The Pokémon Company began in 1998 as the company that ran the Pokémon Center stores, before it became the manager of the brand (see The Pokémon Company). In April 1998 Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak set it up in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district under the name Pokémon Center Co., Ltd. Almost thirty years later, Pokémon Centers are the brand’s flagship shops, in Japan, across Asia and online, and the one place where the company that runs Pokémon sells straight to its fans.
That makes the stores unusual in Pokémon’s money. Almost everywhere else, someone stands between TPC and the customer: Nintendo on the games, licensees on the merchandise, distributors and shops on the cards. In its own stores, TPC’s group keeps the whole price, in most places but not all: in three of its newer online markets a payments firm is the legal seller and TPC’s Western arm sells to it below the shelf price.
The one place TPC keeps the whole price
Follow a pack of cards to the shelf. Through a hobby shop and a distributor, TPC’s Western arm keeps under half of the list price; through GameStop, which buys direct, a little more. In a Pokémon Center it keeps all of it.
What the publisher keeps, by route
Estimated share of a card’s list price that reaches TPC’s Western arm, by sales route. A store can use more than one route. No company publishes this.
- Estimated range
- Own stores: the publisher keeps all of it
- Most likely, all Western sales
Through distributors TPC keeps well under half of list. In its own Pokémon Center stores it keeps all of it.
Built from and .Show the numbers
| Route to the shelf | Estimated range, ¢ of each $ | Own stores: the publisher keeps all of it, ¢ of each $ | Most likely, all Western sales, ¢ of each $ | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pokémon Center, own stores | – | – | ||
| GameStop, buys direct | (50–65) | – | – | |
| Via a distributor such as Excell | (38–59) | – | – | |
| Hobby stores, via distributors | (38–50) | – | – | |
| Europe, via Asmodee | (35–50) | – | – | |
| All Western card sales | (35–59) | – | – | |
| All Western, most likely | – | – | (46–49) |
Estimated range. No route’s share is published, so every bar is a bounded estimate. Hobby: store cost of 50–56% of list less an assumed distributor margin (ceiling 56¢). Excell: wide because its margin is assumed, and whether Excell takes title to Target’s or Walmart’s cards, rather than managing the category for a fee, is not confirmed. GameStop says in its annual report that it buys directly from manufacturers; a store can also use more than one route, so the bars are routes, not stores. Europe: derived from Asmodee UK’s filed margin. The all-Western blend uses illustrative weights.
Own stores: the publisher keeps all of it. Pokémon Center is 100¢ by construction; how much it sells is not published.
Most likely, all Western sales. The central part of the blended range. Excell was signed in February 2026 with no closing on record, so it has not changed the latest year’s share.
How much the stores sell is not published anywhere. On our model, the stores in Japan and Asia and the online shop together bring in somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty billion yen a year, a wide band because no store sales figure exists. If the Tokyo company books those sales, the stores would account for somewhere between a tenth and a little over a quarter of its operating profit. Even the Western online shop, the one store anyone tries to measure, is uncertain by a factor of more than two: one data vendor puts its 2025 sales at $513m, another at $194.9m. Neither is a filing.
The gap is not mainly about what the two firms count. The firm with the lower figure leaves out returns and reports purchases only. Even allowing generously for tax, shipping and returns, those differences explain at most about 1.3× of it. The real split is how fast the shop grew. The higher estimate’s own page calls 2025 “a change of 250-255% from the previous year”. The lower one has sales “up 50%+ from the previous year”. By September 2026 their monthly figures are 1.8× apart, not 2.6×. Global-e, the cross-border firm that is the legal seller in three of the shop’s markets, lists Pokémon among merchants that added more country routes in late 2025, but publishes no figure for it. So the size of the online shop is still a choice between two models, and it should be quoted as a range.
A shop company that doesn’t look like a shop
The stores in Japan are run by a separate company, Pokémon Center K.K., which TPC owns. Its own page names TPC as its main shareholder, it shares TPC’s address, and it employs the people on the shop floor. It describes its business as running the stores, the online shop and the cafés.
Its accounts, though, look like a service company’s rather than a retailer’s. It has tiny capital and has never paid a dividend. Its profit has risen steadily but modestly, from ¥102m to ¥370m, while its parent’s revenue grew 2.3× in three years. Its assets peaked in 2024 and then fell, even as new stores opened.
A small balance sheet
Total assets of Pokémon Center Co., the company that runs the shops in Japan.
The store company’s assets are small, and have fallen since their 2024 peak.
Built from .Who sells to the customer
“Pokémon Center” is one name over four different sellers. Japan’s online shop names the Tokyo parent as the business on its legal seller notice. In Singapore the store’s own terms name Pokemon Singapore Pte. Ltd., a wholly owned group company, as its operator. pokemoncenter.com is sold by TPC’s Western arm in the US, the UK and Canada. In Germany, Australia and New Zealand it is not: there Global-e, a cross-border e-commerce firm, is the merchant of record, the customer’s contract is with Global-e, and the store’s notice says Pokémon “acts only as an intermediary”. In those three markets the group’s revenue is its sale to Global-e, not the price the fan pays. The first permanent Pokémon store outside Asia is to open in London by 2029, announced on 21 October 2026 as the first of several planned beyond Asia; which group company will be the seller on its receipts is not yet said.
That raises a question the research could not settle: on a receipt from a Japanese Pokémon Center, which company is the seller? The store company says it operates the shops, but operating is not selling. On the online shop’s legal seller notice, the business named is the parent, TPC. Both companies registered for Japan’s invoice system on the same day in October 2023, so every receipt since then prints one of their numbers, and one dated receipt would answer it. None has been found. The research leans slightly towards the parent, but calls it close to even. The store company’s own accounts rule out one answer. It earned ¥370m on ¥3,976m of assets, which on ordinary retail margins and stock turns would support only about ¥8–37bn of sales if it bought and resold the goods itself. That is an estimate, and it does not rule out the store company being named on the receipt while selling on commission.
It matters less than it sounds. Either way, the profit stays inside TPC’s group. The answer decides which TPC company books the store revenue, not how much Pokémon earns from its shops.
What it adds up to
The Pokémon Company was founded to run a shop, and its stores remain the one place it sells straight to fans and keeps the whole price. They are a showcase more than a large business: on our model they bring in tens of billions of yen, but not enough to rival the cards. In Japan they are run by a small in-house company whose accounts look like a service arm, and nobody outside can yet say which TPC company is the seller on the receipt. Online in the West, the group does not even keep the whole price everywhere.