What is DeNA? A Diversified Company Expanding from Its Gaming Core into Live Streaming, Sports, Healthcare, and AI
The company name DeNA is a coined word combining DNA (genes) with the letter "e," and its starting point was Tomoko Namba's declaration to rewrite society's core genes through web services. Founded in 1999 as a limited company, the firm has since transformed into one of Japan's leading internet companies, with a market capitalization of approximately 312.6 billion yen (as of May 13, 2026) and roughly 3,000 consolidated employees. Its business is broadly composed of five pillars, each taking on the character of an independently profitable operating company while remaining organically interconnected.
The core, as ever, is the gaming business. While operating its proprietary platform "Mobage," DeNA leverages strategic partnerships with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company to jointly develop and operate the globally hit smartphone trading card game "Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket (Poke-Poke)," which has recorded staggering download numbers worldwide since its October 2024 release. The company also runs numerous long-running titles such as "Pokémon Masters EX" and "Othellonia." The second pillar is the live streaming business, which encompasses "Pococha," a live-streaming app enabling two-way interaction between livers and listeners, and "IRIAM," which allows character broadcasting with just a single smartphone and one illustration. Pococha launched its corporate offering "Pococha for Business" in 2025, while IRIAM is generating a new wave of VTuber culture centered on Gen Z.
The third pillar is the sports and smart city business. The Yokohama DeNA BayStars, which DeNA has nurtured since acquiring the team's operating company in December 2011, rewrote franchise history with the "miracle of third place"—advancing from a third-place finish in the 2024 Central League to claim the Japan Series title—and saw attendance figures surge as well. Combining entertainment businesses integrated with the cityscape—including the Kawasaki Brave Thunders of basketball's B.League, SC Sagamihara of soccer's J.League, the permanent live-viewing facility "THE LIVE," the immersive experience facility "Wonderia Yokohama" opening in spring 2026, and the urban sports hub "Kawasaki Cultural Park"—the company is steadily advancing its "Kanagawa Smart City Initiative" connecting Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Sagamihara.
The fourth pillar is the healthcare and medical business, which deploys "kencom," a healthcare entertainment app linked to health checkup results; "ONSEI," which uses AI to analyze voice feature data and check for changes in cognitive function; "MENKYO/MOGI," a tablet-based cognitive function test for elderly drivers; the "Join" series, a communication and telemedicine platform for medical professionals; and "Tsuna-Ken," which digitally transforms health checkup operations. Together with the medical platform operated by its subsidiary Allm, the business aims to provide infrastructure that uses AI to redesign on-site operations at medical facilities, health insurance associations, and local governments. The fifth pillar comprises new domains and AI businesses, including a virtual security guard jointly developed with Secom, the entrepreneur-support VC "Delight Ventures," "DeNA AI Link" for corporate AI implementation support, and the enterprise AI service "Leaders AI" described later. Cash generated by gaming revenue is circulated into live streaming, sports, healthcare, and AI—this portfolio-based management constitutes the basic framework of DeNA.
From a Girl in Niigata to "the Third Japanese Female Partner in McKinsey's History"
Tomoko Nanba was born on April 21, 1962, in Niigata City, Niigata Prefecture. Her father was a business owner who ran an oil wholesale company, and her household was reportedly a combination of a strict paternal figure and a sensitive mother who longed for Tokyo's culture. As a child, Nanba was known throughout the neighborhood as an exceptionally competitive girl—an active child who took charge of games among the boys. After attending Niigata Municipal Minami-Bandai Elementary School and Niigata Municipal Miyaura Junior High School, she went on to Niigata Prefectural Niigata High School, known as the prefecture's top college-preparatory school. During her years at Niigata High, she distinguished herself in debate and student council activities, and former classmates described her as "someone who would overturn arguments with carefully considered words."
