Pokémon is on T-shirts, plush toys, food, costumes and, since 2026, LEGO sets. Most of it is not made by The Pokémon Company. It is made by other companies under licence, and they pay TPC’s side a royalty for the right to put Pikachu on their products.
This is how Pokémon gets everywhere, and it is the source of the franchise’s most famous number. The claim that Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world rests largely on licensed merchandise. That number is real shop sales, but it is also the least visible income in the whole business: what TPC keeps of it is a few cents in each dollar, and most of it comes from licensees no document names.
From agent to in-house
In the first craze, licensing was not TPC’s business at all. Outside Asia, Pokémon merchandise was licensed by 4Kids, acting as “Nintendo's exclusive Merchandise Licensing Agent for Pokemon outside Asia”. Nintendo of America was the licensor of record until 2000; from 2001 the payee was the TPC side. 4Kids’ filings hold the only rate structure ever filed for Pokémon merchandise. Across all the properties it represented, licensees paid royalties of 4–20% of the wholesale price, on terms of one to three years that they could renew by paying their minimums. The agent’s stated commission was between a tenth and four-tenths of the owner’s royalties, later up to a half; in practice 4Kids kept about 26–30%. When the craze ended, 4Kids’ Pokémon revenue fell 67% in a single year.
TPC brought the business home. When the 4Kids agreement ran out at the end of 2005, Pokémon USA, now The Pokémon Company International (TPCi), took over all Pokémon licensing outside Asia. In Japan, merchandise licences run through ShoPro, which signs them in its own name. Its Pokémon division describes the remit as managing the rights for merchandise sold within Japan; as described, it does not extend to publishing. Game Freak says it has entrusted its domestic Pokémon copyright window to ShoPro; none of the other owners says so publicly. And TPC takes Japanese licence inquiries itself, through its own intake for products, campaigns and promotions, which does not mention ShoPro. Yet every Japanese maker’s licence on record that names a counterparty names ShoPro; a wider read of releases and filings found none naming TPC alone, though most name no licensor at all, and TPC appears only as the seller of at least one item in its own Pokémon Centers. A foreign brand’s Japanese collection can differ: Puma Japan’s 2022 release named TPC’s Western arm.
The big number
Each year the trade magazine License Global ranks the world’s biggest licensors by the retail sales of their licensed products. Its figures come from the companies themselves. TPCi submitted $8.5bn for 2021 and $12.0bn for 2024. The 2025 figure, $15.7bn, is marked as an estimate, more likely than not TPCi’s own: License Global tags its own estimates of companies that did not resubmit, and TPCi’s page carries no such tag, though the report never says who supplied the number.
The number TPCi reports
Retail sales of licensed Pokémon products as reported by TPCi to License Global, $ billion. Shop sales, not company revenue.
- From press reports of the ranking
- From License Global’s own pages
- 2025, marked as an estimate
- Estimate
The reported figure more than doubled from 2020 to 2024. It is the company’s own submission.
Built from , and .Show the numbers
| Year | From press reports of the ranking, $bn | From License Global’s own pages, $bn | 2025, marked as an estimate, $bn | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | – | – | ||
| 2015 | – | – | ||
| 2016 | – | – | ||
| 2017 | no figure | – | – | |
| 2018 | – | – | ||
| 2019 | – | – | ||
| 2020 | – | – | ||
| 2021 | – | – | ||
| 2022 | – | – | ||
| 2023 | – | – | ||
| 2024 | – | – | ||
| 2025 | – | – |
From press reports of the ranking. Press reproductions of License Global’s ranking. No figure was found for 2017, so the line runs straight from 2016 to 2018. 2019 is back-solved from License Global’s stated 43% average growth (a press snippet gives $4.2bn).
From License Global’s own pages. Retail (shop) sales of licensed Pokémon products as reported by The Pokémon Company International to License Global’s survey: company-reported, unaudited, and not TPC revenue. Which divisions and countries it covers is not stated.
2025, marked as an estimate. Marked “(E)” in the ranking and read once from a page that is not archived, so not yet confirmed. $3.7bn (30.8%) above 2024.
What is inside it has never been published. The magazine’s form asks each company “which business divisions and/or categories are included”, and TPCi’s answer is not public. Whether the trading cards are counted is not stated, though one TPCi profile places the card game “In the toys and collectibles category”. If the cards are inside it, licensed merchandise makes up 73–86% of the figure on our estimate; if they are not, all of it.
