For the past few years, the Japanese animation industry has been growing exponentially. With the industry ever-looking outward with expansions abroad, it also looks like it ain’t gonna end soon. The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) a preview of their upcoming report on examines industry trends from 2017. And even if it’s still a preview, it revealed that the industry was valued at 2.1527 trillion yen last year. This means that it experienced an 8.1% increase from 2016.

The chart shows that the industry has been growing steadily for the past eight years. However, it was for the past five years that the industry has recorded consistent record-high growths. Note that the charts are in the values of 100 million yen, so those numbers are pretty huge.

And it seems that the overseas market for anime is one of the main reasons why it has been growing so steadily over the years. According to the chart below, the overseas gains grew by 29.6% over the last year. However, while the industry is growing outside of Japan, it seems that it has slowed down a bit locally. As the chart below also shows, the domestic market had a 5.5% decrease.

China, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States have become the largest markets for Japanese animation outside the country. In particular, a previous report noted that China had the most anime industry contracts from last year. And with collaborations between Japanese and Chinese companies, it seems that number may still grow this year.

On the other hand, other anime-related fields also grew. For example, the live-events market experienced a 29.6% growth. And with companies like Netflix and Crunchyroll leading the charge, anime streaming also grew by 10%. However, it’s not all good news though, as film and home video sales were quite weak in 2017.

Sources: AJA, Anime! Anime! Biz