How about a movie star? That’s next on Kitty’s lands to conquer, after Sanrio’s 2019 announcement of a partnership with Warner Bros for a motion picture based on the brand, described as a “hybrid of live action and anime.” Sanrio confirmed earlier this month that the movie is still in its plans, though hasn’t given a release date.
That could be the key to diversifying Kitty’s revenue stream – and making her the most valuable media property in the world. Pokémon, the only franchise valued higher by TitleMax, has a far more varied stream of contributions, including games, live-action and animated movies as well as TV series. Kitty, by comparison, is limited almost exclusively to merchandise.
A film to match the success of what the 2023 movie Barbie did for Mattel, or The Super Mario Bros. Movie has for Nintendo, would change that.
The movie deal also includes other Sanrio characters, such as My Melody and Gudetama, that remain less well-known outside Japan. Nonetheless, they are increasingly contributing, along with the likes of Aggretsuko, the long-suffering metal-music-enjoying red panda featured in a popular Netflix series, reducing Sanrio’s dependency on the half-centenarian icon.
Nearly 15 years ago, The New York Times fretted Kitty “may be running out of product lives,” and while that prediction was wide of the mark, it’s true the company has long struggled with a succession of booms followed by busts.
Just as Nintendo is seeking to escape the peaks and troughs of the console cycle, so too is Sanrio trying to smooth out its fortunes. Questions were asked when Sanrio appointed Tomokuni Tsuji, the grandson of founder Shintaro Tsuji, as chief executive officer at just 31 – some 14 years younger than Kitty herself, and then the youngest head of a major Japanese listed company.
A shinkansen bullet train featuring Hello Kitty.Credit: AP
Tomokuni’s father, Kunihiko, had been groomed to take over but died unexpectedly in 2013. While Shintaro was a visionary, by the 2010s he was in his 80s, and the company was languishing, with six successive years of declining sales.
The younger Tsuji has turned around those fortunes in a remarkably brief time, importing dozens of new hires from outside the company, lowering the average age of Sanrio’s management, and embracing digitalisation through video games and apps using its intellectual property. That has helped the company’s stock rise more than 10 times from the COVID-era low of March 2020.
As much as the business is diversifying, none of that would be possible without its most famous asset. But it would be remiss of me to fail to address the most long-standing debate over Kitty, which crops up every few years: Is she a cat or, in fact, as executives sometimes say, a little girl?
Fans seem to react badly to the suggestion Kitty’s not feline. The company now appears to be reaching for strategic ambivalence, with Tsuji recently telling the BBC that “Hello Kitty is Hello Kitty and she can be whoever you want her to be” – even your mother or yourself.
Maybe then she simultaneously is and isn’t a feline – Schrödinger’s Kitty, perhaps? Regardless, she’s not only still pretty at 50 – she’s more vital than ever.
Bloomberg
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