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Forbes
4 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Meet The Billionaire Behind Netflix's Biggest Rival In Japan
I n 2021, TV remote controls with a dedicated U-Next button became widely available in Japan, providing single-click access to a popular, homegrown streaming service. Since then, U-Next has overtaken Amazon Prime Video to become Netflix's biggest rival in the country by market share, according to Tokyo-based research firm GEM Partners. ss With 4.6 million subscribers (as of February) U-Next is a minnow compared with global streaming giants with their hundreds of millions of viewers around the world, but it can boast of having one of the largest local content libraries, including programming from Japanese broadcasters TBS Holdings and TV Tokyo Holdings. U-Next subscribers get a lot else—the latest Hollywood blockbusters, live streams of music concerts, English Premier League soccer matches and hit TV series like The White Lotus, plus online access to e-books, comics and magazines. The subscription package also gives them points every month that can be used to buy movie theater tickets and access new releases. The viewer-friendly approach has made the streaming service provider, which is owned by listed U-Next Holdings, an established name in Japan. But Yasuhide Uno, the company's 61-year-old president and CEO, who built $2.6 billion (market cap) U-Next from a troubled family business, is eyeing much more. For one, he's determined to more than triple company revenue to ¥1 trillion ($7 billion) by 2035. 'It's not just a number to me,' says Uno in an interview in his spartan office at the company's Tokyo headquarters near bustling Meguro station. 'If we maintain 10% [annual] growth, that trillion-yen target will be achievable.' Lately, U-Next appears to be on track. The company reported double-digit growth in the fiscal year through August 2024, with revenue up 18% to ¥326.8 billion and net profit increasing 40% to ¥15.4 billion. The company says it expects to maintain the momentum in the current fiscal year, with a revenue target of ¥360 billion and net profit of ¥16.7 billion. Bullish investors have pushed up U-Next's share price nearly 40% over the past year. That boosted Uno's net worth by roughly the same percentage to $1.6 billion, placing him at No. 34 in the ranks of Japan's richest. U-Next has other businesses that are even bigger contributors to operating profit than entertainment, though they are less visible. The company provides a range of services such as piped music, point-of-sale machines, IT and cloud services, and catering robots to some 860,000 stores, restaurants, salons, hotels and hospitals across the country. It also supplies broadband services and green energy to businesses and households, and has lately expanded into payment services and real estate. 'From the time I first met Uno-san in the early days of the internet boom in Japan, he had a vision for the transformative power of connectivity.' Analysts say U-Next is less vulnerable to domestic and global headwinds as the bulk of its revenue comes from subscriptions or term contracts. 'About 80% of its revenue is recurring. These services have the nature of continuous sales growth as the number of customers increases,' Aizawa Securities analyst Naoto Takahashi wrote in an April note to investors. Uno's ambition for U-Next goes beyond hard numbers. He wants to cement his legacy by making the company an icon of Japan Inc. 'I often talk about wanting to become a company that is needed and represents Japan, a company that is known and trusted, and one that Japanese have high hopes for and love,' he says. Shunichi Oda for Forbes Asia It's been a tumultuous two-plus decades for Uno since he stepped into his late father's shoes in 1998. Mototada Uno started a business in 1961 in Osaka to provide background music through coaxial cables to retailers and restaurants. Osaka Yusen Broadcasting as it was called then, expanded nationwide with a footprint covering 80% of the country. Uno insists that he never had any desire to join the family business. 'Absolutely not,' he avers. 'My father was rather against succession too. In my mind, I wanted to start and run my own company. I thought my older brother [Yasuhiko] would take over if there was a family succession.' After studying law at Meiji Gakuin University, he worked at a real estate company that was developing condo projects in Tokyo. In 1989, he cofounded Intelligence, a recruitment services firm, which he ran as CEO. When Mototada was suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer at age 63, he turned to his younger son. 'My father was told that he only had three months left to live,' Uno recalls. 'I think he thought that as I had already started a company and was getting ready to list it, that I was prepared as a manager.' Uno was anything but prepared for what lay ahead. The cables being used to relay piped music had been strung on utility poles without permission from the government or utility companies. Moreover, the company had piled on ¥80 billion in debt, backed by personal guarantees from his father. It took Uno a couple of years to secure permission from the then- Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for the over 7 million poles the company was using—and put ¥50 billion toward accumulated fees. Repaying debt took much longer. For the fiscal year ended August 2024 With a cleaner slate, Uno could focus on expansion beyond the legacy piped music business. In 2000 he renamed the company as Yusen Broad Networks to reflect his next move: upgrading the cable network to introduce what it says was the world's first commercial optical fiber broadband service—starting in Tokyo and eventually extending it nationwide. Uno strongly believed that the internet would 'change society' and that video distribution was the next big thing. 