ASCII (company)

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ASCII

logo
legal form Kabushiki kaisha (joint stock company)
founding June 24, 1991
resolution April 1, 2008
Reason for dissolution fusion
Seat Chiyoda , Japan
Branch Computer magazine , computer games

KK ASCII ( Japanese 株式会社 ア ス キ ー Kabushiki kaisha Asukī , English ASCII Corporation ) was a publisher of computer game magazines and a manufacturer of computer games with headquarters in Chiyoda , Tokyo Prefecture , Japan . The company was bought by Kadokawa Group Holdings in 2004 and merged with a subsidiary of Kadokawa Media Works on April 1, 2008 to form ASCII Media Works . The publisher's main product was Monthly ASCII .

history

1977-1989

ASCII was founded by Kazuhiko Nishi and Keiichirō Tsukamoto in 1977. First, the publisher brought out a magazine with the same name ASCII . After talks between Kazuhiko Nishi and Bill Gates , the company became Microsoft's first pillar in Japan in 1979 and was henceforth called ASCII Microsoft .

In 1984 ASCII entered the semiconductor business and in 1985 expanded the business with commercial online services under the ASCII-NET brand . When the video game market flourished in the 1980s, the company developed and sold software for various consoles and home computer systems, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System , Sega Mega Drive and MSX .

After Microsoft went public in 1986, the Japanese company ASCII Microsoft became independent again. ASCII had to be restructured because it diversified too much in its business direction in the early 1980s. In 1989 the company went public.

1990s

In March 1996, ASCII had a revenue of 56 billion yen. Of this, 52.5% went to the publishing industry, 27.8% to computer games, 10.8% to semiconductor production and 8.9% to the remaining areas. Despite the effort to focus on the core business, the company suffered more and more from accumulated debt. In 1997, CSK Holdings helped the company with a purchase into private capital.

ASCII became known in the USA with its subsidiary ASCII Entertainment , which opened in 1991 and was mainly involved in the software market. The ASCII co-founder Keiichiro Tsukamoto left the company to found his own company Impress in 1992 . The offshoot Agetec (for "Ascii Game Entertainment TEChnology") was founded in 1998 by ASCII, a year later it became independent.

2000s

In 2001 it was announced that CSK would transfer the shares in ASCII to the Unison fund . Unison based ASCII on its core business (publishing). Computer game production was stopped in March 2002. In 2004 ASCII was bought up by the group of companies around Kadokawa Shoten (English Kadokawa Shoten Publishing ). and merged with the Kadokawa subsidiary MediaWorks on April 1, 2008 to form ASCII Media Works .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Anime News Network : Kadokawa Group to Merge ASCII, MediaWorks Subsidiaries , accessed March 30, 2008
  2. ^ A b Roy A. Allan: A History of the Personal Computer , Allan Publishing 2001, ISBN 0968910807 , pp. 31, 65
  3. ↑ Ronnie Lessem: management development through cultural diversity . Routledge, London / New York 1998, ISBN 0-415-17875-4 , pp. 160–161 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ↑ Satoru Toda ( 戸 田 覚 ): A quick map to Information and Telecommunications market . Kō Shobō ( こ う 書房 ), ISBN 4-7696-0606-0 , p. 130–135 (Original title: 情報 ・ 通信 業界 早 わ か り マ ッ プ .).
  5. ↑ Ascii to join CSK group . In: The Japan Times , December 25, 1997. Retrieved April 22, 2009. 
  6. ↑ Impress Holdings website
  7. ↑ CSK Corporation to Transfer ASCII to Unison (Press release) Capital Partners LP ( Memento January 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), accessed April 22, 2009
  8. ^ T Media, Inc .: Kadokawa buys ASCII ( ア ス キ ー 、 角 川 が 買 収 へ ) (Japanese), accessed April 22, 2009