Strongly determined to continue her studies in Tokyo, Nanba chose the Department of English Literature, College of Liberal Arts, at Tsuda College. Tsuda is one of Japan's foremost institutions of higher education for women, founded in the Meiji era by Umeko Tsuda, and is known for its English-language instruction and small-group education. While enrolled, Nanba excelled academically, and in her fourth year she was awarded "a scholarship granted to the top-ranked student," enabling her to spend one year studying abroad at Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania, USA—a prestigious liberal arts college and one of the "Seven Sisters," the pinnacle of women's higher education), Tsuda's sister school. This study-abroad experience is said to have had a decisive impact on Nanba's career outlook, and in later interviews she recalled, "The training in thinking for myself and expressing my opinions that British and American liberal arts education drilled into me became the foundation of everything that followed in negotiations and management decisions." Throughout her high school and university years in Niigata, several former classmates have said Nanba "stood out by a head not for sheer excellence, but for a tenacity that turned frustration into fuel to break through."
In 1986, the year she graduated from Tsuda, Nanba joined the Japanese subsidiary of McKinsey & Company as a new graduate. McKinsey at that time hired almost no new graduates, and female associates were an even smaller minority within an overwhelmingly male-dominated culture. After joining, Nanba distinguished herself on global projects in the consumer goods, telecommunications, and IT sectors, and in 1988—her second year at the firm—she was dispatched to study at Harvard Business School (HBS). She earned her MBA (Master of Business Administration) from HBS in June 1990. Her HBS classmates described her as "overwhelmingly proactive, with sharper questions in case discussions than anyone else," and "the only Japanese student who could genuinely out-argue Americans."
Returning to McKinsey after her studies, Nanba was hailed as "the embodiment of professionalism," sleeping as little as possible to power through her engagements, and in 1996 she became the third Japanese woman ever to be promoted to partner (co-managing director) at the firm. At the McKinsey Tokyo office of that era, being promoted to partner at age 34 was among the youngest on record, and industry publications gave it extensive coverage. Former colleagues who worked with her at McKinsey during that period unanimously describe her as a rare consultant who combined three qualities: "the listening ability to draw out clients' true feelings," "the logical power to thoroughly distill and structure data," and "the humor to instantly change the flow of a meeting." Her experience as a consulting project leader deeply involved in strategy formulation for So-net, the internet subsidiary of the Sony Group, would later become the direct trigger for founding DeNA.
Founding—The Dream of an Internet Auction Born from a Sonet Project
DeNA's founding story began with a single remark thrown at Ms. Nambacker by a So-net manager from Sony in early 1999. "Ms. Namba, instead of always making proposals, why don't you try doing it yourself?"—this casual provocation moved Ms. Namba. At the time, Ms. Namba was 34 years old and had built a stable career at McKinsey, but witnessing the rise of internet commerce in the United States, particularly the rapid growth of eBay's auction marketplace, she became convinced that "person-to-person auctions will inevitably become a massive market in Japan as well."
In March 1999, Ms. Namba, together with two McKinsey colleagues (Mr. Shogo Kawada and Mr. Masayuki Watanabe), established DeNA as a limited company with So-net as the largest shareholder, and converted it into a stock company in August of the same year. The name DNA embodied a declaration: "to rewrite society's genes through the internet." The company's flagship early service was the person-to-person auction site "Bidders," which mounted a head-on challenge against Yahoo! Auctions. The result, however, was a painful setback. The wall of network effects that Yahoo! Auctions had already built was formidable, and the company was hit by a fatal trouble in which its outsourced system development "had in fact built nothing." Although it had planned to turn a profit in its founding year, losses ultimately continued for four years.
DeNA was able to survive nonetheless because it succeeded in raising 1.3 billion yen in March 2000 and 910 million yen in 2001—exceptional amounts of funding for that era. Major Japanese VCs and operating companies such as Recruit, Itochu Corporation, and JAFCO invested in Ms. Namba's character and vision. In her book *Unconventional Management: Team DeNA's Challenge* (Nikkei Publishing, 2013), Ms. Namba looks back on this period, saying she "experienced the miracle of the company not going under every single month, while continuing to bow her head in order to pay her employees' salaries."
