Namco

Neither ‘Dragon Ball’ nor ‘One Piece’. The anime that has given the most money to Bandai Namco in its last fiscal year will be a whopping 47 years old in 2026, and it is not associated with fantastic adventures for all audiences, but with plastic models that have little to do with pirate ships and the nonsense of the Monkey King. In fact, for a time it was considered a mere niche for collectors. The annual results that the company made public on May 13 reveal a figure that rearranges the ranking in a surprising way. The top. ‘dragon ball‘ and ‘One Piece‘are the most commercial franchises in Japanese entertainment; an idea that seems to have settled in the heads of fans with implacable firmness. However, the Bandai Namco’s latest financial results They deny it: ‘Mobile Suit Gundam‘ is the company’s most profitable intellectual property, with 254.3 billion yen in total group sales. ‘One Piece’ registered 139.3 billion and ‘Dragon Ball’, 138.0 billion. That is, there is a distance of 115 billion yen between Gundam and its most direct competitor in Bandai Namco, a figure that is approximately equivalent to 730 million euros. The nuance. Important and significant: Bandai owns ‘Gundam’ directly. ‘Dragon Ball’, ‘One Piece’ or ‘Naruto’, on the other hand, are intellectual properties that the company exploits under license: the complete rights belong to their authors, publishers and studios. Therefore, although the benefits for Bandai Namco from the licenses are astronomical, they do not fall one hundred percent on the company, as is the case to a greater extent with ‘Gundam’. That is, we do not have to read this Bandai ranking as an absolute list of global popularity. What is this due to? surprise? In 2022 Bandai Namco released ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury’ (you can watch it on Crunchyroll), first ‘Gundam’ with a female protagonist. As confirmed then by the president of Bandai, Masaru Kawaguchi, the gunpla (name given to the models of the series) of the Gundam Aerial broke the initial sales record in the history of the franchise. Fiscal year 2023 ended that year with 131.3 billion yen for ‘Gundam’, the highest historical figure up to that time. SEED arrives. The next step was ‘Gundam SEED Freedom’ in 2024: film-sequel to a cult 2002 series of the franchise. You can see it on Netflix (and the series on Crunchyroll), and grossed 5.38 billion yen at the Japanese box office, becoming the franchise’s most popular film in its more than four-decade history. The 2025 financial year closed with ‘Gundam’ earning 153.5 billion yen, still below ‘Dragon Ball’ that year but already establishing the trend. The trigger: ‘GQuuuuuuX’. The final leap came with ‘Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX’. The bizarrely named series was co-produced by Sunrise (the historical studio of ‘Gundam’) and Khara, the studio of Hideaki Anno who made ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’, and which made a previous film version on January 17, 2025. Result:more than 3 billion yen at the box office and 1.8 million viewersthe second highest-grossing film in the history of the franchise, only surpassed by the aforementioned ‘SEED Freedom’. The world premiere of the series on Prime Video definitely impacted the numbers: only in the first quarter of fiscal year 2o25 ‘Gundam’ creceived 81.2% compared to the same period of the previous year. The power of synergy. Unlike other companies like Disney, which usually focus on a main launch (series, movie) around which secondary businesses sprout (merchandisingvideo games), Bandai Namco has been applying for years what they themselves call “IP synergy”: a model that coordinates releases of anime, video games, merchandisingphysical events, collectible cards, all supported with the same strength. ‘Gundam’ is the latest and most perfect example of that strategy. In this way, for example, in fiscal year 2026 the ‘GQuuuuuuX’ series, the expansion of the model lines, Premium Bandai launches and the Gundam Next Future Pavilion at the 2025 Osaka World Expo, an event for which Bandai is responsible for much of the growth. Bandai Namco believes that its toy and model arm, which has grown 12.9%, is the leader of all the company’s business segments. Another primary difference with the company’s North American and European counterparts. In Xataka | The 26 best anime of all time and where to watch them