Osaka Investment Promotion and Support Site

Anyuu ArTech G.K. - Chinese Tech-Consulting Company Establishes Osaka Subsidiary

Could you introduce your company and the services you offer?

Hello, our company name is Anyuu ArTech Consulting. Obviously, we want to convey the idea of combining Art and Technology when people see the name. And this is exactly what our new start-up, founded by a tech veteran from Shanghai, set out to do: using state-of-the-art technology to help business customers upgrade their internet-based tools, be it a website, an e-commerce app, an event portal, or a social media account.

The technology of XR behind our pitch has seen rapid growth in the past decade, as the conventional websites which are basically a mixture of text, pictures and videos have become increasingly ordinary and inefficient. A 3D approach to the rendering of online content has quickly gained ground and later became known as VR and AR (or more generally, XR).

We initially started our tech business in Shanghai, China about 10 years ago, focusing on building mobile applications and cloud computing for business customers. (The business was good as so many clients needed to make their PC-based websites and applications mobile-device ready and transition to the cloud platform.) As we gained both tech expertise and client base, we have gradually moved to provide VR/AR business solutions about five years ago, when we anticipated that the Covid-19 pandemic might accelerate the trend of doing business virtually, and thus the demand for enhancing the online experience to mimic offline social and marketing events.

I need to also elaborate a little bit on our business model. We started as a lean company, realizing having a full in-house tech team was unnecessary when outsourcing or temporary project-based hiring would make greater business sense. And over the years, we found that the tech trend shifts very fast and we also have to move and adapt quickly. So our strength always lies in finding the right tech partners and, of course, the customers in different, even unlikely, industries.

What were the reasons for choosing Osaka as your business location?

Let me put it this way: Our customers in China for the past five years were mostly multinational companies. However, due to both the Covid-19 pandemic and global economic slump, many of our customers either exited the China market or greatly reduced their IT-related budget, which caused serious challenges to our business.

One viable strategy is to find new customers, wherever they are! “Going overseas” has become the buzzword over the past three or four years in China, especially for small software or SaaS companies. So the question is not whether we go overseas or not, but which overseas market to choose.

Then why did Japan come to be the final candidate? I still recall clearly when one of our first VR customers asked us about how we designed the animated characters in the VR scenarios, “Did you just copy these from Japanese anime?” I explained that we found a local designer who did all the character drawing, but they did look very much like straight from one of the Japanese anime. To my surprise, the customer said, “We’d be happier if you actually licensed some real Japanese anime characters, which may create some co-branding synergy for the VR marketing campaign anyway.”

I knew then that Japanese anime and manga did have a large following in China and co-branding was a proven marketing strategy. However, the licensing of popular IPs such as Pikachu, Hello Kitty, Doraemon, and Shinchan mainly focused on traditional merchandise, such as clothes and fashion items, maybe even some small electronics, but to integrate them into high-tech content would require very high-level negotiation and was rarely done in China.

From that project onward, I was always thinking how we can have access to the most commercially viable visual content to work with the emerging XR technology, which would also help us to pitch to our potential customers: instead of just some fancy generic 3D graphics, we have the 3D-enhanced Japanese anime characters to promote your products.

JETRO has an office in Shanghai, and I started to attend their events in the past few years. In June, 2024, there was this big event of Shanghai-Osaka Sister Cities 50-year Anniversary held in Shanghai. The event featured officials, trade offices and high-tech companies from both cities. I spoke directly with officials and company reps from Osaka, and left with the impression that Osaka was developing extremely fast and the city was very welcoming to foreign investment, especially in the high-tech area.

In 2024, our company was undergoing restructuring due to the aforesaid challenges and there seemed no other good options except to develop new markets. As we always stayed as a very lean team, it wasn’t difficult for us to cut the Shanghai office to a minimum while still retaining all the technology partnerships in areas of XR, AI, and robotics.

I was telling myself, during the process of my applying for a Business Manager visa to Osaka, Japan, that I could give myself a couple of years to understand the landscape of front-line high-tech in Japan and its customers. Maybe there’s a way to realize my vision of having the world’s most popular visual content to help promote businesses under advanced XR or AI technologies.

What kind of support did you receive from the INVEST OSAKA team (IBPC Osaka) when expanding into Osaka?

I started by asking JETRO Osaka for advice on how I could find a tech-friendly incubation office in Osaka. JETRO Osaka referred me to one of the INVEST OSAKA staff members who proved to be a great help in securing a free-rent office (BSO) and introducing me to many resources.
 
In addition to a very efficient and friendly office environment, there have been many networking and tech-related events either organized or promoted by INVEST OSAKA, which has proved to be invaluable for a foreigner to touch base with the business landscape in Osaka.
 
I have since moved to an ODP office after a 6-month incubation period with BSO.  ODP,  which is also under the umbrella of the city government, hosts about 40 Osaka-based companies, mainly in the areas of graphic designs, computer graphics and animation, video and photography and advertising. The community obviously provides me with even better opportunities to work on my vision of integrating the Japanese creative content with high-tech.

I have since changed our company motto to the following:
Engineering Art, Visualizing Value: The XR partner for Japan’s Creators