Either way, licensed goods are where most of the fans’ money goes. On our estimate, more than half of what people spend on Pokémon each year is licensed merchandise.
Where fans’ money goes
Estimated yearly spending on Pokémon by line, year to February 2026. Ranges.
- Licensed merchandise, from the company’s own reported estimate
- Other lines, estimated range
- Console games, a floor
Licensed merchandise is the largest single destination of fans’ spending.
Built from and .Show the numbers
| Line | Licensed merchandise, from the company’s own reported estimate, ¥bn a year | Other lines, estimated range, ¥bn a year | Console games, a floor, ¥bn a year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Licensed merchandise | (1,708–2,017) | – | – | |
| Trading cards | – | (493–680) | – | |
| Mobile games | – | (258–337) | – | |
| Own stores and online | – | (70–230) | – | |
| Console games | – | – |
Licensed merchandise, from the company’s own reported estimate. License Global’s row for calendar 2025 ($15.7bn, reported by The Pokémon Company International and marked as an estimate) at ¥149.57, less cards and games. 55–68% of the total. Japan and Asia licensed merchandise is in no number.
Other lines, estimated range. Ranges, and the lines do not add exactly to the ¥2.8–3.2 trillion total. Mobile games are gross of app-store fees (¥181–248bn net). Events (about ¥1bn) are too small to draw; resale is kept apart.
Console games, a floor. At least ¥121.6bn on TPC’s calendar (¥146.8bn on Nintendo’s year to March, which takes in Pokopia’s March 2026 launch).
A few cents on the dollar
The largest share of fans’ spending is also the smallest share of TPC’s income. A licensor is paid a royalty on the price the licensee charges the shop, so it sees a small slice of the shop price. At typical industry rates, TPC’s side keeps about 5.5–8.7¢ of every shopper’s dollar on licensed goods. On a card it publishes itself, it keeps a third or more. The only filed Pokémon rate structure, 4Kids’ from a quarter-century ago, brackets that range but cannot say where in it today’s rate sits.
What TPC keeps of each yen
Revenue TPC books per ¥100 that fans spend, by line. Estimates.
- Revenue booked per ¥100 spent
- GO licence income, estimated from profit
Merchandise brings TPC a few yen in every hundred; cards bring it a third or more.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Line | Revenue booked per ¥100 spent, ¥ per ¥100 | GO licence income, estimated from profit, ¥ per ¥100 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pokémon Pocket | (70–100) | – | |
| Trading cards | (35–59) | – | |
| Pokémon GO (licence, from profit) | – | (13–26) | |
| Licensed merchandise | (5.5–8.7) | – |
Revenue booked per ¥100 spent. Estimated ranges built from corner inputs, so they are wide and do not add up. Merchandise: royalty per yen of licensed merchandise sold, with cards taken out of License Global’s retail figure, itself a self-reported estimate. Cards: the company’s share of list price. Pocket: from net of 30% app-store fees to gross.
GO licence income, estimated from profit. Pokémon GO is licensed: per Nintendo’s 2016 filing, TPC receives a licence fee and a payment for helping develop and run the game. TPC does not disclose the amount, so this estimates it from the profit GO added to the Tokyo company in its first year, applied to about ¥100–111bn of app-store spending: ¥13.1–25.6bn. It is measured as profit, so it sits slightly differently from the revenue bars.
On our model that puts TPCi’s Western licensing income at ¥99–204bn a year, a wide band because the rate and the scope are both unknown. Add an unsourced allowance for Japan and Asia, and merchandise licensing comes to 10.8–24.9% of group revenue.
The revenue comparison overstates the gap, since cards have to be printed and shipped while a royalty costs TPC little to collect. Even so, at the parent company’s blended gross margin, a yen spent on cards brings TPC about 1.7–5.5× the gross profit of a yen spent on licensed merchandise, on our estimate. Licensing would come out ahead only if the card line’s own margin, which no document shows, were below about 9–25%. Per yen of TPC’s own money or effort the two cannot be ranked, because TPCi’s licensing costs are not public. Licensing spreads the brand. Cards pay the bills.
Who pays
The contracts can be mapped, but not priced. In Japan, Takara Tomy’s filings have named ShoPro alone as its Pokémon licensor since 2016, on rolling fourteen-month terms. In the West, TPCi licenses directly: TOMY held the master toy licence from 2012 to 2018, then Wicked Cool Toys, now part of Jazwares, and LEGO joined in 2026. Beyond Takara Tomy, the one other Japanese licensee on record as signing with ShoPro is Tradeworks, for a line of travel goods in 2017. No filing from the last decade gives a Pokémon royalty rate or minimum guarantee. ShoPro runs Japan’s Pokémon merchandise window itself: its licence site says it decides whether a use goes ahead, issues the application and contract, supervises and hands out the authenticity seal, and none of the eight company texts read names TPC as the principal behind it.
