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Anime Makes Up 50%+ of BD Sales in Japan in 2009's 1st Half

GfK Marketing Services Japan issued a report on Monday that stated that Japanese animation continues to account for over 50% of the yen spent on Blu-ray Discs (BD) in Japan during the first half of 2009. Anime has been outselling other categories in the Japanese BD market since last year. According to the survey firm, the country's Blu-ray Disc market has maintained stable growth as sales reached 8.4 billion yen (about US$89 million) on 1.47 million BDs during this six-month period. E-commerce sites accounted for 47% of the yen spent on BDs, followed by electronics volume retail stores at 27% and media stores at 23%.

At the same time though, BD sales did not make up for the shortfall in DVD sales, which dropped 15% by volume and 20% by yen amount year-to-year. 28.52 million DVDs were sold for 116 billion yen (US$1.23 billion) during the first half of 2009. Media stores accounted for 40% of the yen spent on DVDs, followed by e-commerce sites at 34%, electronics volume retail stores at 13%, and general volume retail stores at 1%. Media stores continues to show a decline in DVD sales. While some of that loss is attributable to the continuing increase in sales volume at e-commerce sites, the same e-commerce sites had less sales in actual yen spent.

According to Fuji Sankei's Business i website and an August survey report by Humanmedia, the overall Japanese content marketplace of games, music, manga, films, and other media releases fell for a second year in a row in 2008. The market fell 2% to 12.8627 trillion yen (US$136.357 billion). While Internet and mobile phone media sales increased, traditional music CDs, movie DVDs, books, and other forms of packaged releases dropped in sales. Packaged media releases fell 3.9% to 6.0803 trillion in 2008, after having already dropped 3.6% in 2007. On the other hand, game sales increased 8.1%, television and broadcast revenues increased 2.9% to 3.7914 trillion yen (US$40.193 billion), Internet media sales increased 12.5% to 859.9 billion yen (US$9.12 billion), and mobile phone media sales increased the most at 14.6% to 568.3 billion yen (US$6.025 billion).

Source: AV Watch