Market Overview

The character business market size (merchandising, licensing) in FY2022 grew to 2,613,600 million yen, 101.1% of the preceding fiscal year. FY2022 saw a variety of affluent characters such as a media mix content “Uma Musume Pretty Derby”, animation titles “SPY×FAMILY” and “CHAINSAW MAN” both developed from manga, Tokusatsu entertainment “Ultraman”, and a movie released “ONE PIECE FILM RED”, etc., which have contributed to stable growth of the character business market.

The character business market consists of merchandising and licensing, both of which showing positive growth for FY2022: Merchandising market (based on retail values) generated 1,273,600 million yen, 101.4% of the previous fiscal year, and licensing market (based on contract amount) achieved 1,340,000 million yen, 100.8% of the preceding fiscal year. While merchandising upturned because of favorable product sales at theme parks after the lift of behavior restrictions for the corona crisis, licensing grew because of rapidly increased adoptions of VTubers.

Noteworthy Topics

Trend of Characters in NFT Form

From pictures, illustrations, videos, VR works to source codes, a variety of data are sold as NFT arts in the market.
In the situation where NFT arts are prospering as uncopiable works, there are cases of manga and anime released in the past are renewing their values as art objects after being digitalized and tokenized in the blockchain.

For example, Shueisha, the publisher, has made the hugely popular manga “ONE PIECE” into the NFT form, aiming to utilize blockchain for creating new values as an artwork. There are many of such cases, i.e., games and trading cards, helping NFT arts to about to form a market. The character market is drawing attention for its being with the use of NFT.

* Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is the ownership of digital assets that cannot be replaced and are issued and traded on blockchain. An NFT art refers to the digital art that uses NFT.

Future Outlook

The character business market size (merchandising, licensing) for FY2023 is projected to reach 2,650,800 million yen, 101.4% of the previous fiscal year.
FY2023 can expect the great hit for the second season of “Oshi no Ko (Children of My Favorite Idol)”, and new seasons to be broadcasted for anime titles “Damon Slayer” and “Attack on Titan” both already successful in character development. In addition, the character “Super Mario” has had its movie released, and new release of the game title “SUPER MARIO BROS.” is expected for the first time in eleven years. Therefore, characters and their works, with many fan bases, are planned to be released one after another during the fiscal year, which are the favorable factors for the market.

Research Outline