The breakthrough came with "Mobaoku," a mobile-phone auction service launched in March 2004. While she had let Yahoo! Auctions get ahead in the PC market, the then-emerging feature phone (Galapagos phone) mobile market had almost no competitors, and DeNA rapidly captured market share with a business model that was unconventional for the e-commerce industry at the time: a paid membership system at 315 yen per month. In Q3 of FY2005, mobile revenue surpassed the PC business, and the company's center of gravity shifted completely to the mobile domain. Following this, the social gaming platform "Mobage Town" (later Mobage), launched in 2006, grew explosively, and in the first half of the 2010s DeNA released a string of major hits such as "Kaito Royale" and "Rage of Bahamut," achieving a listing on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (at the time) and standing alongside GREE as one of the two giants of social gaming.
The Sudden 2011 Resignation—Her Husband's Battle with Illness and a "Changing of the Guard That Was No Heartwarming Tale"
On May 25, 2011, a shockwave ran through the industry. Just after the Golden Week holidays following the announcement of strong financial results, Ms. Nanba suddenly announced that she would step down as president to care for her husband, who was battling illness. Her successor was COO Isao Moriyasu (then 37, with a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Tokyo, who had joined DeNA as a systems engineer when it was founded in 1999 after working at Oracle Japan), while Ms. Nanba retired to the position of non-executive director. In fact, at the earnings announcement on April 28 of the same year, the IR materials had just explicitly stated that "the dual-engine system of Nanba and Moriyasu would continue," and no one—inside or outside the company—had anticipated such an early generational handover.
Ms. Nanba's husband was Katsunari Konya, with whom she had worked together at McKinsey. He suddenly fell ill after the holidays and was diagnosed with a serious condition requiring surgery and long-term recuperation. Without hesitation, Ms. Nanba set her work aside and chose the path of devoting herself to his care. In a June 2011 interview with the Nikkei, Ms. Nanba declared that she would "win an overwhelming victory over her husband's illness as well," and her stance of placing the battlefield of management on equal footing with the battlefield of family struck a deep chord with many. On the other hand, some industry papers at the time reported various speculations about her motives for stepping down, since the timing coincided with the period when the company was facing public criticism over issues such as the "compu-gacha" controversy and the baseball team acquisition. She has, however, repeatedly stated since then that "there is no reason other than caring for my husband."
After stepping down, Ms. Nanba became deeply involved in the management of the Yokohama DeNA BayStars while supporting her husband. In December 2011, DeNA acquired the shares of the former Yokohama BayStars from TBS Holdings for approximately 9.5 billion yen. Initially viewed as a burdensome team bleeding red ink, Yokohama was revitalized through thoroughly designed fan experiences and deep regional engagement. In January 2015, Ms. Nanba became the first female owner in the history of Japan's 12 professional baseball teams. Through a decade-long renovation of Yokohama Stadium, the "ballpark-ification" centered on Hamasta, strategies to attract female fans, and the introduction of a data-driven player evaluation system, the Yokohama DeNA BayStars achieved the "Miracle of Third Place" in the 2024 season, winning the Japan Series despite finishing third in the regular season. In sports business literature, the case is frequently cited both domestically and internationally as a management example known as the "BayStars Model."
The first female Vice Chair in Keidanren's history, and now a member of the government's Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy
In June 2021, Namba was appointed Vice Chair of Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation). It was a historic personnel decision—the first time a woman occupied the Vice Chair post, which had been held exclusively by men for 75 years since Keidanren's founding in 1946. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun ran a major story under the headline "Keidanren: A Long-Overdue First Step," portraying it as a symbolic event that punctured the closed structure of an all-male chairmen's council long dominated by heavy-industry corporations.
