■Future outlook

2. growth strategy

As a medium-term target, Hatena ＜3930＞ is aiming for sales of 4.5 billion yen for the fiscal year ending 2026/7. The plan is to position the 2024/7 fiscal year as an advance investment period, and the idea is to achieve sales growth of around 15% per annum using technology solution services centered on “GigaViewer” and “next-generation Mackerel” as growth engines from the 2025/7 fiscal year onwards. Also, from the 2025/7 fiscal year onwards, the pace of employee growth will slow down, and the ratio of labor costs and DC usage fees to sales is also expected to decline due to the effect of increasing sales, and it is expected that it will shift to a profit increase line even on a profit basis. If “GigaViewer for Apps” and “Next Generation Mackerel” grow steadily, we expect that a record high update will enter the firing range on a profit basis after 3 years.

(1) Technology Solution Services

The sales target for the 2026/7 fiscal year is aimed at over 3 billion yen, an increase of 1.5 times compared to the 2023/7 fiscal year. Using “GigaViewer,” which is a DX support service for publishers, as a growth engine, it is expected to grow at an annual rate of 15% or more. “GigaViewer” is a strategy to replace the application version or promote the introduction of a new application for customers who have introduced the web version. What was done with SHUEISHA's “Shonen Jump +” project is exactly in line with this strategy, and the company anticipates that this can also be applied to other customers who have introduced the web version. Since the application version has a higher billing rate compared to the web version, there is a possibility that sales from revenue-sharing services will increase significantly. Stable operation results etc. with the web version have been evaluated, and there have been many inquiries about the application version from the past, but since resources have been invested in the large-scale development project “Shonen Jump +,” they were unmanageable. Since delivery of the same project has been completed this time, we will sequentially accept orders for these promising projects in the future. Currently, the app version has been introduced to only 2 services, and there is plenty of room for market share expansion.

Also, since there was an issue where the development period for replacement projects was longer compared to new projects, the development infrastructure was reviewed so that development can proceed smoothly even in replacement projects, and monetization support such as advertisement operation and point sales is also being strengthened by expanding the functions of the application version, and expansion of revenue-sharing type services is also expected. According to the announcement of the (public) National Publishing Association and Institute of Publishing Science, the e-comic market size in 2023 will increase 7.8% from the previous year to 483 billion yen, and steady growth continues as the paper media market continues to shrink. Sales related to “GigaViewer” are expected to continue to grow at a high rate even after the 2025/7 fiscal year due to an increase in market share in the application version and an increase in revenue-sharing services.

Meanwhile, it was announced that “Mackerel” obtained AWS partner certification* and ISMS certification in 2024/2, and sales will be strengthened by targeting medium-sized enterprise partner companies. As the cloud shift of corporate information systems and the strengthening of information security management systems progress, it is expected that obtaining such certification will have a positive effect on order acceptance activities in the future. In particular, companies of a certain size or larger often use ISMS certification as an employment standard, which is a hindrance to order acceptance activities. Since the average period of business negotiations with such companies takes about 1 year, it is expected that the effects in terms of sales will come out after the second half of the 2025/7 fiscal year.

*Acquired partner certification for the “AWS ISV Workload and Beyond Program”. It certifies services determined by AWS to contribute to strategies and execution to accelerate the transition of customer workloads to AWS, and it was the first Japanese company to acquire it.

Also, the official version of the “Next Generation Mackerel Architecture” is scheduled to be released in the latter half of 2024, and it is expected that the customer base will expand significantly from the present. This is because it makes it easier for companies to introduce it by complying with the standards defined by the open source “OpenTelemetry” from conventional proprietary standards. Also, in addition to starting an official version compatible with SAML* authentication around the same time, the billing system is not only a billing system linked to the number of conventional hosts (servers), but it is a strategy to advance customer acquisition by looking at user convenience, such as introducing a billing system linked to the number of metrics (number of monitored items) to be monitored, and considering price revisions. Furthermore, in the past, the function of “Mackerel” emphasized ease of use and provided only monitoring services such as server error occurrence, etc., but in order to respond to diverse needs, it is planned to gradually expand the function so that the cause of error occurrence can be performed by expanding the scope of monitoring to the application layer and collecting various data. As a result of these efforts, sales of “Mackerel” are also expected to return to a high growth line again after the latter half of the 2025/7 fiscal year.

*SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is an XML-based standard for authenticating users between different internet domains. One of the means to achieve single sign-on.

(2) Content marketing services

In content marketing services, we are strengthening efforts in human resource recruitment-related markets where demand is strong, and in addition to expanding the number of cases of managed media for recruitment purposes, we aim to increase sales per number of media cases by strengthening recruitment consulting and proposals for optional services (SNS advertisement operation, video content production support, etc.), and aim for a scale of 1,000 million yen in sales for the 2026/7 fiscal year (697 million yen for the 2026/7 fiscal year).

(3) Content platform services

In content platform services, as the downward trend in ad network advertisement unit prices continues, we will work to recover sales by enhancing paid sales services for article content and support services for writers. The sales target for the 2026/7 fiscal year is aimed at the same level (421 million yen) as the 2023/7 fiscal year.

(Author: FISCO Visiting Analyst Joe Sato)