Between a fan’s money and The Pokémon Company stand a lot of other companies. Nintendo sells the games. DeNA builds TCG Pocket and Scopely runs Pokémon GO. Apple and Google take their cut of the apps. Distributors move the cards to shops, and toy makers, clothing brands and chain stores carry the merchandise. Pokémon could not reach the world without them.
Two things stand out about those partners. The ones that publish accounts take small, visible slices, and most of them depend on Pokémon far more than Pokémon depends on them. The ones that carry the most Pokémon money publish nothing about it. And over twenty-five years, TPC has steadily pulled the riskiest and most valuable layers of that chain inside.
Who stands in between
The partners that file are small and dependent. DeNA, which builds TCG Pocket, booked ¥31.1bn from TPC in its latest year, 21.0% of DeNA’s sales. No other partner’s published Pokémon figure comes close. The large slices sit with partners who file nothing about Pokémon: the card shops and distributors, the app stores, Scopely and Nintendo’s overseas publishing, all of them modelled.
Who keeps what
Pokémon-related amounts reaching each partner, latest year, ¥ billion. The rows mix revenue, profit and upper bounds, so they do not add up. Blue bars come from company accounts; pale bars and ranges are our estimates.
- From company accounts
- Our estimate
- Our estimate, range
No partner’s published Pokémon figure tops DeNA’s. Card shops and distributors, taken together, keep far more, on our estimate.
Built from , and .Show the numbers
| Partner | From company accounts, ¥bn | Our estimate, ¥bn | Our estimate, range, ¥bn | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Card shops and distributors | – | – | (205.4–357.9) | |
| Apple and Google app stores | – | – | ||
| Nintendo: overseas Pokémon game revenue | – | – | ||
| Scopely (Pokémon GO) | – | – | ||
| DeNA: revenue from Pokémon | – | – | ||
| TV Tokyo: Pokémon income, at most | – | – | ||
| ShoPro: whole-company profit | – | – | ||
| Café operator: revenue from Pokémon | – | – | ||
| Animation studio: whole-company profit | – | – |
From company accounts. On different bases, so not to be added up. TV Tokyo is an upper bound from the title’s rank in its animation segment; ShoPro and the animation studio are whole-company profit, including non-Pokémon work. Fiscal years differ by about a month.
Our estimate. Modelled, not published by anyone: app stores at 30% of mobile spending; Scopely at about half of Pokémon GO.
Our estimate, range. Card channel: gross margin at list price across the publisher’s share of list, 35–59%. Nintendo: its revenue from Pokémon games sold outside Japan, year to March 2026.
Who sells the cards, and who decides
In the United States, TPC’s Western arm, TPCi, sells cards along three routes. Excell, its largest distributor, supplies chains including Target, Walmart and Amazon. Hobby distributors supply local game shops. A few accounts such as GameStop, which buys “directly from manufacturers”, take stock direct. No other large chain has been shown buying direct. In Europe, Asmodee distributes TPCi’s cards. In Japan, cards pass through toy wholesalers led by Happinet, whose line for “other makers”, which it says is centred on Pokémon cards, grew from ¥62.1bn to ¥83.6bn in the two years to March 2026. It is the nearest public measure of what Japanese shops buy, though it also holds other makers’ toys and is smaller than TPC’s Japanese card sales on our estimate, so other routes exist.
Each route keeps a share of the list price: a gross cut before the shop’s own costs, not a profit. On our estimates, the US hobby route keeps 50–62% of list, the route through Excell 41–62%, GameStop 35–50% and the European route 45–71%; in Japan it is about 38%. Only Pokémon Center, TPC’s own store, keeps the whole price. No company discloses how many cards go through each route.
TPC sets two things on other companies’ shelves: the list price and the release time. It raised the Japanese pack from ¥180 to ¥200 for sets released from May 2026, citing raw-material costs. In 2023 it asked distribution companies not to start sales in the small hours of release day. For shops it reaches through distributors, it does not decide who gets how many. Every dated per-customer limit at a third-party shop on record, from Target in 2021 to Bic Camera in 2026, was set by the shop or its distributor, and TPCi says it “cannot be directly involved in determining which retailers receive product”. Read against the law, that most plausibly describes how TPCi has chosen to sell, through independent distributors, rather than a legal bar: on the UK, EU, US and Japanese rules read, nothing stops a supplier choosing whom it supplies and how much, short of dominance or, in the US, discrimination in price or services, and the law bites only on limits placed on an independent distributor’s own customers. Japan’s current guidelines, revised in 2026, keep that freedom: which firms a supplier deals with is “basically” its own choice. If TPCi comes to own its largest distributor, the EU’s guidelines treat a supplier and the distributors it has integrated as a single company, outside the rules on agreements between firms. Japan’s say the same of a wholly owned subsidiary, normally and in principle. When supply is short, hobby shops appear to be cut first: for one 2025 set they reportedly received 85–90% of their normal allocation while Target, Walmart and Best Buy got their usual amount, on a single fan-site report.