'From the time I first met Uno-san in the early days of the internet boom in Japan, he had a vision for the transformative power of connectivity, especially for how streaming services could revolutionize entertainment,' says Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and CEO of Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, by email. 'He's one of the most relentlessly driven leaders I know.' Mikitani and Uno collaborated to start a paid content platform in 2001 called Showtime—six years before Netflix debuted its streaming service—that showed movies, dramas, anime and sports. (In 2009, Rakuten bought out Usen's 50% stake in the platform for ¥1.8 billion, which by then had 60,000 titles and 1.1 million subscribers.) Uno doubled down on streaming, and in 2005 he changed his company's name to Usen, launching a free (advertiser supported) video content streaming service called GyaO that offered local TV programs and movies as well as overseas fare. Two years later, he launched a paid subscription service called GyaO Next, the predecessor to U-Next. (GyaO caught the attention of Yahoo! Japan, which spent ¥530 million to acquire a 51% stake in 2009 with the aim to build one of the nation's largest video distribution platforms.) Usen began to unravel alongside the global financial crisis. In a two-year period through August 2009, the company posted losses totalling over ¥113 billion, mainly due to Uno's aggressive acquisitions that included Intelligence and karaoke-equipment and music distributor BMB, which resulted in write-downs. By 2010, the company's lenders finally had enough and Uno was forced to step down. 'More is learned from people who have experienced various setbacks than from executives who've had straight line success.' Uno had listed Intelligence on Jasdaq in 2000, made it a Usen subsidiary in 2009, but then had to sell it to PE firm KKR a year later for ¥32.5 billion. According to Hiroshi Kodama's 2020 book, An Entrepreneur's Courage: The Rise and Fall of Yasuhide Uno's Ventures, he was under heavy pressure from banks to repay the loans because of concerns over hitting lending covenants and to quit. Uno admitted in local media interviews that he struggled to cope in the aftermath. Uno now says his frankness is appreciated. 'People often tell me that they were encouraged,' he says. 'More is learned from people who have experienced various setbacks than from executives who've had straight-line success.' At the time of his departure from Usen, Uno negotiated a ¥10 million deal with the company to acquire the money-losing businesses of subscription-based streaming and personal broadband services. These two businesses were housed in a company called U-Next, which was spun off from Usen. Luckily for Uno the timing worked out. With internet penetration in Japan picking up pace, both businesses gained traction. In 2014, the company was stable enough for him to pull off a public listing of U-Next on the Tokyo Stock Exchange startup bourse Mothers. In 2017, Uno orchestrated a complicated merger to reclaim control over Usen as well as his CEO's position by leveraging his nearly two-thirds stake in U-Next and the roughly 30% shares he still owned in Usen. He ended up eventually with about 70% of the combined Usen-Next Holdings, which last year he renamed as U-Next Holdings. (Uno now holds a stake of under 60%.) Uno believes that Japan's streaming market, which got a boost during Covid-19 lockdowns, is poised for another growth spurt. GEM Partners projects that it will expand over 50% to nearly ¥790 billion in revenue by 2029 from ¥526 billion last year. Drawing a comparison with the U.S. market, Uno sees ample room for growth. In Japan, per GEM, roughly 40% of Japanese have paid for streaming subscriptions, with an average of 1.8 per household. According to Deloitte's March 2025 Digital Media Trends report, 90% of Americans have at least one paid streaming service, with the average household subscribing to four. While he acknowledges that Japanese audiences are used to getting content for free, Uno maintains there's potential to hit 60%. U-Next is targeting 10 million subscribers in the next decade—equal to Netflix's current subscriber base in Japan. The American giant's competitive pricing poses a challenge, however. U-Next's monthly fee of ¥2,189 for unlimited viewing is considerably more than Netflix's standard no-advertising plan of ¥1,590 and more than double its cheapest plan with ads at ¥890. *Estimated total revenue for streaming video-on-demand providers in Japan (including domestic and international players) in 2024 'The price is high, but customers can access new releases…and other content like manga,' says Aya Umezu, Gem's CEO. 