Kadokawa takes Malaysia's Art Square Group

The move aims to help both companies expand throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The MoU ceremony also marked the rebranding of acquired entity ASG, a publisher of comics and children’s books, to Kadokawa Gempak Starz.
Idris Jala, InvestKL chief executive for performance management and delivery (Pemandu), said Malaysia was poised to capture a bigger slice of the global creative content industry with Kadokawa’s entry to the country.
The industry is worth US$10 trillion (Bt360 trillion) up until 2019, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2015-19 global entertainment and media outlook.
Idris said Malaysia’s creative multimedia industry was worth 19 billion ringgit (Bt160 billion).
He said the partnership would progress further to produce original content, focused on international markets.
“Both parties can leverage on their expertise and further monetise the production of animation, movies, games and merchandising as well as digitalisation of creative content,” said Idris, who witnessed the MoU signing ceremony between Kadokawa Corp chairman Tsuguhiko Kadokawa and InvestKL chairman Michael Yam.
Also present were KHA CEO Susumu Tsukamoto and InvestKL CEO Zainal Amanshah.
Susumu said Malaysia was an attractive hub to strategise Kadokawa’s publishing and content business.
With KGS as the development base for Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the Kadokawa group aims to strengthen original content creation for Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia and Arabic, as it believes these markets have growth potential.
It believes doing so will complement its market presence in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong as it expands in other regions.
KGS CEO Chris Yew said the company expected to triple its revenue with the tie-up, with more than 40 per cent to be contributed by the overseas markets.
He said KGS intended to bring in 30 per cent more comic creative talent over the next two years, while 200 more jobs would be created in the information-technology development and content space over the next five years.
Zainal said Kadokawa was an excellent example of the type of investments InvestKL was looking to seize.
“The value of this relationship is great between a world-class company from Japan with our local company,” he said, without giving a figure.
“There is huge intellectual property here and high-skilled jobs that can be created with potential high export value,” he said, adding that Malaysia continued to be strong in terms of talent, ecosystems and connectivity that seemed to be attractive for other Asean markets.
Commenting on the outlook, he said different climates presented different challenges.
Zainal stressed there were tremendous opportunities within Asean.