Charlotte Gallagher

it now has to compete against the likes of South Korea with K-pop demon hunters and so on.

Tell us who will take on the design responsibilities for Hello Kitty now.

We don't know yet.

The company said that the new person is going to start by the end of this year.

So quite a bit of a gap there.

But I would have thought that there's a huge team of people who have been working on Hello Kitty products.

So it's not like, you know, suddenly there's a vacancy at the top.

But yeah, but it does feel like a generational change as well.

You know, it goes on.

Miss Yamaguchi has been in charge of it for some 40 years and I'm assuming that the new designer will be someone younger from a different generation.

I would have thought that fans wouldn't like to see Hello Kitty changing too much and I don't think the company would push for that either because

Despite Hello Kitty being around for so long, she is still one of the most popular characters at Sanrio, you know, which is quite interesting because the company decided to diversify so that it doesn't have to rely too much on Hello Kitty.

But still, she's very, very popular.

And that was Mariko Oi, the BBC's Hello Kitty correspondent.

And that's all from us for now.

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This edition of The Global News Podcast was mixed by James Piper and the producer was Charles Sanctuary.