Industry group: second highest year-on-year growth, overseas growth of 26%
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The Japan Animation Association (AJA), an industry group led by animation production companies, presented a summary of this year’s animation industry report on Thursday during the TIFFCOM trade event in Tokyo. AJA reports that the global animation market will grow to a record level of 3.8407 trillion yen (approximately US$25.1 billion) by 2024. Among them, the domestic market is 1.6705 trillion yen (approximately US$10.9 billion), and the overseas market is 2.1702 trillion yen (approximately US$14.1 billion).
The global animation market overall grew by 14.8% last year, the second-highest annual growth rate (after 15.3% growth in 2019). The domestic market grew by 2.8% and the overseas market grew by 26%.
2024 is the third year that overseas markets will be larger than domestic markets (after 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2023).
AJA calculates the global animation market by including revenue not only from television, film, home video and streaming distribution, but also from merchandise sales, music distribution, events, concerts, overseas licensing and other related sources. The association distinguishes the larger overall anime market from the smaller revenue subset of companies directly involved in animation production.
Estimated revenue from animation production rose 9.1% to an all-time high of 466.2 billion yen (approximately $3.025 billion). Domestic revenue increased by 6.7% to 347.4 billion yen (approximately US$2.254 billion), and overseas revenue increased by 16.6% to 118.8 billion yen (approximately US$770.6 million).
Masahiro HasegawaThe editor-in-chief of AJA’s “2025 Animation Industry Report” explained the reason for the low annual growth rate of producers’ revenue. He pointed out that there is a lag of several years in the revenue from certain sources such as overseas streaming media being reflected in producers’ revenue.
On a related note, Ogata Naohiro,director Bandai Namco movies‘ Gundam The strategic business group noted at the TIFFCOM conference that the company aims to increase the overseas share of screen distribution revenue from 25% in fiscal 2023 to 50% in fiscal 2030.
Animation is part of the Japanese government’s five-year plan action plan Overseas annual entertainment sales are expected to double from 10 trillion yen (approximately $65 billion) in 2028 to 20 trillion yen (approximately $130 billion) in 2033. This is 3.7 times 2024 sales (6.044 trillion yen, approximately US$39 billion).
AJA will release the complete 2025 Animation Industry Report in early December. Among other things, AJA is one of the main sponsors of the AnimeJapan conference (pictured above).
Source: TIFFCOM Japan Animation Association
