Takami Ohbari talks NJPW's business during pandemic, doesn't think they would've lasted if they continued with business portfolio
postwrestling.com/2023/05/25/takami-ohbari-ta...
postwrestling.comPosted May 26, 2023, 11:52 PM UTC
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postwrestling.comNjpw doesn't have the television contract money that bigger companies have, it's not a surprise that a company that relies on live ticket gates to stay afloat could have fizzled out in 2020.
Good to hear that they're doing well again, I remember there was an article that said they made somewhere around $50k in one fiscal year, and that was the same year where shows were getting cancelled, Naito got injured early into the G1, etc. In retrospect, it's a wonder they stayed alive.
This is also probably why a lot of foreign talent weren't locked into big contracts and chose to sign elsewhere, or were still working on per-appearance deals. The company doesn't have the money to offer it.
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yet some fans want to bitch at them for not "locking down" Aussie Open. If they had the money, I'm sure they would have tried! But they don't have the funds to beat what a literal multi billionaire could offer lol.
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Its not about Tony's money, its entirely that American tv money is just ludicrous at this point. Unless you have access to it, you just can't hope to compete with it.
By all accounts I've seen, the current Dynamite tv deal is worth around $40-45 million annually, which is on par with the numbers I've seen for the total annual revenue of New Japan and Stardom combined last year. So without Rampage, or Collision, or a single ticket sale, or a single merch sale, or a single sponsorship, or anything else, AEW can match the entire sum total of everything NJPW and Stardom do financially. And that number is only going to increase in the future (see: WWE's absolutely monstrous tv deals).
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This is probably why NJPW took the AXS TV deal.
It may have a laughably small TV audience, but the actual payout in dollar terms may actually give TV Asahi a run for its money.
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Money >>>> no money.
Getting paid to be on a tiny channel >>>> not getting paid and not being on any channel
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His father is far richer than Vince. Even without the TV deal with TNT, Tony could afford to sign anyone he wants for any price. He started the company with the expectation it wouldn't be profitable in the first few years, but that doesn't matter when daddy is a multi-billionaire.
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Yes, Shad Khan's net worth is really high. That doesn't mean Tony has access to the sum total of that in liquid cash/assets. A substantial portion of his net worth is the Jaguars/Fulham ownerships, which aren't at all liquid.
As for the rest, that's just how most businesses are founded/run nowadays. Its not that AEW doesn't have to make a profit because "daddy is a multi-billionaire," its that AEW doesn't have to make a profit because the people putting up the money have good reason to believe increasing tv rights fees are in their future. Basically, they can run the company break-even or at a slight loss when rights fees are $20-40 million because they expect to get them to $100 in the near future, which given everything we know about the tv industry, seems like a perfectly reasonable assumption at this point. "You have to spend money to make money" is a common saying for a reason and it applies here, you have to take a risk to make a big profit, and this has all been a very carefully calculated risk, one that seems poised to pay off huge for Tony Khan.
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Aussie Open don't have a history of following the money. There are other ways to get people to want to stick around than throwing money at them. Maybe TK made an offer they can't refuse, but I can't help but think NJPW not seeming to appreciate they had one of the top ~3 best teams in the business working for them is a factor.
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They are just barely turning a profit again and people want them to give out big contracts to foreigners lol. They have to fix their house first and that starts with their own guys. Those are the people that will sell tickets domestically.
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Absolutely. Look, I love Aussie Open, I love NJPW, and I love Aussie Open in NJPW. But if they can't afford to pay them, and if there's a working relationship between AEW and NJPW, then let the Aussies go to AEW, and work a few NJPW tours out of the year. It's cool. I'm totally ok with NJPW rebuilding its financials so that talent can be paid period. We don't need to worry about big contracts right now.
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There’s this perception that native wrestlers “sell tickets domestically” for New Japan, though that undersells how important gaijin wrestlers are for Japanese companies and their perception.
