Kadokawa Acquires Media Factory1

The whole light novel and related industries are talking about it this morning. The web is overloaded with news, information and speculations. To make life easier, I will just go through the truth part. According to Nikkei, Kadokawa Group Holdings (Kadokawa GHD, 株式会社角川グループホールディングス), the Japanese holding company of the Kadokawa Group under Kadokawa Shoten (株式会社角川書店), agreed on Wednesday to acquire Media Factory (メディアファクトリー) from Recruit (リクルート) for 8 billion JPY (about 100 million USD). Media Factory is a subsidiary of parent company Recruit that publishes manga, magazines and  Anime related goods. For more magazines that published by Media Factory, check out ANN for a complete list.

Nothing seems to change after the acquisition. The company structure, employees and the president of Media Factory will remain their positions. However, as a result of this purchase, Kadokawa is now controlling the biggest pie of the light novel industry, probably causing a lot more attentions from the ant-monopoly government agency from now on. MAL has a long list of light novel publishers under Kadokawa Group. Also Noboru Yamaguchi (ヤマグチノボル), the author of Zero no Tsukaima also talks about the news on his Twitter. To learn more about this news, you can check out the official announcement of Kadokawa GHD (PDF).

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It'll be interesting to see what comes of this new change. Although a great economic move on Kadokawa's part, it's obviously going to cause some friction with anti-monopoly agencies as this is a perfect example of a horizontal merge~