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Japan's Anime Market Hits Record High for 6th Consecutive Year

The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) will publish its "Anime Industry Report 2019," which examines industry trends from 2018, on December 9. According to a preview of the report published on Friday, the anime market was valued at 2.1814 trillion yen (about US$19.9 billion) in 2018, a 0.9% increase from the previous year.

The industry has seen growth for the past nine years, and it has reached a record high for the sixth consecutive year. The values in the chart represent the market value for each year in units of 100 million yen.

Both the Japanese domestic market and the overseas market saw slight growth in 2018. The Japanese domestic anime market grew for the first time since 2014. Meanwhile, the overseas anime market surpassed the 1-trillion-yen (about US$9.14-billion) mark for the first time, though growth in the overseas market slowed after a more steady rise in recent years. The chart below shows the domestic market with the solid line and the overseas market with the dotted line.

Fields that saw an increase in 2018 included live events, with 23.1% growth, and streaming, with 10.2% growth. On the other hand, the home video and merchandising rights markets decreased by 23.3% and 4.4%, respectively. Last year marks the fifth consecutive year that the home video market decreased.

The full report for 2017 noted last year that the total production minutes for television anime exceeded 110,000 minutes for the fifth consecutive year. At the same time, the total number of television anime broadcast decreased by 4.5%.

Source: Email correspondence