Once richer than Peter Thiel, Wang Ning of Pop Mart sees $ 6 billion disappear with the Labubu media threatening

The “thin” doll was displayed by celebrities from David Beckham to Lisa de Blackpink, pushing the resale prices to dizzying peaks.

But once “cool hunters” move, Wall Street does it too, and Wang discovers it in the expensive way.

Since the peak of Pop Mart on August 26, the title has plunged around 20%, erasing $ 13 billion in market capitalization – a quarter of the value of his business – as the craze shows his age. The stock of Hong Kong, based in Beijing, continued to dive on Monday, sliding up to 9% in its steepest fall of a day since the United States unveiled the prices of the “Liberation Day” in April.

Wang has personally lost $ 6 billion in its own net value since the end of August, according to a Forbes estimate.

The Sharp withdrawal follows a degradation Monday of JPMorgan, analysts warning that the company’s assessment leaves a “small margin of error” after an increase of 427% in the last year.

Pop Mart did not immediately respond to Fortune Comment request.

Frave in Comedown

For a large part of 2024 and early 2025, Pop Mart was the darling of the Hang Seng index while the Labu dolls triggered a frenzy across Asia. But a toy with a media threw built on its rarity of engineering – the labious dolls are notoriously difficult to collect and have a prosperous resale and counterfeit market – does not forever prepare.

“The whole is like the inevitable life cycle of something that becomes Faddish, knocks saturation, then begins to sparkle,” said Brook Duffy, social media researcher and communication teacher at Cornell University, said Fortune. “Once too much attention is provided on a trend, she immediately loses her social currency.”

She compared the climb and dropping out of Labubu to the Tickle Me Elmo Craze of the 1990s: first impossible to find, then suddenly everywhere, and ultimately cooler.

The cheeky growth of Pop Mart has not yet reversed. Sales have increased in the past two years, income has more than doubled in 2024 and still climbing 200% in the first half of 2025.

But there are the first signs of fatigue. The resale prices for Labu collecting objects slip and analysts fear that the company remains strongly dependent on a single product.

“As soon as you saw celebrities showing them, it was the tilting point for generation Z,” said Duffy. “What was rare was suddenly felt commercial.”

JPMorgan analysts echo this skepticism when they demotive, reducing their target price to $ 300 HK out of 400 HK $. While popmart income and collaborations and collaborations with brands like Uniqlo have struck their brands, future projects, including a series of Labu animation and interactive toy lines, have a speculative value so far, said JPMorgan.

Pop Mart, in other words, is a victim of his own success. After a stock market rally five times in the past year, even minor disappointments – lower resale values ​​or whispering on product quality – can trigger an excessive sale. So, which in the past looked like a story of flight on the run now seems to be a precarious bet.

A stay test

The deep question is whether Labu can have a “gentle landing” of its craze and evolve from fashion to franchise.

“The novelty will always disappear,” said Duffy. “You just don’t know when. This unpredictability is what maintains marketing specialists at night.”

Pop Mart bets big on expansion, seeking to operate 200 foreign stores and the “Roboshops” of automatic distributors by the end of the year, and aims for foreign markets to contribute 60% of profits by 2027. Labu alone represents more than a third of sales.

But maintaining cultural relevance is more difficult than retailing scale.

“Right now, you look like a critical inflection point,” said Duffy. “In the social media era, the media threshing cycle moves at a dizzying speed. Something that was everywhere yesterday can feel overexposed today. ”

For Wang, the check clock: find a way to keep the labu fresh, or may look at its mascot of a billion dollars fades in the toy box of past modes.

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