Who signs in Japan
Who is named on the Pokémon toy licence in each of Takara Tomy’s annual filings, years to March.
Since the year to March 2016 the licence names only ShoPro.
Built from .The licensees that publish accounts show only blended figures. Funko and JAKKS pay licensors, all of them together, around a sixth of their sales. Funko says “no single property accounted for more than 5% of our sales”, so Pokémon is a small part of it.
What licensees pay
Royalties paid to all licensors, as a share of sales.
- Funko: average royalty rate
- JAKKS: royalty expense as a share of net sales
Licensees hand a sixth or so of their sales to licensors. Pokémon’s own rate is not public.
Built from and .Show the numbers
| Year | Funko: average royalty rate, % of sales | JAKKS: royalty expense as a share of net sales, % of sales | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | – | ||
| 2017 | – | ||
| 2018 | – | ||
| 2019 | |||
| 2020 | |||
| 2021 | |||
| 2022 | |||
| 2023 | |||
| 2024 | |||
| 2025 | – |
Funko: average royalty rate. Average royalty rate on licensed sales, all licensors. 2019 and 2020 come from summaries of the filings.
JAKKS: royalty expense as a share of net sales. All licensors; 2019 and 2020 are computed from the filings. Rates are blended across every licensor: no Pokémon rate is disclosed. Hasbro and Mattel are left out because their rates are on a different base.
Adding up every named toy and costume licensee, they could pay at most 13–27% of the licensing band. If the band is right, most of TPCi’s licensing income, at least ¥66bn to ¥72bn a year, comes from a long tail of clothing, food, publishing and smaller toy deals. Nothing found sizes any Western category beyond toys. If the band is too high, the gap shrinks. Either way, the biggest payers are private and unpriced. The chart of what the named licensees could pay, against that band, is on Who pays the Western royalty.
Books and music, part of that tail, work more as a way of keeping fans than as income. Scholastic, Pokémon’s North American book publisher, reports more than 94m copies in print since 1999, about 3.6m a year; at an assumed price and royalty that would be under one per cent of the Western licensing estimate. Much of the music is given away: TPC has put 375 game tracks into a free Sound Library, while the main-series soundtracks stream inside Nintendo Music, which needs a paid Switch Online membership. In Japan TPC has become an author itself. Its 2025 ecology encyclopedia, published by Shogakukan, sold an estimated 417,925 copies, number 4 on Oricon’s book chart for the year. Partners pay for these channels, but none is a line TPC depends on.
No published document says who grants the Japanese manga. Its creators say Nintendo wanted a Pokémon manga before The Pokémon Company existed and offered them the series, which tells us where it started, not who licenses it today. Asked whether the adaptation is coordinated with the games, the writer said “Not at all”; the artist follows guidelines from the games’ design work and says he usually gets permission for personal touches, without naming who gives it. The credits follow the source material rather than a single licensor. In Shogakukan’s catalogue records, 108 of 113 comics adapted from the anime credit a named supervisor, a practice that began in 1997, before TPC existed; none of the 93 volumes of Pokémon Special, the series based on the games, carries such a credit. ShoPro is on none of the comic credits, though it supervises 46 of Shogakukan’s Pokémon activity, picture and quiz books. A wider count of the National Diet Library’s catalogue shows where each company’s name goes. Among books that carry a credit line, 39 of The Pokémon Company’s 42 supervisor credits are on game-based books and none on books adapted from the anime, while ShoPro’s sit on anime and children’s picture books and on no game guide. The Pokémon Company has supervised under its own name since 2001, when the National Diet Library’s catalogue credits it, with Creatures, on a card-game guide; it has supervised alone since at least 2009, and took its first author credit only in 2025. About half the catalogue records carry no credit line, so these are floors, and a credit names a supervisor, not the company that granted the licence.
What it adds up to
Licensing is what makes Pokémon ubiquitous. It puts the brand in front of people who will never buy a card or play a game, and it accounts for the largest share of what fans spend. But it is not where The Pokémon Company makes its money. TPC keeps a few cents in each dollar, the headline number is its own Western arm’s submission with an unpublished scope, and most of the royalty comes from licensees that never appear in a public document.