Toei Animation Co.,Ltd. (4816.T) fair value

ACCE thesis

Toei Animation makes the animated series, feature films and character licensing behind Dragon Ball, One Piece, Sailor Moon and Precure, and it earns most of its money by owning and exploiting those franchises across merchandise, streaming and overseas broadcast rather than by production fees alone. The moat is the back catalogue and the production capacity to keep adding to it: a 52.8% gross margin and 33.9% operating margin are unusually high for a studio, and they reflect royalty and licensing income layered on top of contract work. Revenue growth of 13.1% is being driven by the continued global demand for Japanese anime on streaming platforms, where long-running IP keeps resurfacing. At 23.6x trailing and 27.5x forward earnings the shares price in continued growth, so the question for a deeper look is whether the forward multiple, which sits above trailing, reflects a slower earnings path or simply the market paying for a franchise pipeline that has yet to show up in reported numbers. With a 16.3% ROE and no index membership, the name is a mid-cap quality compounder that the market may still be underweighting.