Namba's appointment as Vice Chair was positioned as the standard-bearer of the Keidanren reforms led by then-Chairman Masakazu Tokura (Sumitomo Chemical). As a representative of startups and emerging enterprises, Namba spearheaded policy proposals on themes such as digitalization, education, women's advancement, and the development of a startup ecosystem, and she also spoke actively at the "Council on New Form of Capitalism" and the "Education Future Creation Council" held under the Kishida administration. In particular, she has made major contributions to the realization of policies such as the Startup Agency concept, angel taxation reform, the rationalization of stock option taxation, and "The Startup," an overseas training support program for young entrepreneurs. Within Keidanren, comments such as "Vice Chair Namba's remarks are always built from the reality of the younger generation" and "She brings in logic that representatives of heavy-industry firms don't normally hear" have earned her recognition, and she functions as a driving force not only for women's advancement but also for intergenerational diversity.
Furthermore, in November 2025, Namba was appointed as a private-sector member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy of the Cabinet Office. This council is Japan's most important decision-making body on economic and fiscal management, composed of the Prime Minister, relevant cabinet ministers, the Governor of the Bank of Japan, and four private-sector members—experts from the business and academic communities. Namba is the first woman to occupy what may be called the "heaviest seats" in Japanese policymaking: Vice Chair of Keidanren and member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy. Combining the Harvard-style discussion culture she cultivated during her years in the United States with the never-say-die spirit of Niigata, Namba is said to energize council debates with a stance that does not hesitate to cut down bureaucratic boilerplate.
The "All-In on AI" Declaration and One Year of Progress—The "Dilemma" Born in the Shadow of Productivity Gains
The groundwork for Ms. Nanba's return as president was laid in April 2025, when she herself announced an "All-in on AI" declaration. Positioning generative AI—particularly general-purpose large language models such as Claude and Gemini, along with the arrival of the AI agent era championed by Anthropic—as "a paradigm shift on par with the dawn of the Internet," DeNA declared a company-wide transformation into an AI-native company. The strategy comprised three pillars: first, company-wide productivity enhancement; second, strengthening the competitiveness of existing businesses; and third, the creation and growth of new businesses.
In March 2026, one year after the declaration, Ms. Nanba candidly shared the progress at the company's own event, "DeNA × AI Day 2026 Proof." In some product development projects, cases emerged where AI agents replaced 95% of the work, and legal review operations became 90% more efficient. The company-wide rollout of Gemini Advanced and the full-scale introduction of AI agents such as Devin into development and testing processes also moved forward. In December 2025, DeNA publicly released "100 Selected AI Use Cases at DeNA," which systematized 100 internal AI use cases and covered everything from AI agent implementation methods and evaluation metrics to talent development and governance. As a treasure trove of practical know-how, it generated a strong response among AI leads at enterprises.
At the same time, however, Ms. Nanba confessed to a serious dilemma. "Efficiency has improved. But we found that, in proportion to how much easier their work became, employees were piling more work onto themselves"—the more diligent the employee, the more they devoted the surplus time created by AI to additional tasks within existing businesses, rather than to new ventures. The original vision of "shifting half of our 3,000 employees to new businesses and mass-producing unicorn companies in teams of ten" had stalled because of employees' own voluntary "diligence." Ms. Nanba stated, "We need to incorporate 'producing talent' into managers' personnel evaluation metrics and push forward with reassignments under what could even be called a more forceful style of leadership." Many news reports point out that this "need for forcefulness" remark became the fundamental motivation behind her subsequent return to the presidency.
As a concrete product symbolizing DeNA's AI strategy, there is "Leaders AI," which DeNA AI Link began offering jointly with THA on April 21, 2026. This is an enterprise service that turns the thinking, judgment criteria, and tacit knowledge of executives and leaders into AI agents, allowing anyone in the company to instantly resolve the "you have to ask that person or you won't know" problem. Following its initial deployment at Daiichi Sankyo Healthcare, several major corporations are advancing pilot deployments. The industry has taken notice of how it fuses the know-how from the "AI President" service for small and mid-sized businesses, which THA had been providing previously, with the DeNA Group's product operations capabilities. Furthermore, starting with new graduate hiring for fiscal 2027, DeNA established an "AI Generalist" track designed to cultivate talent that creates value with AI across job categories, transitioning to a two-track hiring model running in parallel with its existing "AI Specialist" track.
