Did Pop Mart miss the opportunity to fall? Duan Yongping, who swore not to buy, has changed his mind.

(This article is authored by Damo Finance and published with authorization from Titanium Media)

By | Damo Finance

Du Yongping, who previously said he “didn’t understand” Pop Mart (9992.HK), suddenly changed his stance.

On March 30, the well-known investor Du Yongping (Snowball ID: the Great Dao, no form of my own) posted on the Snowball platform, saying, “Over the past two days I spent some time looking at Pop Mart again, and I’ve decided to retract the statement from Brother Zhang (Snowball founder Fang Sanwen) that I’m not investing in Pop Mart.”

This is very different from Du Yongping’s prior attitude. In the past few months, Du Yongping has mentioned Pop Mart multiple times. Earlier this year, Du Yongping said, “I’ve roughly looked at Pop Mart and think they really are quite impressive. But I still can’t understand why people would need this thing—what if, in two years, everyone doesn’t want it anymore?”

On the day Du Yongping reversed his stance, Pop Mart’s stock price, which had been falling for several days, briefly turned positive. At the close, the stock was 148.7 HKD per share, with a total market value of about HKD 200 billion. After Pop Mart released its earnings report on March 25, the stock price continued to fall, and over the two trading days of March 25 and 26, the cumulative decline reached 30.6%. Looking over a longer period, compared with the peak in August last year, Pop Mart’s stock price has already been “cut in half.”

However, Pop Mart, whose share price kept dropping, has performed very impressively. In 2025, Pop Mart achieved revenue of 37.12 billion yuan, up 184.7% year over year; attributable net profit was 12.78 billion yuan, up 308.8% year over year.

Pop Mart’s well-known collectible IP LABUBU also grew rapidly in 2025. During the year, the IP revenue of the THE MONSTERS series to which LABUBU belongs reached 14.16 billion yuan, up 365.7% year over year, accounting for 38.1% of the company’s total revenue, up 14.8 percentage points year over year.

With earnings surging, investors still “voted with their feet,” which may be due to Pop Mart’s proactive approach to managing growth pace.

At an investor communication meeting, Wang Ning, Chairman and CEO of Pop Mart, said that in 2026 the company will strive to achieve a growth rate of no less than 20%. A Bank of America Securities research report shows that this revenue guidance is below market expectations by about 30%, which means that in the second half of 2026, revenue may decline year over year due to the high base. In addition, Goldman Sachs also noted in its communication with investors that the market reaction mainly reflects concerns about a slowdown in growth, especially based on third-party data in the U.S. indicating that the deceleration has continued from the beginning of the year.

Du Yongping’s remarks, however, show a line of thinking that is completely different from the market’s view. In Du Yongping’s view, the “speed” of economics is actually the “acceleration” in physics. When people invest, they buy the future total amount—what you get in physics is “speed” x “time” yielding the total length. And of course, some “acceleration” will carry farther within a unit of time.

With different viewpoints competing with each other, are investors who “voted with their feet” wrong?

Can the earnings growth be sustained?

Some market participants believe that beneath Pop Mart’s rapid growth there are hidden concerns. If the core IP LABUBU cools off, the company’s future performance may be difficult to maintain at a fast growth pace.

Before Pop Mart went public in 2020, there were already views that the company had an “IP dependency syndrome.” At that time, Pop Mart’s flagship IP was MOLLY. Between 2017 and 2019, that IP’s revenue contribution ratio remained above 25%, reaching as high as 41.6% in 2018.

The explosive success of LABUBU once broke the market criticism that Pop Mart relied on a single IP. In 2024, LABUBU exploded, and in that year, the THE MONSTERS series IP it belongs to achieved more than a 7-fold growth in revenue, becoming the company’s largest IP. In 2025, LABUBU continued to maintain a high-growth trend, with total revenue reaching 14.16 billion yuan, up 365.7% year over year.

But as LABUBU stayed hot, doubts about “IP dependency syndrome” returned again. In 2025, the revenue share of the THE MONSTERS series IP to which LABUBU belongs reached 38.1%, nearing the level of MOLLY’s peak period.

More importantly, after LABUBU became a hit, Pop Mart’s market value grew significantly—from a period low of 16.68 HKD per share in February 2024 to a high point of nearly 340 HKD per share in August 2025. Over roughly one and a half years, Pop Mart’s share price rose by nearly 20 times.

At that time, the capital market valued Pop Mart at a high multiple, based on expectations of a big jump in the company’s performance. Now that performance expectations are slowing, investors have resorted to “voting with their feet.”

Investors’ concerns are not without basis, but judging from Pop Mart’s own situation, the market’s panic may be a misjudgment.

Compared with the “MOLLY period,” today’s Pop Mart, while relying on LABUBU, is not solely dependent on LABUBU. In 2025, Pop Mart’s new IP CRYBABY (Crybaby) saw revenue increase 151.4% year over year to 2.93 billion yuan; revenue from Star People grew by more than 16 times year over year to 2.06 billion yuan. In addition, traditional IPs such as SKULLPANDA and MOLLY also saw substantial revenue growth.