Looking online, one of the biggest complaints Japanese fans have of All Japan right now is the lack of gaijins, and it’s why NOAH made such a push of importing gaijins like Elgin from the middle of last year. It all comes back to the heyday of Japanese wrestling when New Japan and All Japan would stack almost half their lineups with huge gaijins. Spending big on bringing over big-name gaijins isn’t what New Japan needs right now, but it’s not ideal when they’re selling themselves to the Japanese audience as a global company.
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Why can't the Aussies be "their own guys"?
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Because they aren't homegrown. They did not train in the dojo.
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Neither is Zach but he sure feels like a New Japan guy.
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ZSJ has put in the time. He's been working in NJPW full time since 2017 and worked for NOAH prior to that. He even moved to Japan and lived there full-time during the pandemic.
Conversely, Aussie Open hasn't even spent a full year in Japan yet.
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Let us be thankful that they're still around
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Agreed.
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And NJPW fans complain about not locking foreign talent to contracts and act like NJPW is a run by a multi-billionaire or a multi-billionaire son, like WWE and AEW. When in reality just like many other Japanese promotions, they were struggling turn a profit due to forcing to do limited attendance and as well decrease of fan interest during the pandemic. Let's not forget NJPW executives took a voluntary pay cut, just so the company can pay NJPW's wrestlers and staff during the first year of the pandemic.
And before anyone say, "But NJPW signed Mercedes Mone to a multimillion contact, why they can't do the same to other foreign talent". I like to point out that Mone is signed to a contract with Bushiroad, not NJPW which allows her work in both NJPW and Stardom. Bushiroad and NJPW doesn't share the same budget.
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Mone was also a calculated risk. They were banking on her being a draw - no pun intended - and it worked. I'm sure they'd like to have all their pushed foreign talent under written deals. But it's not feasible, and it's risky. If someone was available who Bushiroad had reason to think could boost live gates and PPV sales/subscriptions for New Japan or Stardom then I'm sure they'd consider signing them to a deal like Mone, but talent that can do that don't become available often.
They also did right by their foreign regulars during the pandemic. Tanga Loa, for example, was always only on a verbal agreement with New Japan, and still got paid throughout the pandemic. It'd have been a straightforward cost cutting measure not to pay anyone not under a written deal at that point, but they didn't.
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They also were smart with only signing Mercedes to a short-term agreement at first, so if for some reason she’d turned out not to be enough of a draw to justify her cost it wouldn’t have been too much of a loss.
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It's like when Spike was paying TNA talent, or Turner paying WCW talent.
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Except weve seen on a few occasions in the last couple of years how not locking down foreign talent has screwed them. I understand the fact that they couldnt afford to lock these talents down but until you can, dont put titles on these unsigned talent
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President Ohbari did an interview with Proresu-TODAY which hasn't really been discussed here.
Part 1 which is about business during COVID:
https://proresu-today.com/archives/218499/
Part 2 about Women's wrestling and Muto retirement:
https://proresu-today.com/archives/219099/
Part 3 future:
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From the Post translations
If we had continued with our existing business portfolio, I think the company would have ceased to exist within a few months, let alone take a major hit. The majority of our business was dependent on revenues from the venue. One day, Tanahashi asked me, ‘Boss, if this situation continues, how many more months will this company last?’ I could count on one hand. At the time, I could count on one hand. With a smile on my face, I replied, ‘Don’t worry.’
The gist of the first interview is that they were in much more trouble during COVID then anyone here figured.
Even now they are barely going to turn a profit.
They have lost a bunch of employees which have not been replaced.
Downsized a lot of the business to save money.
Wants to make the Super Juniors as big as the G-1.
Need to get fans back in the building since that is where their profit is.
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Part of the reason Japanese-language things don’t get posted here is because they can easily be mistranslated. That Post article was translated using AI (specifically DeepL), and so cannot be trusted as being 100% correct.
In this particular article, while I do believe the AI got the general idea of what Ohbari said correct, the paragraph about ticket revenue sounds to me like it may have some mistranslation issues.
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I asked a Japanese speaker if the Post article was correct and they said it was.
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Yes, and I said that this particular article seems to have come out of the translation AI correctly. (I’m not at all fluent enough in Japanese to say for certain, but I know what to look for in machine translation that can indicate something’s been mistranslated.)
