There has been a lot of speculation that dentsu’s international business is up for sale. What is on dentsu’s mind?

Takeshi Sano: With regard to the international business, the company is rebuilding the business foundation and re-evaluating underperforming businesses. At the same time, the company is exploring strategic alternatives to enhance corporate value, but no decision has been made at this time. Should any matters arise that require disclosure, the company will make an announcement in a timely and appropriate manner.

There are reports that you are looking for a partner in some geographies.

Sano: Of course, one option is to have a partner... yes.

What’s your view on the Omnicom-IPG merger? They are now the biggest network.

Sano: We are watching that story. Size is only one competitive advantage. I think we need to focus more on the client business. And we feel lots of businesses could be up for re-evaluation.

This year we saw the global launch of your sports and entertainment network, and the first market rollout was in India. How is it going?

Sano: The sports and entertainment area is one of our big competitive strengths compared to other holding companies. We have a long history of that in Japan. The big news in Japan is how we bought the FIFA World Cup domestic broadcasting rights — both for television and OTT.

We have been in strong relationships with IP holders or supporting the sporting federations. We believe this is one of our competitive advantages, so we want to expand with it globally. In India, so many people love animes of Japan. So we can help and we would like to contribute to the IP holders from Japan to expand in the India market. Also, some clients from Japan are eager to enter the India market. So they would like to enhance their marketing or make the synergy of Japanese IP content like animation. In the AI agentic era, sports and entertainment is even more important.

Hideyuki Hirai: Our Mela! Mela! Anime Japan! event in India attracted more than 60,000 people this year over two days, a 28 per cent increase from last year.

Harsha Razdan: We have been meeting clients for five or six months now. And our strategy focuses around e-sports, gaming; and in entertainment, Japanese anime or Bollywood. So, we have currently established a team, which is led by Yosuke Murai. We will be building step by step. Step 1 is to establish credibility with clients before taking big punts on IPs. Our clients have never seen dentsu doing sports and entertainment in India, so currently a lot of queries are coming in. Right now we will not build IPs — that may be a 2027 situation — or we may leverage on Japanese IPs.

Last year, when we met, you talked about how important BX is? What is the latest on that?

Sano: In Japan, BX continued to have a double-digit growth and remains exceptionally strong. And revenue growth is also occurring across all other domains, including marketing, DX (digital transformation), and sports and entertainment. This indicates our integrated growth strategy is working.

Yuichi Toyoda: Outside Japan as well, BX delivered a double-digit growth and the team expanded. We also secured several high-value projects that are further upstream in a client’s business value chain, beyond advertising, and very close to management. Like mid-term management plans, changing the brand strategy, channel strategy, marketing transformation or HR transformation. I think the perception of dentsu is changing among clients. Also, our employees — their mindset has changed. They think more about the client’s business now, rather than the communication strategy, which is a progress beyond numbers.

Razdan: Just to add to what Sano san and Toyoda san said, our version of AX-BX-CX is media-plus-plus, which comes to life primarily through performance marketing. We have very strong brands — erstwhile Sokrati, which we acquired (now Merkle Sokrati), and iProspect. Going forward, our view is to expand them into the content space, influencer space, meme marketing space, take search engine optimisation to a GenAI engine optimisation and expand.

How is dentsu India doing? Any rationalisation plan?

Razdan: I would say dentsu India’s journey has been in three parts. The first part happened much before I came in, which was acquisitions. The first three years of mine were spent in consolidation. We had 23 entities, so the task was to get the ‘One dentsu’ operating model rolled out, and get all services behind the client lead, or, how they say in Japan, ‘eigyo’ — the single point of trust for the client. From 2026, the next two years will be about differentiation. For us it is BX, sports and entertainment, and now we are going into retail media. These areas are helping us differentiate.

My favourite way of explaining it is: We had a car, but the car had only two tyres — one creative tyre, one media tyre — and one tyre was punctured. So, I couldn’t go very far. My job was to put two more tyres. So I have done the four tyres and now we can run. This year has been good for us. We have done double-digit growth, more than ₹500 crore of billing. We also added very different team members, hiring from Flipkart and Amazon. We had consulting people joining us, because BX needed a different kind of talent. The aim is, when we are into a client pitch, can we do everything the CMO (chief marketing officer) wants? Can we be a true eigyo?

Any future gazing on what 2026 will bring to advertising?

Sano: The advertising market is still stable and growing. Globally we have seen over 5 per cent growth. In India, the advertising market growth will exceed the GDP growth. And AI will bring further growth. Also, India is one of the most important countries for us and one of the highest growth markets outside Japan.