First Press Conference After Returning as President in 15 Years — Resolve as a "Perpetual Venture"
On May 12, 2026, in parallel with the online fiscal year ending March 2026 full-year earnings briefing held that afternoon, DeNA announced the return of Chairwoman Tomoko Namba to the position of Representative Director, President & CEO, and the appointment of current Representative Director, President & CEO Shingo Okamura as Representative Director, Chairman. The changes take effect following the 28th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders on June 27 of the same year. Namba's return to the presidency marks her first time in the role in 15 years, and it is extremely unusual among listed companies for a founder to return as president after a 15-year hiatus.
At the earnings briefing, Namba explained her reasons for returning as follows: "It's frustrating that the stock price has been flat. We decided to once again make DeNA properly recognized as a growth company." "DeNA is a perpetual venture. We will accomplish organizational reform within approximately three years." The keyword "perpetual venture" is a management philosophy Namba has repeatedly used over the years, and embodies the company's pride in not losing its DNA of taking on challenges even as it grows in scale. Namba further described the seismic shift in industrial structure brought about by AI as "a second founding on par with the dawn of the internet," and clearly articulated a policy of fully accelerating focused investment in the AI domain, organizational reform, M&A, and the creation of new businesses.
The earnings results announced alongside the press conference were difficult. The consolidated results for the fiscal year ending March 2026 landed in decreased revenue and decreased profit, with revenue of 147.7 billion yen (down 9.9% year-on-year), operating profit of 18.694 billion yen (down 35.5%), and net profit of 19.048 billion yen (down 21.3%). The causes were that *Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket* (*Pokepoke*) entered the anticipated reactive decline following its historic initial momentum right after its October 2024 launch, and the recording of a 9.6 billion yen goodwill impairment loss on medical subsidiary Allm. By segment, the Game Business saw operating profit decrease 23% to 29.6 billion yen, while the Live Streaming Business turned profitable at 3.9 billion yen (compared to a 210 million yen loss in the previous period) thanks to the success of strengthening Pococha's B2B offerings. After candidly explaining the background to the decreased revenue and profit, Namba stated, "We will draw the next growth curve through the continuous discovery of hit titles and the mass production of new AI-axis businesses. As the founder, I will take responsibility and see this through."
Shingo Okamura, for his part, has a distinctive career: after studying ancient Chinese history at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo, he joined the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (now the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) in 1995. After deeply engaging in information and communications policy at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, he joined DeNA in April 2016, served as Representative Director and President of Yokohama Stadium and as Representative Director and President of the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, and assumed the role of the company's President & CEO in April 2021. He is a hands-on executive who, during his more than five years in the role, achieved results such as the BayStars winning the Japan Series championship, Pococha turning profitable, and *Pokepoke* becoming a global mega-hit. With this personnel change, he will remain as Chairman with representative authority, and in an internal letter Okamura declared, "Together with Namba in a two-top structure, we will absolutely see the three-year plan through. These will be three years of revival and evolution for DeNA."
Editorial Tones Across Major Newspapers — "A Last-Ditch Return" and "A Break from the Market's Low Valuation"
Regarding Ms. Namba's return as president, Japan's major media outlets have offered largely favorable yet cautious assessments. The Nikkei reported the news with the breaking story "DeNA's Chairwoman Tomoko Namba Returns as President After 15 Years, Concurrently Serving as CEO to Transform the Business Model" (May 12), followed by an analytical piece, "Namba's Return as DeNA President: An All-In Bet on AI for a Second Founding—Diversification Outside Baseball Has Failed to Take Off" (May 13), which candidly pointed out the sluggish performance of diversification businesses outside the Yokohama DeNA BayStars and the reality that the stock price has remained stagnant below its 2011 peak. Building on this, the Nikkei positioned Namba's proclaimed "all-in on AI" strategy as the decisive factor for restarting the company's growth trajectory.
