The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) released the summarized version of its Anime Industry Report 2025 on February 4th. The report, based on surveys and data analyses conducted by AJA throughout 2024, reveals that the anime market size had grown by 114.8% year-on-year, reaching 3.84 trillion yen (about $24.5 billion USD) and setting a new record high for the industry. In particular, the overseas market has been witnessing much greater growth compared to the domestic market.
According to the report, continuing last year’s trend, the anime market has witnessed one of its biggest ever year-on-year increases in growth, only second to the 115.3% growth recorded in 2019. The market is said to have doubled in size since 2015, and is 3.5 times bigger than what it was in 2002. Assuming the same growth pace, the estimated market size for 2025 is over 4 trillion yen (about $25.54 billion USD)
The overseas anime market has grown by 126.0% year-on-year, and its expansion has been greatly accelerating ever since 2022. This comes thanks to the worldwide popularization of Japanese anime through global streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney +, and Crunchyroll. According to the data, the overseas market accounted for 56.5% of the overall market size, beating the domestic market by a margin of around 499.7 billion yen (about $3.18 billion USD) once again. This gap has significantly widened compared to the 97.9-billion-yen difference (around $624 million USD) from the previous year.
On a related note, due to the potential Japanese content has shown in the overseas market, it seems like the industry has been taking more concrete steps towards global expansion. For example, the Japanese government recently laid out a new set of policies to promote the expansion of Japanese content and anime industry on a worldwide scale. Furthermore, only last month, Japanese anime studio MAPPA announced a strategic partnership with Netflix, aimed at creating new projects with global audiences in mind.
