NJPW - News, Results & Sonstiges

[C4rnifex]

Takaaki Kidani (Gründer & President von Bushiroad) im Interview mit "Shueisha" und "Nikkei Style Magazine" :

(Übersetzung durch Chris Charlton / Twitter @reasonjp)

"I always thought wrestling was a character driven business, which is our wheelhouse as a company. With more publicity, popularity follows. We've achieved a lot with the company. In this most recent reporting period, we've had sales of 3.2 billion Yen, with profits of 410 million (1000 Yen ~ 9.9 $). Before we purchased the company, sales were just 100 million. In the ten years before purchase there was a brief period where the company was in black, but it mainly stayed in the red. The prior company waived 800 million in debt and we bought the company for just 50 million Yen, from that we took over 450 million in debt and bought the company with 530 million cash. We had to right a lot of issue with the prior company. Yuke's business was in game development. In that industry you have to be very careful with a set budget. Their objective was to cut a lot of costs. But that approach had its drawbacks, in that they had no ability to go on the offensive. For our company that's our speciality. From when we took over I've been constantly working on publicity. [...] One of our wrestlers, Kazuchika Okada, just bought a Ferrari. That's really expensive for his salary. But why buy it? He said people see him come to venues in a Ferrari, it protects a major league image, that they want to be wrestlers too. It's an aspirational thing. And anyway, his salary is going to increase and he's getting a lot of commercial endorsments. He's doing a great job."

"[...] Young people are steadly coming to events, especially in places with relativly little live entertainment. When we went to Kagoshima for the G1, we had 3300 people, spending 10 million Yen on merchandise alone."

"Sports - Its not really been recognized in Japan, but globally we've been a bubble for sports content for the last few years. UFC was bought for 400 million dollars. Even in Japan broadcast rights for the J league went for 2.1 trillion Yen. People are realizing the value of sports. Key part of that is watching and keeping track in real time .. and now that is possible online as well as on TV, the value is increasing."

"We are the market leader in Asia and number two in the world. But the leader is WWE, who are roughly 25 times bigger than us. It's rare to find an industry with that big gap between one & two. But even in this market I can feel we can increase sales to 10 billion Yen. WWE get a lot of broadcast rights & have 1.5 million subscribers to a 10 Dollar monthly service. We have our own, NJPW World, for 999 Yen, but only with 40000 subrcibers. But with so few examples of such a speciality channel drawing, it's a decent number. Like the world's second biggest fan club."

[Bild: http://www.nikkei.com/content/pic/201609...PB1-13.jpg]

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