A field guide to the Pokémon business
How the Pokémon franchise works
Pick any part of the business. Each opens a short explainer, with every number sourced and graded.
Fans spend ≈¥2.7–3.7tn a year on Pokémon at list price. The Pokémon Company’s group books ¥1.02–1.05tn of it, selling cards and apps itself and licensing the rest. It pays its owners very little: ≈1.6% of nine years’ group profit. The Tokyo parent has kept ¥414bn of its own profit, but an estimated half of the group’s profit never appears in the parent’s accounts, and no published record shows it being sent up to Tokyo.
Nintendo, with 32% of the votes, booked ¥60.8bn as its share of affiliate profit, mostly TPC’s, in the half to September 2026, up 37.7%. Yet the company that runs the franchise owns none of the names. Follow the money
Built from 8,370 sources and 26,145 records, every number traceable. How the research works
Last updated