pushed from 1.4 toward 2. Sales for the year to August 2019 reached ¥175.8 billion, 63% above the prior year, and the group ran seven straight years of rising sales and profit after the merger.

The 2022 plan, Road to 2025, targeted ¥274–286 billion of sales; the company moved to the TSE Prime market that April, issued its first ¥10 billion bond that September to loosen its dependence on syndicated loans, and set up a power retailer, U-POWER, buying on the wholesale exchange and bundling electricity with lines and music for shop customers. The larger move was in content. In 2023 it acquired the operator of Paravi, took a capital tie-up with TBS, and merged the two services — a consolidation of Japanese streaming by U-NEXT, TBS and TV Tokyo against Netflix, Amazon and Disney. Paying users roughly doubled in four years, from about 2.5 million to 4.94 million by August 2025.

In April 2024 the holding company dropped the five letters it had traded under since the founding and became U-NEXT HOLDINGS — the centre of gravity had moved to content. Sales reached ¥390.4 billion with ¥31.6 billion of operating profit in the year to August 2025, a ninth consecutive record since the merger, across four segments: content distribution, shop and facility solutions, communications and energy, and finance, real estate and global. In October 2025 Road to 2030 set out ¥600–650 billion of sales by August 2030 and a growth-investment envelope of about ¥100 billion for new businesses and acquisitions — leverage deliberately reapplied now that equity is 37.6% of assets and net debt 0.7× equity. The company that was taken apart to survive a debt inheritance is once again buying scale ahead of the demand for it.