Global anime market could reach $57 billion by 2030

By Amara Osei

Global anime revenue is forecast to grow from US$32 billion in 2023 to US$57 billion by 2030, according to the market forecast cited in this report. The report also estimates that about one in three streaming viewers worldwide watches anime.

The report sets this expansion against Japan’s aging, shrinking population, pressure from low-cost Chinese manufacturers, energy shortages and rapidly rising public debt. Sony Group CEO Hiroki Totoki nevertheless sees a commercial opening: “Animes have become a cultural phenomenon around the world,” he said. He called anime “one of the positives” for a country confronting population aging.

What changed at New York Comic Con?

At last month’s annual four-day New York Comic Con, held at Manhattan’s Javits Center, anime took the visual lead. The Japanese animation style is traditionally associated with two-dimensional artwork and large-eyed, expressive characters. A decade earlier, US comics and superheroes dominated. Fans carried Hello Kitty bags featuring Nezuko, the “Demon Slayer” protagonist, and wore lanyards printed with characters from “Naruto.”

New York resident Chris Cosentino pushed a cart carrying his 13-year-old Pomeranian, Haku, dressed in a straw hat and red vest inspired by Luffy from “One Piece.” The report described a common sentiment among attendees: they loved anime and Japan. American rapper Megan Thee Stallion now references anime in her music, while European football players imitate anime battle poses when celebrating goals.

Takeaway: Anime now operates as a mass cultural export, not a niche Japanese subculture.

Can anime offset Japan’s economic pressures?

The report says Japan now earns more revenue from international tourism than from any export except automobiles. It also earns more from content sold overseas than from traditional exports such as semiconductors and steel. Those figures do not show that creative industries have replaced manufacturing; they show that IP (intellectual property) now carries unusual weight in the export mix.

McKinsey & Co. partner Naoyuki Iwatani said: “Japan has built a very strong power of cultural influence.” He said decades of resistance to leaving declining businesses damaged productivity, and that companies must change fast enough to exploit the anime opportunity. He cited Sony as a company that made the shift.

Sony illustrates the transformation. After building its reputation on the Walkman and Trinitron television, it spent decades exiting unprofitable businesses and redirecting capital toward music, film and games. Its entertainment divisions now produce about 70% of company profit.

Totoki spent four decades moving through Sony’s finance and corporate-planning departments. He watched consumer-electronics dominance in the 1980s and 1990s give way to lower-cost South Korean and Chinese rivals, then backed anime’s international rise.

Takeaway: Cultural exports have become a national economic asset, but the corporate shift behind them took decades.

Can Sony turn demand into predictable hits?

Before becoming CEO in 2025, Totoki helped supervise an approximately US$300 million investment in media group Kadokawa. He also expanded Crunchyroll, which Sony acquired in 2021, and formed a strategic partnership with Bandai Namco.

The strategy has not removed hit risk. Sony developed “K-Pop Warriors” and sold its distribution rights to Netflix before the film became a global phenomenon and Netflix’s most-watched title ever.

Anime studios also cannot simply add output when demand rises, as factories can. Industry leaders argue that the format’s appeal rests on niche, countercultural roots, qualities inherently hard to replicate at scale. Critics cited in the report identify that tension as a central failure of Cool Japan, a government program launched in 2013 that spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to manufacture a modern, popular image for Japanese culture.

Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini said: “The anime audience is large, and everyone wants Japanese anime.” Global hits, he argued, usually come from artists telling their own stories rather than designing content for a mass export market. “They are very specific stories — the authentic ones that creators want to tell, rather than those built from the idea that they need to be exported,” he said.

Takeaway: Market growth does not guarantee repeatable hits; creative autonomy remains part of the product.

Can Japan compete with China, South Korea and AI?

South Korean and Chinese studios are rapidly expanding high-budget productions modeled on anime. Blackstone paid US$1.7 billion for Infocom, a Japanese company specializing in manga comics. Generative AI (software that creates content from instructions) can also produce anime-style video in seconds.

Population decline and a shortage of artists limit Japan’s production capacity. Long working hours and low pay, longstanding features of the sector, make recruitment harder. The creative community has received AI with distrust. Totoki believes that scarcity could become an advantage in content, where scarce human work is difficult to copy.

Totoki cited “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — Infinity Castle,” the highest-grossing international film in North American history, as evidence of anime’s pull. He said he nearly cried during his first cinema screening because of his connection with the characters. That human work makes audiences willing to pay, he said.

In consumer electronics, a product becomes a commodity (an interchangeable good), turning competition into a race for the lowest manufacturing cost. “It is hard to survive in that environment,” Totoki said. In content, “the story is different.” He added that companies can create similar content and imitations, but originality and authenticity ultimately matter most.

In his first year as CEO, Totoki led Sony to a record US$9.2 billion in operating profit, with growth in music, anime and camera image sensors contributing. That company-wide result supports the sector’s momentum but does not isolate anime’s contribution or prove that the talent problem is solved.

Takeaway: Scarcity may protect value, but record profit does not resolve Japan’s production bottleneck.

Japan’s next test is whether studios can retain scarce creative talent and use AI without eroding the authenticity that Purini and Totoki identify as the basis for global demand.