CATDOLL: Multiple Japanese comic magazines form alliance, Asia will become the main sales battlefield

The Japanese domestic market is obviously unable to support the annually increasing consumption of Japanese animation and comics. More and more publishers and producers are setting their sights on the vast markets outside Japan. On September 1, Shueisha, Shogakukan, Kodansha, Kadokawa Group, and Animate jointly established the Japan Manga Alliance (JMA). The establishment of this alliance is to promote the sales of genuine Japanese comics in the Asian market. The establishment of this alliance also means that the Japanese comics industry has officially identified Asia, including China, as the main battlefield for the overseas expansion of Japanese comics.

At the founding ceremony, Shueisha's comics department director and sales director Sumino Yoshio, Kodansha director Minegishi Nobuya, Animate director Kunieda Shingo, Kadokawa Group director Tsukamoto Shin, and Shogakukan director Aiga Nobuhiro attended the ceremony together, and took photos with their arms around each other's shoulders. The five Japanese comics-related companies formed this alliance with the goal of setting up physical stores in Asia outside of Japan with the five main functions of promoting comics and animation, gaining fans, preventing piracy, conducting overseas market research, and promoting Japanese tourism. The first JMA physical store will be officially opened in Bangkok, Thailand from the end of 2015 to the beginning of 2016.

The directors of the five companies said that the physical store to be opened in Bangkok, Thailand, will have a rich line of Japanese two-dimensional products and will be operated by experts. The opening of this physical store in Bangkok will help Japanese anime combat piracy in the region. JMA will personally operate overseas markets this time instead of looking for local Thai partners.

As for why the first physical store was chosen to be in Thailand, JMA said that among all Asian countries, Thailand has a large number of publications and comic translations, and the Thai government is very willing to accept JMA's entry. In addition, the sales of genuine comics from Kadokawa, Shogakukan, Shueisha, and Kodansha in the Thai market are 5-6.5 billion yen, and the sales of pirated Japanese comics in Thailand are twice that of genuine ones. Therefore, the Thai market has a market size of about 15 billion yen. Although genuine comics are more expensive than pirated ones, JMA believes that the income of residents in Asian countries has generally increased, and the middle class has increased. Therefore, anime fans in Asian countries want to consume genuine products more. As for where Thailand will open physical stores in the future, JMA said it has no other plans yet.

In fact, the Chinese market is a big piece of cake, but some historical and political elements will definitely make it difficult for JMA to open physical stores in China. It feels that JMA is actually a Japanese comics copyright alliance. For some domestic comic reading apps, it seems that they will have to deal with JMA a lot in the future. In addition, if JMA wants to succeed, it still needs to do a good job of localization. Many Japanese game manufacturers entered China but did not do a good job of localization, and can only be in a half-dead state.