2025, the year the market slowed without shrinking

A 8.0% decline sounds like bad news. On a ten-year scale, it isn't one. In 2016, the market published 2,181 volumes; it publishes 3,591 today — 79% more at the peak and still 65% more than at the start. The 2024 peak (3,904 releases) was not a plateau: it was the culmination of a decade of growth fuelled by the post-Covid boom and the Pass Culture. 2025 doesn't go back to square one: it falls back to the 2023 level, which was already a very good year.

And one column in the table below never moves: the leader's. Pika has led every year since 2016, 10 years without interruption. No other publisher has taken first place in a full year over the whole period observed.

The year isn't flat. November peaks at 363 releases, December drops to 228, a gap of 37.2%. The December trough is not a market weakness: it's the breath before the holidays, whose releases are pushed into November.

The last column says the most, and it reads top to bottom: the decline isn't spread evenly. The top of the ranking absorbs it gently (Pika loses only −3%), while the belly of the top 10 collapses: 3 imprints lose more than 20% of their output in one year: Delcourt (−22%), Tonkam (−26%), Hana (−34%). What one publisher loses in a contracting market, another doesn't necessarily pick up: of ten imprints, 7 publish less than in 2024. 2025 is not a year of redistribution: it's a year of shared contraction.

An imprint is not a company. Delcourt, Tonkam, Kurokawa and Soleil are four catalogues and a single group; so are Meian, Noeve and Hana. Rebuilt at the scale of the houses that actually decide acquisitions, the ranking changes at the top.

Editis becomes the year's leading player with 672 releases (18.7%), even though none of its imprints tops the previous ranking. Pika, France's leading imprint, belongs to Hachette Livre, 577 releases, 16.1%. And Meian, the country's second imprint, is no lone wolf: it belongs to IDP / Anime Store, 559 releases combined (15.6%), a group that, taken together, is close behind the top two.

Three groups sit within 3 points of one another. The French manga market doesn't have a leader: it has a trio, and the gap between them is smaller than the imprint ranking lets you believe.

Two ways to fill a shelf. The first: publish the volumes of a series you already own in quick succession — these are the workhorses. The second: launch a new series and establish it within its first year. The two lists have almost no one in common, and that's the whole point.

Meian holds 4 of the top ten places in the workhorse ranking. That's the signature of a cadence strategy: releasing a series' volumes at a pace the established houses don't practise. The detail is telling: Meian publishes faster than anyone and falls by 12.0% over the year. Cadence is an engine, not an insurance policy.

On the right, the launch ranking is far more scattered, and no publisher dominates it. That's expected: launching a new series takes a rights negotiation, a marketing budget and a bet on readers who don't exist yet. Continuing a series you already own takes only a calendar.

Shonen and seinen together account for two thirds of the year's typed releases. The rest share a third, and webtoon — billed for five years as the next big thing — tops out at 7.6%.

Of the 1,570 series active in 2025, 16 had already changed publisher during their lifetime. A series almost never changes houses by choice: it changes because the previous one closed, was bought out, or gave up. Those paths are the memory of the sector's failures.

This review is the first edition of an annual series. It will be recomputed on every import: the 2025 figures will keep moving at the margins as records fill in.