Cross Marketing Group, a market research and digital marketing company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under the code 3675, signed an agreement on October 30, 2026 to acquire all of the shares of Chot Inc., a front-end development company based in Nakano-ku, Tokyo. Chot is due to become a consolidated subsidiary on December 1, 2026.
Neither company disclosed the price or how it will be paid. Chot said its founder and representative director, Yoshiki Kojima, is transferring all of his shares to Cross Marketing Group.
The Chot that Cross Marketing is buying will be smaller than the company that exists today. On the same day the share transfer completes, Chot will carry out a company split that moves its Orizm content management system and its web production work into a newly established company, AX ONE Inc., led by Kojima. Chot will keep only its front-end development support business, which builds websites and web applications for corporate clients.
What Chot built
Chot was founded in April 2019 and reports capital of ¥58.4 million (about $370,000). In a message published with the announcement, Kojima said the company started out teaching web design. After several hard years, which he linked to the pandemic and war, the team came across the Next.js framework and the Vercel hosting platform and rebuilt the company as a contract developer working with modern front-end tools. He said Chot now employs more than 60 people.
According to Cross Marketing's release, Chot's engineers work with Next.js and React and have built web applications and AI workspaces that use generative AI. Rather than only delivering finished projects, the company places its engineers inside clients' own development teams to support ongoing work, and it has long-running relationships with customers in a range of industries.
M&A Online reported that Chot recorded revenue of ¥527 million (about $3.3 million) in the fiscal year ended March 2026, with operating profit of ¥6.12 million (about $39,000) and net assets of ¥25.2 million (about $160,000). No outside funding rounds or investors have been reported.
Why Cross Marketing is buying
Cross Marketing Group was established in June 2013 as a holding company for Cross Marketing, a research firm that began in 2003. It says it runs a panel of more than 16 million people for consumer surveys, carries out more than 20,000 research projects a year and works with more than 7,900 client companies a year. The group had 1,919 employees on a consolidated basis at the end of June 2026 and has more than 30 companies in Japan and abroad, having expanded from research into digital marketing, including influencer and IP marketing.
The company said the deal supports the theme of its medium-term plan, "Unite & Generate," which centres on creating value through cooperation between group companies, along with digital and AI work. It described three expected benefits. The first is new services that pair the group's consumer data and research know-how with Chot's ability to build AI applications. The second is selling Chot's work, including Next.js and generative AI application development, to the group's existing clients as part of digital and AI transformation projects, which Cross Marketing hopes will become a new source of revenue. The third is using Chot's engineers to modernise the group's own services and internal systems.
The CMS spin-off and new leadership
Under the restructuring, Chot will set up AX ONE through a split in which the new company is created from part of the existing one. Nihon M&A Center reported that Chot's representative director will receive the shares of the new company, leaving Cross Marketing to acquire a business focused only on front-end development support. AX ONE, also based in Nakano-ku, will offer a digital experience platform and website production, with Kojima as its representative director.
Chot's board will change on December 1. Koji Onozuka, a senior managing director at Cross Marketing Group, will become Chot's representative director and chairman, and Hibiki Tsunoda and Katsuya Kojima will join as directors. Yoshiki Kojima will stay on as Chot's president for a period, according to his message.
Kojima wrote that he had wanted someone else to help the company grow further for the benefit of its staff and customers, and that Cross Marketing's approach convinced him it could do so. Neither company said what will happen to existing customers of the Orizm CMS beyond its move to AX ONE.
A research firm moving into software
The purchase adds an in-house engineering team to a group whose core business has been survey panels and marketing research. Cross Marketing said combining its understanding of consumers with Chot's front-end skills should let it build more consumer-facing AI services and applications.
The deal is small relative to the buyer. Chot's annual revenue of ¥527 million and its headcount of more than 60 compare with a group of nearly 2,000 employees. Cross Marketing did not say whether it expects the acquisition to have a material effect on its results.