Jiji Press, in "DeNA's Chairwoman Namba Returns as President After 15 Years; Founder Herself Drives Reform" (May 12), focused on the linkage between the founder-led reform and Namba's position as a member of the government's Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy. ITmedia Business Online, under the title "DeNA's Chairwoman Namba Makes a Do-or-Die Return as President: Taking on 'All-In AI' Over Three Years and Breaking Away from 'The Market's Low Valuation,'" used the keyword "do-or-die" (haisui) to frame her return as the founder's way of taking responsibility for the triple burden of a depressed stock price, the rebound decline of Pokémon TCG Pocket, and the failure of diversification. Regional newspapers such as Niigata Nippo and Toou Nippo also gave warm coverage of Niigata-born Namba's return as president, treating her as a "star of the hometown." In particular, Niigata Nippo ran the headline "DeNA's Chairwoman Tomoko Namba (from Niigata City) Returns as President—Where the Founder's Gaze Is Set as She Leads Transformation…," reading the story as the life cycle of one female executive who soared from a Niigata prep school onto the world stage.
The opinion platform Agora published a commentary asking, "Will DeNA, Where Tomoko Namba Returns as President, Be Reborn?" While giving high marks to Namba's "broad-mindedness in giving young people opportunities and tolerating failure," the piece pointed out structural challenges such as "DeNA has not necessarily built a clear identity" and "smartphone games are inherently a trend-driven, hit-dependent business." Among overseas media, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Financial Times all covered the story with the tone of "Japanese internet pioneer Tomoko Namba returns as CEO to lead AI overhaul." Bloomberg in particular described her as "One of Japan's most prominent female business leaders returns to operational helm at age 64," positioning the move as a symbolic case of the presence of female executives in CEO appointments in Japan.
Decoding from a VC Perspective: What Must Be Accomplished in 3 Years
Interpreting Ms. Nanba's return from a VC (venture capital) perspective, this transcends the realm of mere personnel news and can be read as an experimental answer to the more universal question of how Japan's publicly listed tech companies should design their "management structure for the AI agent era." In the United States, figures like OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have repeatedly spoken about the possibility of "unicorns operated by just a handful of people," while in Europe, Mistral AI is achieving rapid growth with a small elite team. The same wave is sweeping across Japan, but there is no precedent for a publicly listed company of 3,000 employees attempting to split and reconfigure itself organization-wide into small units, cultivating multiple unicorn candidates in parallel.
The first point of discussion is organizational design. Now that real cases are emerging in which AI boosts individual productivity by a factor of 20, organizations need to be restructured from pyramids into networked "amoeba + AI" forms. The "mass-producing unicorns in teams of 10" model that Ms. Nanba advocates can be positioned as an attempt to fuse Silicon Valley-style studio startups (Atomic, Pioneer Square Labs, the in-house studio at Founders Fund, etc.) with Japanese corporate organizational culture. From a VC standpoint, if this begins to work well, DeNA could become "the publicly listed company that mass-produces the most unicorn candidates," while if it stagnates, it also harbors the risk of organizational fragmentation that drags down existing businesses.
The second point of discussion is the reallocation of cash flow. DeNA has an extremely healthy financial structure, with a market capitalization of 312.6 billion yen and an equity ratio of approximately 70%. Where to allocate the abundant cash generated by Pokémon TCG Pocket—defending existing businesses, investing in a group of new AI startups, or buying time through M&A—this choice will significantly influence its performance over the next three years. DeNA is already advancing entrepreneur support through Delight Ventures and providing AI for businesses through DeNA AI Link, and has a track record of nurturing and spinning off ventures such as the taxi-dispatch service "GO" and the AI startup "ALGO ARTIS." How the company assembles its lineup through acquisitions, investments, and spinouts over the next three years could also influence the liquidity of Japan's AI VC market as a whole.
