Sony Increased Its Kadokawa Stock Acquisition to 10%

Sony Group announced that it has signed a strategic capital and business alliance agreement with Kadokawa. The agreement includes an upcoming plan for Sony to become the largest shareholder of Kadokawa by increasing its stock acquisition on January 7, 2025. As a reminder, the company owns the developers Spike Chunsoft, Acquire, and FromSoftware, all of which are known to make games for Sony PlayStation consoles.

This announcement has thus confirmed a Reuters report published a month prior in November 2024. Sony had first acquired several of Kadokawa stocks in February 2021. As of December 2024, the company held around 2% of the Japanese pop-culture media conglomerate.

The former will spend about 50 billion yen (~$318.87 million) to acquire an additional 12,054,100 stocks in January 2025. That will turn Sony into Kadokawa’s largest shareholder with around 10% of its stocks. However, Sony noted in a Japanese press release that it has no immediate plans to further increase its stock acquisition on Kadokawa.

By signing this alliance agreement, Sony also pledged to help Kadokawa with wider publications of the latter’s anime and video games, the latter of which included titles from Spike Chunsoft, Acquire, and FromSoftware. The group also plans to produce live-action films and dramas based on Kadokawa-owned IP franchises. Some of the examples include titles that originated from light novels published by the company group, such as Re:Zero and Sword Art Online.