'While overtaking Netflix will be difficult based on the number of users, it's very possible based on revenue because of its high monthly fee.' U-Next has an 'overwhelming' amount of content, adds Umezu. Last year, U-Next inked an agreement with Warner Bros. Discovery for brands on its Max platform such as the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and HBO. Uno acknowledges that the 10 million subscriber target may be difficult to achieve organically. 'In a red ocean and our industry, companies that can't survive will be merged with others, something that's already happening,' he says. In 2023, he struck a pivotal deal with a local company that beefed up U-Next's Japanese content substantially—giving it a fighting chance to compete with streaming giants. A stock swap with Premium Platform Japan (owned by TBS, TV Tokyo and others), which operated the paid subscription platform Paravi gave U-Next more subscribers and access to about 19,000 titles including reruns from Japanese TV broadcasters. Uno hints that more such deals could follow. In addition to streaming, U-Next plans to grow its other businesses by leveraging its 2,000-person sales force and 1,000 technicians to help cross-sell its services and expand its presence in under-penetrated segments. For example, fewer than a third of hospitals in Japan and under a fourth of business hotels use automatic-payment machines. Last year, U-Next acquired payment service provider NetMove for nearly ¥5.8 billion to provide cashless payments, complementing the company's point-of-sale services. Uno has also set his sights on growing overseas but in a measured way. In the streaming business, the partnership with Warner has expanded, giving the American company the rights to distribute U-Next's Japanese content globally. In February, U-Next set up a Malaysian subsidiary to develop and franchise Halal-approved virtual restaurants. U-Next made a foray into food with the 2023 acquisition of WannaEat, a food-delivery service then called Virtual Restaurant, for an undisclosed amount. 'I know very well that going overseas isn't easy,' he notes. Uno has traversed tougher terrain. After he left Usen, he got obsessed with triathlons, eventually qualifying for the 2015 World Triathlon Long Distance Championships in Sweden, where he managed to cross the finish line. The gruelling experience taught him a lesson that has probably helped him navigate his eventful business career: 'When doing challenging sports, you somehow start to think that no matter how tough it is, it will eventually end.' Not satisfied with streaming content into millions of Japanese homes, Uno became a movie producer on the side. An avowed film buff—in college, he would watch one or two movies every night—he set up his own production outfit called Uno Films in 2019. Its only movie to date, a 2022 drama called The Wandering Moon, about a fateful friendship between a young man and a girl, got six nominations for the Japan Academy Film Prize, including for best actor and actress. The company says it has more projects in the pipeline but declined to elaborate. The Wandering Moon, movie poster Uno says he's not contemplating giving up his day job anytime soon. But he's readying potential successors through a year-long, internal training program. (Uno's two adult children aren't involved in the company.) Monthly sessions focus on topics such as devising a business strategy and developing leadership skills. The program, which asks participants to analyze business books and case studies, has run for two years; Uno attends about half the sessions and talks about the lessons he's learned. 'Uno-san has weathered storms that would have broken most businesses,' says Rakuten founder and CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani. 'His resilience and unwavering focus are an inspiration to me, and to business leaders everywhere.'
Tokyo Weekender
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Tokyo Weekender
A Beginner's Guide To Watching Akira Kurosawa Films
The more popular an artist is, the harder it can be to start enjoying their works. You may feel that you are basically familiar with them because of cultural osmosis, where you see bits and pieces of their output or their influences all around you. You may also feel paralyzed by choice, not knowing where to start your journey of discovery. Many people feel this way about Akira Kurosawa, widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers in history. A director of more than 30 movies, Kurosawa's filmography is full of historical drama, social commentary, heart-pounding action and profound introspections about the nature of humanity. Where do you begin with a director of such caliber? Below are some suggestions. List of Contents: The Ironman Method The Mifune Method The BFI Method Related Posts An official poster for the 1941 drama Uma — meaning 'horse' The Ironman Method Most of Kurosawa's filmography is easily available in Japan on streaming platforms like U-Next or Prime Video. The DVDs of his movies are also often quite cheap, especially if you buy them secondhand. This makes it easy to watch all of Kurosawa's films in chronological order, from his debut to his last cinematic offering, enjoying not just the movies themselves but also the evolution of his style and fascinating reflections of the times he lived through. There's just one problem with that. Not everyone agrees about