Pop mart’s 22% stock plunge signals the labubu bubble is already deflating
One doll carried a $5 billion toy empire across oceans. Now the same doll is dragging it down. Pop Mart shares collapsed 22% overnight after the Hong Kong-listed blind-box giant missed top-line forecasts for 2025, proving that a single IP—its wide-eyed, fanged mascot Labubu—can giveth and taketh away at internet speed.
The numbers that spooked wall street
Revenue did surge 185% to 37.1 billion yuan, but traders had baked in 38 billion. Net profit jumped 309% to 12.8 billion yuan, a beat, yet no one cared. The knife twist: management trimmed the dividend payout ratio from 35% to 25%, a move Morningstar’s Jeff Zhang calls “a slap to institutions that rode the Labubu wave.” Add a Q4 deceleration and you get the perfect script for a growth scare.
Labubu still delivered 14.2 billion yuan—40% of total sales—up from 23% in 2024. The monster is the company, and the company is the monster. When counterfeiters flooded TikTok with $3 knock-offs, resale margins on authentic boxes collapsed from 4× retail to barely 1.3×. Virality turned into inventory bloat.
The geographic escape hatch is already open
Pop Mart opened 42 U.S. stores last year, pushing American revenue up 748% to 6.8 billion yuan. Translation: 18 cents of every dollar now comes from American kids unboxing plastic in strip malls from Austin to Jersey City. The catch: same-store sales growth slipped into single digits by December, hinting that even U.S. consumers tire of gacha fatigue.
CEO Wang Ning, who personally pocketed 17 billion yuan in 2025—yes, richer than Peter Thiel on paper—has ordered a diversification scramble. Twinkle Twinkle and Skullpanda are being groomed as Labubu lite, but Crybaby and Molly already underperformed. The pipeline looks like a tribute band lineup: similar silhouettes, weaker dopamine hit.
Investors aren’t waiting for the encore. They’ve seen this movie before: a viral character peaks, margins compress, and the next act is either a Marvel-style universe or a garage sale. Pop Mart insists it is “more than Labubu,” yet the doll still pays the rent. Until the company proves another IP can hijack the algorithm, the stock will trade like a meme coin with logistics costs.
Bottom line: a 22% haircut is not a buying opportunity; it’s the market’s way of asking “What’s your next Labubu?” Silence is expensive.