Labubu 热潮退去，Pop Mart 能否维持增长？

Pop Mart warned investors that the third quarter would be ugly and now it shows. 

The company said in its voluntary business update that revenue for the three months to September fell 45 to 50 per cent a year earlier, with all regions going backward.

Sales in the Americas dropped 70 to 75 per cent, Asia-Pacific outside mainland China fell 65 to 70 per cent, and Europe and other markets declined 50 to 55 per cent. Mainland China, by far the steadiest part of the business, slipped 25 to 30 per cent. 

Investors had braced for a fall, just not one this steep. JPMorgan had pencilled in a decline of about 37 per cent in a note published on October 21. When trading opened on October 28, Pop Mart shares dropped as much as 6 per cent to HK$123.80, an 18-month low. CNBC noted the stock has now lost more than 30 per cent this year. 

A base that was never going to repeat 

However, the damage was foreseeable. The third quarter of 2025 was the biggest in Pop Mart’s history. Revenue that quarter rose 245 to 250 per cent, with overseas sales up 365 to 370 per cent, as Labubu’s plush bag charms moved from collector shelves and onto handbags around the world. 

On the analyst call, chief operating officer Si De named that comparison as the main reason for this year’s decline.

If third-quarter revenue rose about three-and-a-half times in 2025 and has now roughly halved, Pop Mart is still selling around 70 to 90 per cent more than it did in the same quarter of 2024. In Mainland China alone, third-quarter revenue is roughly double its 2024 level. The company has not collapsed. It has come down from a peak that was never a realistic base.

Where the customers go 

In Mainland China, offline sales, which cover Pop Mart’s own stores and its vending-style roboshops, fell only 5 to 10 per cent, and that was against a year-earlier quarter in which offline revenue had risen 130 to 135 per cent. Online sales in China fell 45 to 50 per cent.

Senior vice-president Chu Yin told analysts that store footfall still grew in the quarter and that the number of first-time brand customers rose at a double-digit rate. The pressure came from traffic on third-party e-commerce platforms and visits to the company’s online blind-box draw, both of which surged during the Labubu frenzy and have since faded.

The same pattern explains the collapse abroad. Si De said much of last year’s overseas boom happened online because Pop Mart had relatively few stores outside China at the time, and that online traffic was recovering more slowly than store traffic. Revenue from the Americas rose 748 per cent in 2025 to RMB6.81 billion, or 18.3 per cent of group sales, much of it driven by social-media demand that the company had no physical network to hold on to.

Pop Mart’s response is to rebuild overseas stores. It set out to lift its US store count from 72 to more than 100 this year. It has also secured flagship sites on Fifth Avenue and in Times Square in New York. Management said overseas traffic had levelled off in most markets by the third quarter and expects every region to grow sequentially in the fourth-quarter holiday season. It also expects China to post full-year growth

How the monster lost its bite

None of this is a surprise to anyone who watched Labubu’s resale prices. The Monsters, the character family that includes Labubu, generated RMB14.2 billion last year. In the first half of 2026, its revenue fell 7.5 per cent to RMB4.45 billion, the first decline on record, and its share of sales dropped to 26 per cent from 34.7 per cent a year earlier. 

Part of the cooling was engineered. Pop Mart raised Labubu output roughly tenfold to fight scalpers, and resale prices for many models fell by more than half, with some slipping below retail. Yicai Global reported last December that several Labubu products were trading under their shelf price on Chinese secondhand platforms, prompting some resellers to say they would stop buying.

Flooding the market was a reasonable way to reclaim margin from the grey market. But it also exposed how much of the demand was speculative. Morningstar analyst Jeff Zhang told Reuters last year that resellers probably made up a significant share of first-hand purchases, which means falling resale prices removed buyers as well as profits for middlemen.

Can Pop Mart grow again?

Founder and chief executive Wang Ning set a target of at least 20 per cent revenue growth for 2026 in March, describing the year as a pit stop to refuel and change tyres after a breakneck 2025. By August, he conceded the company would most likely miss it. 

Management is now pointing to the fourth quarter. Si De said every region is expected to grow from the third quarter during the holiday season, and the company expects China to post full-year growth. Its Fifth Avenue and Times Square flagships in New York are due to open. 

Pop Mart is also leaning on a wider portfolio. Six characters each generated more than RMB1 billion in revenue in the first half, and Twinkle Twinkle grew 580.6 per cent to RMB2.65 billion. JPMorgan, however, said newer launches including Supertutu, Merodi and KeyA had soft first-run sales.

Further reading: Can Pop Mart survive Labubu fading?

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