How Many Pokémon Cards Shipped By Year

General
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That’s not even the resale market imagine how many transactions happen daily through all channels!!

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Unimaginable numbers…
Thanks for sharing the info.

Looks like I bought 0.000005% of the cards for the year. Gotta pump those number up!

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For anyone curious, www.pokebeach.com/2021/06/pokemon-tcg-sales-increased-over-twofold-during-the-pandemic is the original article and corporate.pokemon.co.jp/en/aboutus/figures is where the figures get updated.

The title is a bit sensationalist as the production hasn’t actually increased twofold during the pandemic (edit: the title has since been corrected). It’s gone up from 1.5 billion in 2018 to 3.2 billion in 2019 to 3.7 billion in 2020. It’s actually only increased by 0.5 billion (15%) during the pandemic and the main timeframe the increase happened was the year before then - my guess would be that this is likely due to increased demand for Pokémon cards in China during this time.

Interest in Pokémon has certainly more than doubled since March 2020 (heck I’d go as far as saying there are at least 5 times more people interested at the beginning of this year compared to last). If anything these figures show that Pokémon aren’t keeping up with the demand - though that’s probably a sensible thing as I imagine once covid has passed the majority of that new interest will dissipate.

The good news is that there will probably be a lot of excess modern product laying around in a couple of years, so those of us who missed out on enjoying the new sets should be able to pick up the pieces relatively cheaply.

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They mentioned 13 languages but I count 14.

  1. English
  2. Japanese
  3. Korean
  4. Chinese
  5. Thai
  6. Indonesian
  7. French
  8. Italian
  9. German
  10. Portuguese
  11. Spanish

(Defunct)
12. Polish
13. Russian

(Defunct and wotc only)
14. Dutch

I wonder if these numbers are not including the wotc era.

Edit. Nevermind they must be including wotc since they mentioned having 14B cards printed during 2004. I wonder how they are calculating the number of languages.

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The original Pokebeach post concluded with a question that Gary didn’t include in his screenshot:

While the :stuck_out_tongue: emoticon suggests that the question is being asked tongue-in-cheek, it is worthy of consideration, and it did lead to a couple of thoughtful posts in the comments section, including this one:

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Yeah, I noticed that as well. Pretty weird it’s incorrect on their own website. I couldn’t find a way to contact them about it, otherwise I would have. There are quite a few ways to get in contact with TPCi, but almost none with TPC from what I could find. And to contact Creatures Inc. or Nintendo for a mistake on the TPC website is a bit overkill.

Greetz,
Quuador

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Sounds like Glenn is advocating for NFTs :joy:

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I apologize but I’m bad at math. The article headline and first paragraph have been corrected:

New Title: “Pokemon TCG Sold Record 3.7 Billion Cards During the Pandemic!”

“Pokemon has released its latest financial report, revealing the company shipped 3.7 billion Pokemon cards between March 2020 and March 2021 — the highest number in recent memory. Before 2019 they were shipping an average of 1.5 to 2 billion cards a year, but the last two years have seen double that rate. It’s likely the rate from 2020 to 2021 would have been even higher were it not for printing shortages caused by the pandemic.”

(Rest of the article the same.)

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@waterpokemonmaster kudos for updating it - I didn’t mean to come across as rude I’ve just seen a few people on Facebook sharing the same statistic as well (presumably spurred-on by this article) and once something like this spreads it’s kinda hard to correct it.

Great job on keeping track of this information, it’s going to be very interesting to see what the next published figure will be as I imagine covid has had quite an impact on the number of cards they’ve been able to produce and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if 2020-2021 is well up to 5 billion.

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Set cards; there is always another copy :wink:

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Trophy cards; there is always an extra copy :wink:

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Edit: Ah shiet I had a good theory but then I realized I was potentially going to spoil the plot of the movie tenet for people. So I deleted the comment. I just want to warn people though these extra copies could be sent from the future.

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Pkonno has entered the chat

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These numbers, wow, that’s actually insane.