SmartNews Cut 200+ Staff After a COVID Hiring Binge. The CEO Calls It 'Stepping on the Accelerator Too Hard.'

SmartNews doubled headcount in two years chasing pandemic-era growth, then slashed 40% of payroll when traffic receded. New CEO Hamamoto now bets on a ¥1,480/month subscription pivot to rebuild.

In January 2023, SmartNews held a staff briefing about mass layoffs that was supposed to last one hour. It ran past three. Employees demanded answers about why 200-plus people were being cut and who bore responsibility. COO Kaio Hamamoto, who fielded questions until there were none left, later said the experience felt like a blade driven into his heart.

The setup was textbook pandemic over-acceleration. SmartNews launched a COVID information map and vaccine channel that drove explosive user growth starting in spring 2020. Management read the surge as a durable signal and invested at what Hamamoto calls the largest scale in the company's history, doubling headcount in roughly two years with heavy emphasis on engineering, marketing, and ad sales. At the time, everyone was celebrating. But the growth was a sugar high. As Japan's emergency declarations ended and people went outside again, SmartNews access numbers declined. Management clung to optimism. Hamamoto tried cutting server and infrastructure costs first, hoping to avoid touching payroll. It wasn't enough. The company ultimately cut total personnel costs by 40% across its Japan, U.S., and China offices — over 200 people via layoffs and voluntary retirement. Hamamoto identifies the core failure as a broken internal brake. Remote work made it harder to sense organizational reality. The euphoria of rapid growth made contrarian voices unwelcome. By the time the post-COVID traffic plateau was undeniable, the cost structure was already locked in. 'We were stepping on the accelerator too hard, and couldn't stop,' he says. The aftermath triggered a leadership restructuring. Co-founder Ken Suzuki, the long-tenured CEO and a PhD-holding visionary credited with scaling SmartNews to a ¥200 billion valuation, moved to chairman in November 2023. Hamamoto, the engineer-operator, took over as CEO with a mandate to stabilize and rebuild rather than dream big. Hamamoto's first major bet is SmartNews+, a ¥1,480/month subscription service launched in December 2024 offering premium content from Diamond Online, the Wall Street Journal Japan edition, and others. It crossed 10,000 subscribers within six weeks. The company also deepened a partnership with NTT Docomo, launching 'SmartNews for docomo' on Android, which hit 2 million dAccount linkages within three months. Hiring has quietly resumed and the Tokyo office reportedly feels alive again. But Hamamoto is cautious. He frames the company as 'still halfway to recovery' and insists on higher-resolution understanding of internal dynamics — a direct lesson from the period when nobody could see the organization clearly through Zoom screens. The question is whether a subscription pivot and a carrier partnership can generate enough new value to replace the advertising-dependent model that cracked under post-pandemic gravity.