“Gundam” has almost doubled its sales in the last decade

Considering most people outside of Japan didn’t know about it Gundam Until recently, it’s amazing to see the franchise double its global sales over the past decade.

According to Bandai Namco’s latest financial report, the Gundam franchise managed to collect Sales of 145.7 billion yen last year. That’s not only up from 131.3 billion yen last year, but nearly double the sales from 2014, which was 80.2 billion yen.

Even with the yen exchange rate all over the place right now, sales are close to $1 billion, successfully Witch from Mercury and Gundam SEED Freedom driving much of this growth.

Plus the merchandising aspect of it Gundam the franchise, i.e. that of model kits and toys, accounts for a large proportion of these global sales.

All of these are amazing and exciting to see. Not least because a lot of what drives success Gundam and other mechanism intellectual properties are their multimedia combination framework. In this case, these are mostly model kits and toys, most of which were closed in Japan until recently.

The last few years of COVID and subsequent lockdowns have meant that hobbies such as model kit building have seen a large increase internationally. What is interesting is that after the lockdown ended, sales of items such as model kits continued to increase globally.

This is likely due to the fact that building engineering model kits is not only fun but also surprisingly affordable, relative to video game and higher end gaming purchases.

Plus, much of the anime that forms its backbone Gundam The franchise is now widely available worldwide. Not only in terms of extensive and excellent Blu-ray releases, but also streaming options on various platforms.

The takeaway from all of this is that other mecha properties are seeing an uptick in visibility and sales, with the recent news of Long saga distributed by Disney+ is a notable example.

In each case, Gundam it is no longer an Asian cultural phenomenon, but clearly has genuine global potential.

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