Sanrio Turns into 4th Excellent Shareholder of Production I.G, Wit Studio’s Guardian

IG Port — the mum or dad company of animation studios Production I.G and Wit Studio, and publisher Magazine Backyard — announced on Tuesday that it has entered precise into a capital and industry alliance with character and merchandise company Sanrio. IG Port issued 929,100 shares valued at 1,750 yen (about US$12) per allotment by map of third-celebration allotment, and raised a full of 1,625,925,000 yen (about US$11.19 million) from gross sales of those shares to Sanrio. The transaction will race into stop on July 3.

IG Port will employ 1 billion yen from the transaction as working capital earmarked for collaborative tasks with Sanrio, besides practising original creators and funding their works. The last 600 million yen will be allocated for updating manufacturing programs and declaring infrastructure, equivalent to work PCs for animation, servers, and data centers.

With the inventory acquisition, Sanrio is now the fourth biggest shareholder of IG Port alongside NTT Docomo. IG Port founder, CEO, and president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa owns 18.9% of the corporate, adopted by Dentsu Neighborhood and NTV, who every own 9.85% of the corporate.

IG Port’s Wit Studio is animating the My Melody & Kuromi reside-motion animation sequence, in step with the titular Sanrio characters. The sequence will debut on Netflix on July 24.

IG Port used to be also the mum or dad company of the anime studio Signal.MD, however it no doubt merged Signal.MD into Production I.G on June 1.

Sources: IG Port, Animation Commerce Journal (Tadashi Sudo)