But it still doesn’t change that translation AI is not always correct and thus it should always be specified when it’s been used. Ideally it shouldn’t be used at all for actually reporting things, but that’s a tougher battle to fight.
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Im now even more grateful that they still exist
I don’t know what my fandom for pro wrestling would be without them
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I'd be following AEW but I'm not nearly as invested as I am in NJPW, so I'd probably be less of a wrestling fan. I'm so happy NJPW are still around and continue to fire on all cylinders, it's everything I want pro wrestling to be and more.
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I wonder how many unpopular decisions NJPW made during the pandemic were due to money, like belts constantly getting stranded in the US, or Okada/Hiromu winning tournaments because it sounds like even travel expenses for foreigners or the smallest amount of ticket sales really mattered to them. Also very curious about how they actually feel about AEW partnership. Probably It made financial sense to make money with them in exchange for their own talents losing on Dynamite, which can be the same for NOAH/NJPW partnership, but if they are able to recover to the pre-pandemic level will they continue this?
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Noah wanted okada to pop the gate. The cost was that he won. I doubt you will see njpw using aew talent to pop gates within Japan like that because well njpw have the best drawing wrestlers in Japan anyway
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Tbh I don't really even care that njpw wrestlers lose on dynamite. Most of the time it makes sense within aew booking. There are more annoying things in the partnership but that's a discussion for a different day
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An interesting point is how badly profitability has been hit. So even despite them heading towards a very successful year from just a revenue perspective profit has been poor. It's why bushiroad has encouraged a bit of belt tightening
I think fundamentally they see the light at the end of the tunnel but it's been a bad slog for 3 years. I just wish fans of both njpw and stardom would be a bit realistic about the state of things. Bushiroad increased advertising last quarter as per their financial report so that's an expected loss that they will hope translates to profits. The yen is very weak so that's an external factor they can't control
But until the business is overall profitable I'd not expect bushiroad to dump a ton of money into wrestling operations.
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Interviews like these make you wonder about the thousands of other businesses in Japan that weren't so lucky. The Japanese government did incalculable damage to its economy and populace with the length and severity of the Covid mandates, especially continuing them long after the rest of the world had moved on.
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New Japan 🗾 Pro Wrestling has incredible talent and venue production quality, and the audience are dedicated to the entertainment style. I truly hope they negotiate a better network deal in North America.
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This information makes me appreciate Naito more for voluntarily taking a 24% pay cut to help the company. Ungovernable but charitable.
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Why, in 2023, they still rely solely on live gate/merchandising? what's the point of being owned by a TV company and Bushiroad then?
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Because that's how most wrestling promotions outside of America operate. TV rights aren't worth nearly as much in Japan as in America because TV viewing habits are radically different. In Mexico, CMLL has always had TV deals, but they make their money through live gates. The Lutteroth family built a bunch of arenas to host their events, so they get all the profit from their shows without having to pay to rent arenas.
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One of the biggest mistakes this sub makes is assuming media consumption habits are exactly the same in Japan as the west.
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They need to revamp NJPW World. It’s a 2005 level website.
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Did you miss the article that said they've spent 3 years barely making any money mate. I understand it's hard to see why it's only the fucking thread you are currently writing drivel in
What fucking money should they use ? Stardom world is much more important to fix for bushiroad anyway when wrestling starts making money
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Moneys
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You are a 40 year old man bruv. Act like it
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They've had more than enough time to update their archaic website. And they aren't going to make more money with such an archaic streaming service.
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They're bleeding talent
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For a promotion that's been scratching to make a profit they've essentially lost no big name domestic talent.
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Good thing Ohbari runs NJPW and not redditors who'd gift every foreigner a huge contract.
Fuck you I wouldn’t pay that rat bastard Finley a dime!
You wouldn’t pay big money to “Wish.com Jay White”?
Instead, those huge contracts should be going to El Lindaman, Mao, and Higuchi.
Oh God, Higuchi in New Japan. Don't give me hope.