A prior research report from Cinda Securities also showed that Pop Mart has already formed a replicable closed-loop system, ranging from discovering artists, IP incubation, supply chain management, and all-domain marketing. The fast success of new IPs such as LABUBU and CRYBABY has verified the effectiveness and scalability of this system.

Rather than saying Pop Mart faces an “IP dependency syndrome,” it could be more accurate to say that the development of hit IPs like LABUBU has been too fast, “covering up” the light of new IPs. If Pop Mart’s new IP incubation goes smoothly, the company may see new growth points in the future.

In addition, in Wang Ning’s view, a slowdown in Pop Mart’s growth rate is not necessarily a bad thing. Wang Ning believes that the company’s high-speed development over the past year has exposed many issues. In terms of organizational management, information integration between regions, and coordination between the middle office and front office, the company still has significant room for improvement.

Wang Ning said, “If 2025 was a fantastic year, then in 2026 we hope it becomes a ‘repair station’ period—through rest, refueling, and changing tires, we’ll address the issues found during high-speed growth. Every company has to go through cycles. It’s very valuable that we can discover and solve problems faster than others during high-speed development.”

Plan for the Future

After a full year of rapid growth, Pop Mart’s management team has started to act more cautiously. At an earnings meeting, Wang Ning talked about “reflection and improvement.” He believes that super-fast development has exposed many problems. “Our consistent philosophy is ‘respect time, respect operations,’ and we hope the company’s growth will be linear and healthy.”

To achieve healthy development, Pop Mart has chosen to “grasp both ends.” In the China market, it will promote more refined development; overseas, it will continue to maintain an expansion posture.

In the just-concluded 2025, Pop Mart’s number of stores in the domestic market grew only slightly. The financial report shows that in 2025, the company’s domestic stores added a net of only 14, reaching 445. Against the backdrop of restrained store openings, however, Pop Mart’s revenue from offline retail stores in China rose 119% year over year to 10.08 billion yuan.

According to Pop Mart’s financial report, the reason its store performance improved significantly is, on the one hand, attributable to the growth of brand awareness, and on the other, to store optimization and upgrades and improvements in operating efficiency.

At the earnings meeting, Zhu Yin, President of Pop Mart China, said that the upgraded and renovated stores in 2025 added only a limited amount of area. Basically, the added area was 30% to 40%, with some stores adding 50%. However, the sales of these upgraded stores were almost double the national average level.

In the future, Pop Mart China will invest more in store upgrades and renovations. Zhu Yin said that in 2026, the number of Pop Mart stores upgraded and renovated will be far more than in 2025, and the company will open more flagship stores.

Operating a member ecosystem will also become an important task for Pop Mart China in 2026. By the end of 2025, Pop Mart’s total number of registered members in Mainland China reached 72.58 million, adding more than 26.5 million year over year. In 2025, members contributed 93.7% of sales, and the member repurchase rate was 55.7%. Zhu Yin said that in terms of channels, the company’s future approach is that third-party channels focus on user acquisition for growth, owned channels emphasize repurchase, and the full-channel strategy emphasizes circulation. In 2025, the number of members who consumed across channels reached several million, increasing by triple digits percentage compared with 2024. In 2026, we will continue to strengthen this ecosystem.

In overseas markets, continuing expansion will remain the main tone for 2026. In 2025, Pop Mart added 31 stores in the Asia-Pacific and 42 in the Americas and 22 in Europe, respectively. The total number of stores overseas reached 185.

From a performance perspective, in 2025, Pop Mart’s domestic business revenue grew 134.6% year over year to 20.85 billion yuan, while overseas business revenue reached 16.27 billion yuan, surging nearly 3 times year over year. Among overseas markets, growth in the Americas was the fastest: revenue grew 748.4% year over year to 6.81 billion yuan.

But there are still views that Pop Mart’s overseas growth is not meeting expectations, especially with a slowdown in the fourth quarter. According to Pop Mart’s financial report, in the first half of 2025 and the first three quarters, the company’s revenue growth rate in the Americas was all above 1,000%, and its growth rate in Europe also exceeded 700%. However, in full-year results, the company’s growth rates in both Europe and the Americas decreased.

Pop Mart’s Chief Growth Officer, Wendle Wen, said that last year, the revenue contribution of the company’s overseas business had risen to nearly 50%. Previously, the company mainly focused on capitals in various countries. Going forward, it will gradually move into second- and third-tier cities. At the same time, we will focus on the layout of core tourist attractions and advance flagship store projects as benchmarks. In addition, the company will quickly replicate mature commercial models that have proven successful in China to overseas markets, and it will also try to incubate new businesses locally overseas, using global channels for dissemination.

For Pop Mart, whether it can truly resolve the various problems it faces in development will have a profound impact on the company’s future, and it will also further test the company’s operating capabilities. In the future, Pop Mart needs to prove to the market that it can navigate through cycles and sustain development by leveraging IP diversification and product internationalization.