Nintendo stock hits 9-year high after last week's Tencent deal to put Honor of Kings on Switch, as investors look for growth in China
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time in fourteen months that a single event has repriced Nintendo's equity: the Pokémon Go launch sent the stock up more than 24% in Tokyo in July 2016, and now a deal to bring Tencent's Honor of Kings to Switch has pushed it to a nine-year high. The common thread is that investors are valuing Nintendo on reach beyond its traditional markets, with China as the prize.
The deal also reads as the opening move in a longer arc: two years later Tencent won regional regulatory approval to sell the Switch in China, and by end-2020 the Tencent-distributed console had moved an estimated 1.3M+ units there, nearly double the combined PS4 and Xbox One 2020 sales.
First-order effects
- Nintendo gains a credible path into the world's largest games market without building its own Chinese publishing operation, since Honor of Kings arrives through Tencent's existing dominance there.
- Tencent gets its flagship mobile title on a home console for the first time, extending the game's monetization onto Switch hardware.
Second-order effects
- Tencent leverages the same partnership toward the opposite direction — by late 2019 it was working with Nintendo to make more console games aimed at US users, turning a one-title port into a two-way content pipeline.
- Rival NetEase answers with its own hit-driven run, and by mid-2023 its stock had rallied 85% off its October 2022 low, edging out Tencent and Bilibili on the Hang Seng Tech Index.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, console makers enter China through local publisher partners rather than direct operations, making deals like this one the standard entry route for foreign hardware.
- Nintendo's valuation becomes increasingly event-driven around franchise and partnership news rather than hardware cycles — a dynamic visible again when a Switch 2 exclusive sellout drove its steepest climb since April 2025 (the March 2026 Pokopia jump).
The trend: Nintendo's market value is being set less by console cycles than by partnerships and franchises that open new audiences, with China access through Tencent as the recurring catalyst.