Now that you mention it though, it's entirely possible that they may have the licence already, but won't announce that they have it for a while so as not to kick off the hype too soon. Why would they do that? Well, one big reason is from lessons learned by other franchises. If you kick off the hype too soon, it eventually dies from everyone getting tired of waiting for it to be released, then by the time the anime is actually released, most people have already spent their emotional allowance on the series before during the big hype rush and don't have much left over for the actual release. Most have learned that it's best to keep the hype and the release perty close together. You usually end up getting a much happier lot of viewers out of it.
