≈¥26.8bn
a year in royalties to TPCi from toys, costumes and Funko combined. A ceiling, not an estimate, and a small part of what TPCi is thought to earn.
- 13–27% of TPCi’s modelled Western licensing income
- $159.0m what Jazwares paid for the company holding the master toy seat
The trainer’s notes models TPCi’s Western licensing income at ¥98.5–204.3bn a year, a borrowed royalty rate applied to a self-reported sales figure (see Licensing). The natural check is to come at it from the other side: find the companies that pay the royalty and add up what they pay. This page does that. The result is odd. The licensees that publish accounts turn out to be small Pokémon payers. The big ones are private. And even if every named toy, costume and figure maker paid the most it plausibly could, they would cover only a small slice of the total. Most of the money, if the model is right, comes from a long tail of deals that no public document shows.
Two contract maps, no prices
Pokémon is licensed through two quite different structures.
Japan runs through ShoPro. Takara Tomy, the Japanese toy maker, lists its Pokémon licence among its important contracts in its annual securities report, a filing (grade A). The counterparty is ShoPro, a company that describes itself as Pokémon’s merchandising window in Japan. TPC is named alongside ShoPro in the filings for at least the years to March 2013, 2014 and 2015, and in none after. Every row since names ShoPro alone. From the 2015 filing the term is 14 months, a year’s licence plus two months to sell off stock, renewed every year; before that it was twelve months. Whether ShoPro is a window passing money through or a licensor in its own right is not settled by the filing. Who is paid behind it is not on record.
The West is licensed by TPCi directly. The same filings carry one Western row: TOMY International with TPCi, on a master toy licence that ran 77 months, from February 2012 to June 2018. That is 5.5× Japan’s term. Wicked Cool Toys took over in July 2018, a company in which TPCi had become a strategic investor with a board seat. Jazwares bought Wicked Cool Toys in October 2019 and has held the master toy seat since.
The other big names. Mattel made MEGA Pokémon building sets from 2017 and said it would “no longer be supplying Pokémon products” after December 2025. LEGO announced a “multi-year” partnership with TPCi and launched on 27 February 2026, so it paid nothing in 2025. Disguise, the costume arm of JAKKS Pacific, has held Pokémon costumes in North America and Australia and New Zealand since 2022, adding Europe and parts of Latin America in 2025.
Only three of these deals name TPCi as the payee in their own documents: Jazwares, LEGO and Disguise (company releases, grade B). For Funko, Mattel, Build-A-Bear and the long tail, TPCi is presumed to be the payee because it handles licensing outside Asia itself. That presumption is an inference (grade C).
How long a licence runs
Terms of Takara Tomy’s Pokémon toy licences, by year.
The Western licence was a single multi-year deal. In Japan the licence is renewed every year.
Built from , and .What the master’s price tells us, and doesn’t
The one hard number on the master toy deal is what Jazwares paid for Wicked Cool Toys: $159.0m. Of that, 52.8% was booked as licence agreements, written off over 8 years. Counting from the deal, that life runs out around 2027. If the accountants’ life reflects how long Jazwares expects to keep the seat, TPCi is likely to renew it before then rather than tender it again. That is our inference.
Berkshire Hathaway, which owns Jazwares, names Pokémon among Jazwares’ brands from its 2023 annual report but never prices it. It gives Jazwares’ revenue once: $1.3bn in 2023, all brands. At the top royalty rate in JAKKS’s contracts, that caps everything Jazwares pays all its licensors at ¥48.6bn. LEGO’s whole licence line, across every licensor, is about ≈¥153bn, and in 2025 it included no Pokémon at all.
These bounds are easy to misread. They are not wider than the band. Jazwares’ bound sits inside it, at 24–49%; LEGO’s is 75–156%. The honest point is narrower: neither number can say where in the band Pokémon’s royalty sits.
The last priced deal is a quarter-century old. In the 4Kids era, 4Kids’ filings stated that its share of the master toy minimum guarantee “would be approximately $30,000,000” for 2000 and 2001, with Nintendo of America as licensor. A new agreement from January 2001 replaced it: the minimum was now owed to the TPC side, and 4Kids’ share was reset to at least a quarter of the old figure for 2001 to 2003. Nothing like it has been filed since TPCi took licensing in-house.
The listed licensees pay little
A sweep of the US filings shows how little they say. Of 4,066 documents filed since 2015 by 13 Western licensees and retailers, searched for Pokémon in every spelling, 48 name it. None prices a licence, and none names TPCi. Most of those mentions cannot be found with the SEC’s own full-text search, because of how the filings encode the accented é: 36 of the 48. The silence follows from the rules. A licensee must file a licence only if its business “depends to a material extent” on it, with no numeric threshold, and none of these companies has filed a Pokémon licence.