The third point of discussion is the redesign of dialogue with the capital markets. The true intent behind Ms. Nanba's statement at the press conference—"Let's once again become DeNA, properly seen as a growth company"—is an expression of management's will to transform the current situation, in which the stock price remains at a PBR of 1.18x, into a valuation that incorporates a growth premium as an AI company. To achieve this, it will be necessary to continuously disclose concrete AI business KPIs each quarter (the number of companies adopting Leaders AI, the ARR of new businesses, the quantification of productivity gains from AI, etc.) and to rebuild dialogue with the market. Just as U.S. tech companies have grown their market capitalizations several-fold through the "AI × platform" narrative, the VC community is saying that DeNA, too, must rewrite its own story from "games + diversification" into that of an "AI-native company."
Future Developments — Key Points to Watch from H2 2026 through 2029
The first major milestone is the 28th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders on June 27, 2026. Here, Ms. Nanba's return as President and Mr. Okamura's appointment as Representative Director and Chairman will be formally approved, and the new structure will launch. In the post-meeting executive appointments, a newly created officer position for AI, generational renewal of the officer in charge of new businesses, and an increase in the number of outside directors are anticipated. According to the announcement, the board will be restructured to a scale of 28 directors in total, and the appointments are drawing attention as symbolic of the shift to an AI-native organization.
In the second half of 2026, the announcement of a new medium-term management policy is expected. Until now, DeNA has set an ROE target of 8%, but with the full-scale launch of its AI strategy as a catalyst, it is highly likely that a multifaceted KPI design incorporating new "AI-driven labor productivity metrics (operating profit per employee, number of AI agents in operation, growth rate of new business ARR, etc.)" will be presented. In parallel, marketing activities directly tied to expanding sales of enterprise AI services—such as a sequel to AI Day 2026 and announcements of major Leaders AI deployment case studies—are expected to accelerate. The fusion of entertainment × AI × physical space, demonstrated through the formal opening of Wonderia Yokohama, will also be a topic from the second half of 2026 through the first half of 2027.
The earnings for the fiscal year ending March 2027 will be a turning point at which the results of the first year under the Nanba structure will be tested. Market consensus currently anticipates operating profit in the range of 20 to 25 billion yen, but it is pointed out that depending on AI-driven productivity gains, the expansion of Leaders AI revenue, and the scaling of new businesses, this range could be significantly exceeded. At the same time, multiple levers will be pulled simultaneously, including structural reform of the healthcare business, full-scale monetization of Pococha's enterprise business, maximization of gate revenue for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, and strengthening of the arena business for the Kawasaki Brave Thunders.
From 2028 to 2029, the deadline of Ms. Nanba's declaration to "accomplish organizational reform in three years" will arrive. Three points warrant attention during this period. First, of the new businesses launched by teams of ten people using AI, how many will become independent unicorn candidates. Second, whether the stock price and PBR will have regained their growth premium as an AI company. Third, how Ms. Nanba herself will proceed with preparations to pass the baton to the next generation of management. This return is a clearly defined three-year plan, and multiple insiders point out that beyond it lies a blueprint for cultivating a new-generation CEO and, likely, for Ms. Nanba herself to shift more toward policy and business-community activities. How Ms. Nanba—who also bears the heavy responsibility of serving as a private-sector member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy—will engage with Japan's AI industrial policy while running both corporate management and policy formation in tandem will be an important point of observation for the entire industry.
The decision by DeNA—a "perpetual venture"—to once again take risks under the direction of its founder: these three years will be a period that the VC community, business academics, and policy authorities will all watch closely as a large-scale experiment in how Japan's listed tech companies will survive the era of AI agents. The company, which began in 1999 as a small auction site called Bidders, stands a quarter of a century later once again at the entrance of a challenge—under the hand of its founder—to "rewrite the genes of the world's society."