With an impressive roster of top talent—including Casper Ruud, Jessica Pegula, Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul—the Japanese sports equipment brand has raised its game and seen record growth.
By Justin Birnbaum, Forbes Staff
Roughly a decade after Yonex released its first-ever tennis racket in 1969, the Japanese sports equipment company pursued one of the most impactful sports ambassadors in history, Billie Jean King. It wasn’t an easy courtship. Founder Minoru Yoneyama repeatedly sent rackets to the 12-time Grand Slam singles champion, and each time they were rejected. But countless hours of tinkering in the factory to appease one of tennis’ all-time greats led to the development of Yonex’s famed square-headed racket, which offered a larger sweet spot without sacrificing control, and King, along with her doubles partner Martina Navratilova, began competing with the company’s products in 1980.
“It’s the athlete partnership that challenged him to make better stuff,” says Alyssa Yoneyama, Yonex’s CEO since 2022 and the granddaughter of the company’s founder. “I think that’s the value he saw initially, and that really pushed him and put us on the map in tennis.”
Yonex’s love affair with tennis’ top talent didn’t end with King and Navratilova. The brand’s history includes some of the most prominent names the sport has ever seen, including Monica Seles, Martina Hingis and Lleyton Hewitt. These days, Yonex supplies rackets to a small galaxy of tennis stars, including Casper Ruud (No. 9 among the world’s highest-paid tennis players) and 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina—who also have apparel deals with the brand—as well as four-time Grand Slam winner Naomi Osaka, Italy’s Jasmine Paolini and many of the top American players: Jessica Pegula, Ben Shelton, Frances Tiafoe and Tommy Paul.
Despite that all-star roster, and more than 50 years in the business, Yonex has lagged behind its competitors in the American tennis market, ranking fourth in rackets sold at U.S. specialty stores and commanding noticeably less buzz than Wilson, Head and Babolat. Meanwhile, Yonex barely registers on the apparel front, miles behind juggernauts such as Nike and Adidas.
But Yonex is finally starting to see the growth it has sought for decades. The brand nearly tripled its U.S. racket market share from 5.6% in 2019 to 14.7% last year, according to data from the Racquet Industry Research Group. And that share climbs to 27.9% when focusing on higher-end models, priced at $250 or more. Yonex is also becoming more ubiquitous at the professional level. More than 30% of participants in the women’s singles draw at this year’s Australian Open used its rackets while 20% did so on the men’s side.
“We’re not trying to do things in a completely different way,” says Casey Yoneyama, head of global marketing at Yonex and the grandson of the company’s founder. “The most important thing is, one, connecting with the customers in a human way, and the other component, which is a bigger component, is just telling our story.”
Even with such an emphasis on tennis, Yonex’s business has historically been dominated by another racket sport: badminton. The company, which trades publicly on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, posted banner results in its most recent fiscal year ending March 31, with revenue growing nearly 8.8% to a record $769 million and operating profit climbing 15.4% to $77 million. Badminton accounts for 63% of Yonex’s annual sales, stemming from the company’s dominance in China and Taiwan and the sport’s rising popularity in India. The sport has “always been our bread and butter,” Alyssa Yoneyama adds, dating back to the company’s World War II origins.
Founder Minoru Yoneyama served in the Japanese Imperial Army and narrowly escaped “essentially a suicide mission,” as his granddaughter describes, tasked with setting explosives on U.S. ships. “Luckily for all of us, he was captured by the Americans,” she says. “So he never had to go out on that mission. But after what he saw in the war, he vowed to somehow contribute back to the world through something that was positive.”
In 1946, the elder Yoneyama returned home and formed what would become Yonex, which began by producing wooden floats for fishing nets. The Japanese economy was suffering after the war, and as the appetite for sports and recreation intensified, Yonex’s woodworking expertise gave the company an advantage when it transitioned to manufacturing badminton rackets more than a decade later. In the 1960s, Yoneyama expanded the business to the U.S. and Europe and laid the groundwork for his products to become the industry standard at Badminton World Federation Events and the Olympics. Tennis was a natural next step, and the sport’s global reach was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“When my grandfather vowed to become No. 1 in Japan and No. 1 in the world in badminton, he knew the second challenge was tennis,” Alyssa Yoneyama says.
In recent years, Yonex has benefited from several positive health and exercise trends emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic. Quarantining and social distancing pushed consumers toward outdoor sports, and the pandemic reversed declining tennis participation in the U.S., Yoneyama says. In addition, the company has invested heavily on the product side, opening a new R&D facility in Japan this summer and constructing a tennis-specific factory set to be completed next year.
It hasn’t been shy about touting its athlete ambassadors’ impact on its good fortune, either. The 28-year-old, late-blooming Paolini, for example, has appeared in two Grand Slam finals in 2024 and brought home Italy’s first-ever tennis gold medal at the Paris Olympics this summer, doing so with a Yonex racket in her hands. That type of success could be quite lucrative, considering the brand has developed a reputation of outspending its competitors, according to several agents in the industry.
Racket and apparel endorsem*nt deals in tennis are hard to generalize and depend greatly on a player’s world ranking and on-court performance, but Yonex has been known to pay top players in the mid-six figures annually for using its rackets. For the most elite players, the payday can exceed $1 million, or even more if apparel is also involved. Wilson’s rates generally pale in comparison, according to tennis agents.
Tennis still represents a small portion of Yonex’s top-line revenue, or about 15% of sales (excluding apparel). But Alyssa Yoneyama sees just how valuable the sport can be, particularly in North America. Tennis participation surged in the U.S. past 20 million in 2020 and continued to grow nearly 20% through the end of last year. The domestic market for rackets and other tennis equipment is approaching $1 billion, according to Polaris Market Research, with an additional $1 billion in apparel and footwear. A recent report from Japanese equity research firm SMBC Nikko Securities found that, at 16%, tennis posted the best compounded annual growth rate among Yonex’s divisions between the fiscal years 2019 and 2023.
“Our badminton business has been growing tremendously in China, [and] it almost appears to overshadow our growth in tennis when you look at the numbers,” says Casey Yoneyama. “But in reality, tennis has been gaining a lot of momentum.”
With Yonex a self-described challenger brand, maintaining such growth won’t be easy, and the company did have to shake off a marginal decline in its global tennis sales last year. (Yonex attributes the dip to overstocking from Covid-era supply-chain issues.) But perhaps the brand doesn’t have look too far to find a comparable success story.
Swiss sports apparel company On, a once-scrappy startup turned $14.8 billion public company, built its business on running shoes and boldly expanded into tennis in 2019, adding Roger Federer as an investor and creative partner and later releasing a signature shoe under his name. While the company doesn’t break out its revenue categories, it posted sales of $2.1 billion in 2023, a 46% increase from the previous year.
“I think being the challenger brand keeps us energized and hungry, keeping us on our toes and not taking anything for granted,” Alyssa Yoneyama says. “But at the same time, I think we’re confident and humbled by our purpose and having the consumer and the product first.”
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