Has Pop Mart's Bubble Burst? Nope.
⏰ Fri, Jun 20, 2025 @ 2:30 PM PST
🐟 Published from Seattle, WA, USA
🔨 Built by Chase Burns Broderick
Friday’s 6% sell-off in Hong Kong isn’t bubble bursting, it’s a reality check traders should have priced in weeks ago.
This morning’s headlines:
China's Warning on Blind-Box Toys Sends Pop Mart Shares Sliding - Bloomberg
Labubu-maker’s shares slump as Chinese state media calls for stricter regulation - CNBC
If you only read the headlines, it seems like Pop Mart’s popped.
It’s fine.
Pop Mart’s headline‑grabbing stock drop today (in Seattle, it’s Friday, June 20th)—about 6 % in Hong Kong after state media urged tighter rules on blind‑box toys and Morgan Stanley quietly took the stock off its China Focus List—is more noise than narrative shift.
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Let’s go to the source.
People’s Daily (Chinese state media) ran a “People’s Livelihood Probe” editorial (by Wang Xinyue and Jin Bo) warning that blind‑card and blind‑box culture can essentially groom children for gambling.
Here’s the editorial, plus a follow-up editorial, in their original printing:
And, since no one’s reading that very condensed image, here’s a translation of both pieces.
What actually changed? Not much.
Beijing’s commentariat is framing blind‑box culture as a moral hazard, but policy has not budged. The pieces merely re‑stated the existing rule that bars blind‑box sales to children under eight; no new penalties or enforcement tools were proposed.
My favorite pull quote from the pieces:
"When I take the children out shopping, they don't buy clothes or go to restaurants. When they see the 'Guzi' store, they can't walk and insist on buying blind cards. When they go home at night, they take their tablet and say they are watching online classes, but in fact they are secretly watching the blind card live broadcast. All the pocket money and meal money given to them are saved to buy this," a father told reporters.
Truly radical stuff. Meanwhile, a more interesting side of the story:
China Customs inspectors unpack and log suspected counterfeit Labubu merchandise during a Ningbo warehouse raid, part of a nationwide crackdown that has seized more than 46k fake Pop Mart items this month.
IP enforcement is tightening—against fakes, not Pop Mart
Ningbo Customs announced it intercepted 2,350 blind boxes, 4,410 plushies and ~9,400 Labubu‑branded keychains on 12 June, flagging them as infringements.
Multi‑city seizures estimated over 46,000 counterfeit Labubu toys last week, prompting People’s Daily to warn of a “black‑market chain” feeding scalpers.
Counterfeit factories in Dongguan and Yiwu have begun shutting down after local regulators increased spot‑checks and threatened criminal charges.
Pop Mart also won a 3D‑printing copyright suit this month (this story has been slept on), signaling it will litigate where customs stops fall short.
Bottom line: Beijing’s lens is on copycats and consumer protection, not on curbing the legitimate IP holder. Enforcement can support premium pricing longer‑term by reducing knock‑off supply. For a company, this is healthy regulation and likely a healthy pullback. Some adjustments need to take place, but where’s this all headed?
What’s coming next for Pop Mart? Another marquee event
Retail flashpoints are forcing the brand to diversify—but the data looks good. Not panic-worthy.
U‑turn in London, bling in Shanghai
Remember the scrap outside Stratford Westfield last month? When a Labubu drop devolved into queue‑gate chaos, Pop Mart yanked the character from UK shelves and instead tested a micro‑batch of Hirono necklaces. In weeks, the brand pivoted from A to B.
A:
B:
Two weeks later, the company went all‑in at home: Popop, its first stand‑alone jewelry concept, opened in Shanghai with sell-out items and a queue of lifestyle influencers snaking round.
Early coverage highlights that Gen‑Z shoppers see the pieces as affordable luxury, not toys—a lane with higher margins and zero “loot‑box” regulatory overhang.
Basically: Jewelry lets Pop Mart monetize IP without triggering blind‑box rule‑making. Expect the next overseas test to be the UK, where the trial already proved queues can behave. The US and other markets will likely wait until capacity frees up.
The new waiting list: livestreams
While store drama hogged social feeds, the real distribution story was online: Pop Mart’s first global AliExpress livestream on 17 June pulled an estimated 200k viewers across the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 10 IP lines cleared out inventory on‑air.
And, an important update, yesterday from Global Times:
On Wednesday night, Pop Mart launched the first global online pre-sale of Labubu 3.0—the third-generation vinyl plush toy in the “Big into Energy” series, triggering a strong market response, the Economic Observer Online (EOO) reported.
Official data shows that sales on Pop Mart’s JD flagship store exceeded 300,000 units, while sales on its Tmall flagship store surpassed 700,000 units. The total expected restock across all channels is around 4 to 5 million units. With a unit price of 99 yuan ($13.78), the projected sales revenue is expected to exceed 500 million yuan, according to the EOO report.
The large-scale release of Labubu 3.0 has had a direct impact on the secondary market, with scalper buyback prices dropping sharply. According to the EOO report, the price of a full box (containing six blind boxes) fell from 1,500–2,800 yuan before the presale to 650–800 yuan.
When Pop Mart can meet demand, everyone’s chill.
More factories coming soon
Jefferies notes that Pop Mart’s Vietnam site already handled ≈10 % of total output by end‑2024, and more tooling is shifting there this year.
A recent photo of a Showcase storefront in Canada. | Courtesy Showcase
Pop Mart’s overseas engine is still revving—loudly
🇦🇪 Dubai first. Since handing GCC rights to collectibles chain The Little Things, tie-dyed Big Into Energy Labubus have evolved Dubai-Mall lines into Deliveroo-delivered sell-outs, with Google Trends spikes now radiating from Dubai to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.
🇨🇦 Canada rising. Trend-driven specialty retailer Showcase is Pop Mart’s leading retailer in Canada. CEO Samir Kulkarni told me over email last week that demand for Labubu has “skyrocketed over 1,000% in the past year,” calling Labubu “one of the largest toy trends we’ve seen in 30 years of business.” On the queue question—he joked that “crowd-control worries are overblown; Canadians are too polite to shove.” (I’ll have more on the Canadian market soon.)
🇮🇳 India. Even without a single official outlet, a mid-June Instagram Story from cricket icon Rohit Sharma catapulted Labubu into Times of India and NDTV headlines, showing that pure social buzz alone can light up a market still served only by grey-market importers.
Put together, these snapshots make Friday’s stock wobble look like little more than normal breathing room.
Next stop: Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands
Pop Mart has confirmed that POP Toy Show Singapore 2025 will take over the Sands Expo & Convention Centre—Halls A, B & C—on 22‑24 August 2025. Building on last year’s “Dimoo in the Garden City” hit, the 2025 edition scales up floor space and shifts the spotlight to Hirono‑themed exclusives.
Marina Bay Sands, fun fact, is the closing image of the movie Crazy Rich Asians.
Wrapping up
Retail scuffles and state‑media hand‑wringing make great headlines, but the fundamentals tilt the other way: Channel mix is evolving. Product mix is evolving. Supply chain is evolving. The brand is still comping triple‑digit growth abroad, structurally widening gross margin, and turning blind‑box IP into jewelry, apparel and theme‑park attractions.
This story still points up and to the right.
