¥33.8bn
for one unlisted shareholding, 29.1× what it cost. From Nintendo’s securities filings; that the company is Niantic is not in them.
- ¥23.8bn TPC’s one-off gain in the same year, never named
- ≈0.68 judged odds that the gain is TPC’s Niantic exit, a reading, not a document
In October 2015, before Pokémon GO existed as a game, three backers put money into Niantic, the small Google spin-out building it: the Pokémon side, Google and Nintendo. Nearly ten years later, on 29 May 2025, Scopely closed its purchase of Niantic’s games business. Nintendo’s side of that exit can now be read off its own filings, to the million yen. TPC’s side cannot: it booked a large one-off gain in the same year and has never said what it was. The most interesting clue turns out to be a dollar amount from 2015 that is exactly divisible by three, and it suggests the Pokémon cheque was written by two companies, not one.
What Nintendo’s filings settle
Japanese companies list how many unlisted shareholdings they own each year, and which went up or down. Nintendo held 17 unlisted holdings a year before the sale and 16 after it, with none added. One holding went down, sold for ¥33.8bn. Because the count fell by exactly one, Nintendo sold the whole holding, not part of it. The count reconciles year by year back to 2020 with no gaps.
The usual hiding places are empty. Nintendo’s listed holdings did not move, and it keeps no shares purely as investments, so the stake could not have slipped into another table. The group-wide note on securities sold shows the same ¥33.8bn, so no subsidiary sold a second block. That holds for anything above about a third of one percent of the position: the note has left out sales that small before. So the filings carry the whole shareholding, though not every conceivable side exposure.
The economics look like an early venture bet. The holding cost ¥1.16bn, and at least part of that was paid before April 2019, since no combination of later purchases adds up to it. Nintendo booked almost all of its gain in the April–June 2025 quarter, the one containing the closing. And it kept nothing: had it received shares in Niantic Spatial, the mapping company spun out of the deal, its count would have stayed at seventeen. Niantic had said that “original investors will also continue to be shareholders of Niantic Spatial”. For Nintendo, that did not happen.
Translated into dollars, Nintendo took ≈$234.8m, or ≈6.1% of the $3.85bn that Niantic’s announcement said its holders would receive. That is a share of the payout, not a known stake in the company. No cap table is public.
One stake leaves the register
Nintendo’s private-company stakes, book value by year to March.
Nintendo’s list of private-company stakes shrank by one in 2026, with a single large sale.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Year | Book value of Nintendo’s private-company stakes, ¥bn | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | ||
| 2021 | ||
| 2022 | ||
| 2023 | ||
| 2024 | ||
| 2025 | ||
| 2026 |
Book value of Nintendo’s private-company stakes. Stakes held for business ties, from Nintendo’s annual securities reports. 16 stakes to 2022, 17 for 2023–25 (one bought each in 2023 and 2024, one written off at nil in 2024), 16 in 2026 after one was sold for ¥33.8bn.
Cost and sale
What the stake cost Nintendo and what it sold for, ¥ billion.
- Cost, estimate
- Sale price
A stake bought for about a billion yen sold for over thirty.
Built from and .Show the numbers
| Year | Cost, estimate, ¥bn | Sale price, ¥bn | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the stake cost Nintendo | – | ||
| What it sold for, year to March 2026 | – |
Cost, estimate. Our estimate of the sold stake’s book cost. None of the later purchases add up to it, so at least part was paid before April 2019.
Sale price. Filed by Nintendo; its gain on investment securities that year was ¥32.7bn. About 29 times the cost.
TPC’s unnamed gain, and the two-way cheque
TPC’s Tokyo company booked a net extraordinary gain of ¥23.8bn in its year from March 2025 to February 2026, a window that contains the Scopely closing. TPC publishes only summary accounts and gives no breakdown of the line; the gazette report of those accounts repeats the total and nothing more. The gain was taxed at about the normal rate, so it was a taxable disposal, not a dividend or a refund. No other candidate asset has surfaced in any search.
The puzzle is size. TPC’s gain is 0.73 of Nintendo’s. If the two had written equal cheques in 2015, the gains should match. Exchange rates, a rollover into Spatial shares or offsetting losses do not explain a gap of that size. Fitting a smaller position to the gap proved nothing, because the size was taken from the gain it was meant to explain.
The Form D
What moved the question was a US filing. Niantic’s 2015 notice of sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission shows it sold $20m plus one dollar of shares, to 4 investors. That odd dollar is the tell: the total is exactly three equal thirds. Three tickets, four buyers.
