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Sanrio Becomes 4th Biggest Shareholder of Production I.G, Wit Studio's Parent

IG Port — the parent company of animation studios Production I.G and Wit Studio, and publisher Mag Garden — announced on Tuesday that it has entered into a capital and business alliance with character and merchandise company Sanrio. IG Port issued 929,100 shares valued at 1,750 yen (about US$12) per share via third-party allotment, and raised a total of 1,625,925,000 yen (about US$11.19 million) from sales of those shares to Sanrio. The transaction will go into effect on July 3.

IG Port will use 1 billion yen from the transaction as working capital earmarked for collaborative projects with Sanrio, as well as training new creators and funding their works. The remaining 600 million yen will be allocated for updating production systems and maintaining infrastructure, such as work PCs for animation, servers, and data centers.

With the stock acquisition, Sanrio is now the fourth biggest shareholder of IG Port alongside NTT Docomo. IG Port founder, CEO, and president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa owns 18.9% of the company, followed by Dentsu Group and NTV, who each own 9.85% of the company.

IG Port's Wit Studio is animating the My Melody & Kuromi stop-motion animation series, based on the titular Sanrio characters. The series will debut on Netflix on July 24.

IG Port was also the parent company of the anime studio Signal.MD, but it merged Signal.MD into Production I.G on June 1.

Sources: IG Port, Animation Business Journal (Tadashi Sudo)