what Kurosawa's first film was. He was first credited as a director for the 1943 movie Sanshiro Sugata , a fun historical martial arts flick about the battle between judo and jujutsu. However, before being given the director's chair, Kurosawa worked on many films as an assistant director. It's now widely accepted that in one such production, the 1941 drama Uma — meaning 'horse' — he essentially did most of the work officially credited to writer-director Kajiro Yamamoto. Many Kurosawa scholars see the young artist's fingerprints all over Uma, which, even if you don't count it as a pure Kurosawa joint, is still worth watching for its portrayal of life in rural Tohoku. There's a bit of military propaganda at the start and end of the film, but it doesn't take away from the quality of the movie . Also, many Kurosawa filmographies mention the 1946 film Those Who Make Tomorrow, which was also a propaganda piece. Only this one came from the Allied Forces, who wanted a movie about workers' unions. Kurosawa was one of three directors on the project but personally didn't consider it part of his legacy. Plus, it's hard to get hold of. At this point, it can only be seen at movie festivals and such. A true Kurosawa completionist will probably still try to hunt that one down, though. For extra credit, watch the 30 movies that Kurosawa wrote but didn't direct, including his last script for the 1999 Japanese and French drama After the Rain, featuring Kurosawa's grandson Takayuki Kato in a supporting role. The Mifune Method Kurosawa's success was defined by his partnerships with powerhouse actors. Near the end of his career, it was Tatsuya Nakadai who helped bring his visions to life in Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985). In the beginning, though, there was the celebrated actor Takashi Shimura, who appeared in Sanshiro Sugata at the beginning of Kurosawa's directorial journey. Unfortunately, he also featured in his weaker movies, such as the pure propaganda piece The Most Beautiful (1944) and the aforementioned Those Who Make Tomorrow . This is admittedly a problem with watching everything Kurosawa directed: you'll have to get through objectively bad movies that he had to get out of his system or was pressured to make, like Sanshiro Sugata Part II. It was the first sequel with a number in it in the world and an altogether unpleasant cinematic experience full of nationalistic propaganda. The Ironman Method can unfortunately sour some viewers on Kurosawa. A safe alternative is to simply watch the movies where the director teamed up with Toshiro Mifune . One of the greatest Japanese actors who ever lived, Mifune appeared in 16 Kurosawa movies , starting with Drunken Angel (1948), in which he played a yakuza with tuberculosis alongside an alcoholic doctor portrayed by Shimura. Many consider Drunken Angel the beginning of Kurosawa's true career, although the 1947 movie One Wonderful Sunday also has a lot to offer. Still, only watching Kurosawa-Mifune movies is a recipe for a good time and a great way to see the actor as more than just a man who portrayed warriors, like in Seven Samurai (1954) , The Hidden Fortress (1958) and Yojimbo (1961) . In The Quiet Duel (1949), he played a stoic, idealistic surgeon who accidentally contracted syphilis during an operation. Two years later, in The Idiot (1951) — a film based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel of the same name — he brought to life a troubled man spiraling out of control due to violent and passionate emotions. In The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Mifune played a mix of a modern-day Hamlet and the Count of Monte Cristo. His last Kurosawa movie, Red Beard (1965), sadly led to a rift between the two, but at least we got a fascinating portrayal of a feudal-period doctor and martial artist out of it. The BFI Method The British Film Institute's selection of the 10 best Akira Kurosawa movies is one of the most useful encapsulations of the director's work that you will ever see. The Mifune Method is fun, but it skips over all of Kurosawa's acclaimed color movies — every Kurosawa-Mifune film is black-and-white — and some of his earlier works, which are essential if you want to understand the director. The BFI gets that, and that's why its selection gives viewers a taste of everything: early, humanist Kurosawa ( No Regrets for Our Youth ), crazy-badass Mifune ( Seven Samurai ), dignified Mifune offering social commentary ( Scandal ), Shimura ripping out the audience's hearts ( Ikiru ), or Kurosawa mastering the historic epic and the use of color in cinema ( Ran ). And that's just half the list. Jasper Sharp's selection for the BFI is obviously subjective, but the writer makes an ironclad case for all the entries. It's probably best to watch them chronologically, which should give you the most informative Kurosawa experience ever. If the movies feel like a chore, and you don't want to watch more, it will mean that Kurosawa isn't your cup of tea, and that's perfectly alright. Others, however, might find themselves enthusiastically picking up what the director is laying down and wanting more. Related Posts Before Keanu Reeves' Speed, There Was The Bullet Train Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust Is Still a Masterpiece After 25 Years Samurai Gun Assassins: When Bullets Bested Blades