Two 2015 announcements say who the buyers were. Niantic’s Japanese release names the Tokyo company and its US arm, The Pokémon Company International, together as the “Pokémon group”, then Google and Nintendo. It then says three companies would invest. TPC’s own release names only the Tokyo company as investor and never mentions the US arm. Both releases are grade B. Read together, they complement rather than conflict: one Pokémon ticket, probably split between the two companies.
If so, the size gap explains itself. The Tokyo company’s gain is 0.73 of the ticket, and the rest, ≈¥8.9bn of gain, sits inside the US arm, outside the published Tokyo accounts. On that reading TPC’s Tokyo company received roughly ¥24.6–25.0bn, about 4.4–4.5% of the payout.
Nintendo’s own accounts point the same way from the other side. Nintendo books its third of TPC’s comprehensive income, and in the year of the sale that included a recycled securities gain. Grossed up, it implies the TPC group’s gain was 1.50–1.61× Nintendo’s, with ≈¥20.0bn after tax sitting below the Tokyo company, in a subsidiary. A vendor database, CB Insights, lists The Pokémon Company International itself as the 2015 investor (grade C). That reading makes the US arm’s share larger than the Form D split alone suggests. It is also less certain: the odds that the whole recycled gain is Niantic are put at only ≈0.45.
How sure
We judge it about two-to-one that the gain is mainly the Tokyo company’s Niantic exit. That is judgement, not a document, and it is up from 0.55–0.60 before the Form D was read. Given that it is the Niantic exit, the split-ticket version carries 0.51 of the weight; the rest goes to the Tokyo company holding alone, either a smaller position or an equal one netted against losses.
Niantic’s fundraisings
Amount raised in each of Niantic’s US filings. The 2025 bar is a separate company issuing shares in a merger.
- Niantic, Inc.
- Niantic Spatial, a separate company
Niantic’s filed fundraisings grew from tens of millions of dollars in 2015 to hundreds of millions in 2021.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Filed | Niantic, Inc., US$m | Niantic Spatial, a separate company, US$m | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | – | ||
| 2017 | – | ||
| 2019 | – | ||
| 2021 | – | ||
| 2025 | – |
Niantic, Inc.. Amount sold as reported in each US Form D filing, not the round size. 2015 is the October round alone (a later $2.8m filing was options, not money raised); 2019 uses the amended filing.
Niantic Spatial, a separate company. Shares issued in a merger (a business combination with 256 existing investors), not new money.
TPC’s one-off gain
Net one-off gains and losses of TPC’s Tokyo parent, by year.
- Net loss
In 2026 TPC booked a one-off gain many times larger than in any earlier year.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Year to February | The Pokémon Company, net one-off gains and losses, ¥bn | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | ||
| 2022 | ||
| 2023 | ||
| 2024 | ||
| 2025 | ||
| 2026 |
The Pokémon Company, net one-off gains and losses. Parent company only, years to February. 2026 is net of any one-off losses, so the gross gain could be larger; it is 22 times the previous high (2023).
What TPC holds in GO now
If the reading is right, the exit ended TPC’s only equity link to GO’s maker. What remains is the contract. Since launch, TPC has received a licence fee plus payment for helping develop and run the game, as the rights holder. After the sale, the only public word on the terms is Scopely’s that “our partnership with The Pokémon Company will continue as it has for the last decade”. No document gives the rate, the term, renewal, or whether the licence passed to Scopely by assignment. Spatial’s holders are unnamed, and nothing places a Pokémon company among them.
The stake also gave TPC no say. A passive early ticket in a company sold to a third party does not carry a veto. Pocket is the contrast. TPC owns just over a third of the studio that runs it with DeNA, and above a third, under Japanese company law, it can block a merger or a business transfer. The Niantic case shows TPC either held no contractual control at the sale or did not use it.
Some of the windfall may still travel. TPC’s two known payouts to its owners were 18.4–18.8% of the previous year’s profit. Sized on reported profit, the next one would carry part of the gain to Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak, if a ratio seen only twice repeats.
What would change the picture
- TPC names another asset, or shows its Niantic shares moved to the US arm before 2025. Either cuts the odds that the gain is the Tokyo company’s Niantic exit.
- The US arm’s own 2015 release says it did not invest, or names a different fourth buyer. That would break the split ticket. It has not yet been read.
- A Nintendo document names another company as the one it sold. That would break the identity.
- Nintendo’s older filings for the years to 2019, still unread, could show whether its extra payment went into the milestone or a later round.