The companies that do file accounts give Pokémon away by its smallness. Funko says “no single property accounted for more than 5% of our sales”, a ceiling it has stated for each of the last three years. At Funko’s average royalty rate, that puts its Pokémon royalty at about $7.9m; even at the top rate in JAKKS’s contracts, it is at most $11.4m. Funko’s average rate across all its licensors runs 15.0–17.4%. Mattel lists minimum royalty commitments of $336.8m but never splits them by property.
Costumes are the best-documented case. JAKKS’s costume segment sold $108.7m in 2025, all brands. Even if every dollar were Pokémon at the top contract rate, Disguise pays TPCi at most ¥3.6bn. JAKKS’s book of minimum guarantees, across every licensor, jumped 2.5× to $189.8m. At 2025 costume volumes, costumes could cover only 42% of the $57.4m due in 2026. The 2025 TPCi extension is one candidate for that jump; it is not proven, and Pokémon’s weight in the book is unknown.
Funko and JAKKS hand a sixth or so of their sales to licensors, and Pokémon’s own rate is not public; the chart is on the licensing page.
Adding up the ceiling
Now put the named payers together, each at the most it could plausibly pay. Every Western non-card toy licensee, Jazwares included, can pay at most ¥21.5bn. That comes from tracked toy sales, wholesale at half of retail, at the top of the filed royalty rates. Add Disguise’s ¥3.6bn and Funko’s ¥1.7bn, and the total is ≈¥26.8bn. That is 13–27% of the modelled band.
So if the band is right, at least ≈¥72bn must come from somewhere else. Two qualifications matter. First, the ceiling is itself built on estimates. At a higher outer toy rate, or with a margin for territories outside the tracked markets, it rises to ¥32.1–32.4bn and the residual falls to about ≈¥66bn. Second, the ceiling is incomplete. Build-A-Bear, a named plush licensee, sits outside it, on terms its own filing calls “limited terms that are terminable by either party”. So part of the residual is untracked toys and plush, not only apparel, food, publishing and the rest of the long tail. License Global’s list of TPCi partners names PUMA, Hallmark, Crayola and General Mills among others, a trade-press source (grade C).
A comparison that surprises. On a consolidated view of TPC’s group, Nintendo pays TPC an estimated ¥16.3–51.1bn a year. That beats every Western licensee’s ceiling. Only Jazwares, if it took the whole toy ceiling for itself, reaches 1.32× Nintendo’s low end. Nintendo is most likely the group’s largest single royalty counterparty, though both sides of that comparison are models.
The named licensees are a small part
Estimated yearly royalties in 2025, ¥ billion: the most named licensees could pay, against the range for all Western licensing.
- Most that named toy, costume and Funko licensees could pay
- Estimated range for all Western licensing income
Named toy and costume licensees can account for a quarter or less of estimated Western licensing income.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Measure | Most that named toy, costume and Funko licensees could pay, ¥bn a year | Estimated range for all Western licensing income, ¥bn a year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Most named licensees could pay | – | ||
| Estimated Western licensing income | – |
Most that named toy, costume and Funko licensees could pay. A ceiling, not a disclosed royalty: toys ¥21.5bn, costumes ¥3.6bn, Funko outside toys ¥1.7bn. 27% of the low end of the range and 13% of the high end. Build-A-Bear is outside it; adding 25% for toys elsewhere in the territory lifts it to ¥32bn.
Estimated range for all Western licensing income. An estimate, not royalties received. No Pokémon Company deal states a rate, guarantee or term.
Where the paper trail goes dark
One registry filing shows how the money moves. Jaz Toys UK, Jazwares’ British company, files accounts at Companies House. Its turnover went from £31.8m in 2020 to £87.8m in 2023, then back to £57.9m in 2025. For three years it itemised its royalties: £2.6m, £2.9m and £3.4m. Every pound went to Jazwares’ US parent, none to TPCi, and no brand is named in any year’s accounts.
From 2022 the royalty note disappears; later accounts cite the exemption “not to disclose related party transactions with companies that are wholly owned within the Group”. It is tempting to link that to Pokémon, because 2022 is also the year Jazwares began distributing Pokémon toys directly in the UK and Ireland. That timing proves nothing. In the same year Berkshire became the company’s ultimate owner, and those were the first accounts filed under it. Either could explain the change, so the timing proves nothing.
What does hold is the route. A national subsidiary pays its own group, and the group pays TPCi privately in the US. No local filing on that route will ever show TPCi’s take.