A steady cut, not a share of the boom
The natural guess is that the middlemen got rich on the card boom. The one card distributor with public accounts shows something more modest. Asmodee’s UK company turned over £224.0m in its latest year, up 60%. Its gross profit grew with it, but its gross margin sat between 24.5–26.5% in every full year on file, through the slump and through the boom.
A distributor’s steady slice
Asmodee UK’s sales and gross margin, all products. The paler bar covers fifteen months.
- Sales, twelve months
- Sales, fifteen months
Sales swung widely; the margin barely moved.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Period to | Sales, twelve months, £m sales | Sales, fifteen months, £m sales | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2021 | – | ||
| Mar 2023 | – | ||
| Mar 2024 | – | ||
| Mar 2025 | – | ||
| Mar 2026 | – |
Sales, twelve months. Asmodee UK Limited (filed as Esdevium Games until July 2026), all products, not only Pokémon. Figures inside the bars are gross margin, gross profit as a share of sales: 24.5% to 26.9% in every period.
Sales, fifteen months. January 2022 to March 2023: not comparable with the twelve-month bars, though its margin is.
A distributor buys at a set price and sells to shops at a set price. It earned more in the boom because more boxes passed through, not because a scarce set raised its cut on each one. The accounts cover all its products and never mention Pokémon, so this is a reading of a distributor, not a measurement of Pokémon.
The only public record of TPCi’s own terms with a distributor comes from a bankruptcy. When Diamond Comic Distributors and its games arm, Alliance, filed for Chapter 11 in January 2025, TPCi’s contract appeared in the court record as “Pokémon TCG Terms Of Sale - CIP”: a delivered price, with carriage and insurance included. Every one of its invoices fell due 30 days after issue, on open credit. Against them TPCi credited one co-op allowance of $14,520 and $4,200 of open-house fees. Deliveries came in a single burst: $494,000, 95% of December’s invoicing, shipped in the last six days of 2024, so the weeks before the filing cannot be scaled up into a yearly figure. At the filing TPCi was owed $533,802. Its recovery rested on priority claims for goods delivered just before the filing, a partial payment as a critical vendor and a $324,602 cure agreed with Universal Distribution, the buyer it accepted for the contract; ordinary unsecured creditors received nothing. TPCi kept its invoices out of the record as confidential, so the case shows how it sells to a distributor, not at what price.
Where the premium landed
The premium above list went further down the chain, to retailers that can price the shelf and trade used cards. GameStop is the clearest case on file. It names “Pokemon” among its three largest suppliers, and its collectibles line, which includes “new and pre-owned trading cards”, grew 48% in a year when everything else it sold fell 17%.
Cards carried GameStop
GameStop’s collectibles sales against the rest of its business, year to January 2026.
- Fall
Collectibles grew sharply while the rest of GameStop shrank.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Part of GameStop | Change in net sales on the year before, % change | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Collectibles | ||
| Everything else |
Change in net sales on the year before. Collectibles $718m to $1,060m; everything else (filed total less collectibles) $3,105m to $2,570m. Collectibles covers all brands, card grading included; GameStop does not break out Pokémon, though it named Pokémon among its three biggest suppliers this year and not the year before.
GameStop does not publish profit by line, and its collectibles also include toys, apparel and grading, so this shows where the sales went rather than what was earned. Because what TPC charges the trade does not change with demand, a hot set raises what a chain store can earn before it raises anything at TPC. The premium above list goes to the retailers that can reprice the shelf, and to resellers (see The collector market).
Pulling the layers in
TPC has spent two decades taking layers of the chain in-house, and the history explains why. In the licensee era, Hasbro printed the Western cards and carried the risk; its Pokémon card sales went from $570m to ≈$101m in a year. TPC’s American arm took over the English cards in 2003 and US distribution in 2006. In Japan, Media Factory “continued to distribute the cards until 2012”, and then TPC took that over too. TCG Pocket launched with TPC, not DeNA, as the seller.
Pulling the chain inside
Key dates when selling Pokémon cards moved in-house.
Step by step, TPC has taken over selling its own cards, and it has agreed to buy its biggest US distributor.
Built from , and .The latest step is Excell, a Des Moines distributor that manages the trading-card shelves of big US chains, and that TPC’s Western arm called its “largest distribution partner in the U.S.”. The deal was signed in February 2026, “subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions”, and no closing is on record to the end of October. How much Pokémon passes through Excell is not known, and it also distributes Pokémon’s rivals: at Target, One Piece, Digimon and Upper Deck products carry its name, Pokémon’s do not. Its revenue would add little to TPC this year. What would change is who stands between the big chains and the competing card games (see TPCi).
What it adds up to
Pokémon reaches the world through partners, but the partners that publish accounts take small, steady slices, and the ones carrying the most money publish nothing about Pokémon. The distributor earns a thin toll on short credit; the boom’s premium landed at the till and with resellers, never at TPC. TPC sets the list price and the release time, but on other companies’ shelves the shops and distributors decide who gets the cards. TPC’s answer has been to take the layers where the money is large and the risk is real into its own hands, the cards, Pocket and, if it closes, its biggest US distributor, and to license the rest, where a royalty is small but safe.