Musings on Kodansha’s International Business

As we heard across the interwebs at the tail end of last week, Kodansha has pulled all of TokyoPop’s liscences in Germany. Kodansha, did not, however, pull any of the liscences for any other company publishing in Germany, or in any other region, as far as we know. This has some obvious implications, some of which, I want to talk about.

We were promised a new publisher in the US around July of 2008; Kodansha was setting up shop here in the States, bringing along its manga properties and doing who knows what to Del Rey in the process. This new imprint never materialized, however, and many of us have been questioning whether Kodansha’s move into foreign waters was a flop,  or if they held off because of bad economic conditions.

It could be, however, that they’re slow-rolling the lot of us.

Manga in Germany is published mainly by TokyoPop and Carlsen, the later being a subsidiary to a privately owned Dutch company. For Kodansha to pull all of their liscences from T-Pop, they must have some sort of plan for the geographic location; companies do not simply cut off revenue streams for no apparent reason. This could mean a few things, one of which is that Kodansha is setting up a German wing to its publishing business. It could also mean that it’s transfering its liscences to another publishing house, such as Carlsen. It could also mean that Kodansha lacks faith in the financial stability of TokyoPop, although that theory doesn’t hold a lot of water, considering that their liscences would all revert back to them if T-Pop did go belly under.

So, what does all this mean for the USA? Well, as of right now, not a whole lot. Nothing across the pond has changed. However (and this is a pretty big however); this business move means that things are about to change. With a loss of some hot properties from its German publishing wing, will T-Pop be able to handle this new bit of stress? And what is Kodansha’s gameplan?

We’ll find out soon enough, I think.