New Report from JETRO on the Manga Market in Germany

JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization) is currently conducting an ongoing series of investigations on manga markets in different parts of the world, including Japan, U.S., Europe, and more. Japanese news site AnimeAnime takes a look at JETRO's report on the German manga market, below is a translation of the report.

JETRO has published reports on the Manga and Anime markets in various countries. The latest report is "The Condition of the Manga Market in Germany". This small report only has about 20 pages, but it contains some very useful contents, such as the scale of the market in Germany, information on the major publishers and popular titles, a list of published manga titles, etc.

The European Manga market proves to be particularly hard to analyze, since it's divided into many parts due to the number of different languages and countries. The scale of each country's market and the scale of each publisher and their activities were almost unknown to the analysts. Such vagueness can be seen in the report. JETRO commented that it was hard to find the base data of earlier reports on the Germany manga market, but the data that was obtained during this investigation proved to be more useful.

JETRO estimates the scale of the German manga market to be from 50 million Euros (7.5 billion yen) to 70 million Euros (10.5 billion yen). JETRO also estimates the French manga market to be at 87.5 million Euros (13.1 billion yen).

This data shows that the scale of the German market plus the French market ranges from 20.6 billion yen to 23.6 billion yen, which is equal to or bigger than the U.S.’s 20 billion yen manga market in 2005. The largest oversea manga market is not America, but Europe, which includes Italy, Spain, and many other countries.

Another interesting data found in this report is the shares of the publishers, where Egmont Verlag Gmbh (38%) and Carlsen (41%) are the two “giants”. The popular titles list is useful too: 1st) Detective Conan, 2nd) Full Moon no Sagashite, 3rd) One Piece.

This information may be common sense for the international department of Japanese publishers and people in the manga industry; however, it has not been made public except on very few web sites and technical journals. This is most likely the first systematical investigation of such information, which offers useful information to businesses and people researching the overseas manga market.

This report from JETRO is part of an ongoing series of investigations of the manga markets in the United States, China, and France. These reports show the status of the three large markets in the world for Japanese entertainment contents, as well as making it possible for people from Japan to understand more about the overseas manga markets from various angles.

Translated by T. Ohara