ANIME FUNDING THROUGH THE STOCK MARKET: How Trading Influences Anime Production Companies And Production Committees
Funding anime is the way to go from the stage of ideation, where pitching material (企画書, kikakusho) matters to convince potential investors, to production. Those potential investors can be production companies, or even streaming platforms (Netflix is a flagship, whose stock price is the most valuable of all studied here, having reached a historical peak after the pandemic and being worth USD690 on October 29th, 2021) looking for exclusive licensing opportunities to market to their consumers. But producers are just as convincing as their assets. A way to gain assets for prospective investment can be for a company to become publicly traded, at the price of revenue and independence. MiHoYo, perhaps surprisingly, is a privately-owned company, which can be reassuring with regards to one of the cofounders recently announcing to renew his focus to cutting-edge innovation.
Anyhow, the stock market is a way for you to lucratively support, though sometimes indirectly, the production of Japanese animation, and otaku culture as a whole. Knowing the medium is a plus, as you can thereby reward anime productions that bring positive value to your life, all the while ensuring an anarchic ownership that gives stability to the current power structures, inasmuch as you trust the executive staff to choose the right decisions for the company to profit. Of course, there are more direct ways to involve yourself in supporting anime production, like crowdfunding if you seek rewards, or donations toward dedicated institutions such as the Animator Dormitory.
This document takes a comparative look at the recent financial histories of various stock prices, belonging to companies more or less relevant in the anime industry. For example, Bushiroad Inc. is involved with both the Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight and the BanG Dream! franchises, being a company involved in video games, collectible card games, the music industry, anime productions… Its status as publicly traded started as of 2019, perhaps coinciding with the company scaling up. But it also includes non-Japanese companies like Netflix and Tencent, giants from the US and China respectively, as well as Disney as Disney+ is trying to acquire anime exclusivities like Mappa’s Tengoku Daimakyou or a flagship shounen mammoth like Bleach. This translates how major players define the globalization of anime as a medium with huge commercial stakes. The pandemic notably marked the economy with the stock price of Netflix soaring crazily high, before falling down after lockdowns were over… Or are they? I don’t know that much about the situation of the pandemic worldwide but what I’m hearing is rather scary, and it might play some part on the stock market.
Now, one may say this graph is imperfect as it starts artificially at the beginning of the decade, just as ended the historical subprime mortgage crisis, but well, it has got to start somewhere. Another problem is that Netflix saw a massive soar thanks to the pandemic, that is so skewing the data that the rest pales in comparison. This is why I will show to you the same data but without Netflix within the equation, so that we can take a better glance at the evolutions of mostly Japanese stock prices. Of course, this might not be the best indicator to compare, as there may be more stocks of a certain company in circulation than others (what we refer to as shares outstanding: all the shares collectively held by all shareholders).
This new graph allows us to better see the various stock prices. If we were to rank all stock prices present in the initial dataset from highest to lowest at the time of writing of this article, we would have: 1. Netflix (streaming platform); 2. Disney (with an involvement in the anime industry as a streaming platform); 3. Sony Corporation (music, technology, gaming); 4. Tencent (animation and media mix production); 5. Square Enix (manga, games, animation); 6. COVER Corporation (Hololive Production); 7. Bandai Namco (anime, toys, theme parks); 8. Aniplex (animation production company); 9. Megahouse (figures); 10. Nintendo (gaming, toys); 11. Bushiroad (music, media mix). Those companies would be some of the growing giants that shape and define the anime landscape, though there are of course relevant corporate entities that aren’t depicted here. But it’s interesting to know where to invest, at least.
To sum up this brief dive into anime financing from the viewpoint of the stock market, we can note a few things. Of all companies involved in the globalization of anime and its correlated media mix productions, the biggest are probably publicly traded with the notable exception of MiHoYo, and one may wonder what this hides (especially with the recent mass hire for game engineers) for the future. The case of Bushiroad is especially interesting as it feels like scaling up, for a company involved in the anime industry, is positively correlated with becoming publicly traded. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ are seemingly the best stocks to invest in with regard to anime as an industry, which makes sense with platforms holding a monopoly and redefining the way consumers engage with the medium everyday. However, this article barely scratches the surface by only looking at one financial indicator, the stock price, without thinking fully and caring about shares outstanding, that would define the total wealth of any given company that is both publicly traded and involved in the anime industry. Such a capital would give it massive weight in negotiating with anime production companies, like Netflix negotiating cruelly low cut unit prices.
