Pop Mart Shares Fall as Labubu Maker Signals It Could Miss Full-Year Target

By Megan Cheah

Shares of Pop Mart International fell Friday as the Labubu doll maker signaled it might be unable to reach its full-year revenue goal after first-half results missed estimates.

The stock declined as much as 8.8% to 140.10 Hong Kong dollars, equivalent to US$17.86, before paring losses to trade 4.2% lower. This brings its year-to-date decline to over 20%, a far cry from its massive gains in 2024 and 2025.

There were little signs of Pop Mart's explosive growth from last year in its interim earnings released Thursday, as top-line growth decelerated.

Revenue for the six months ended June rose 24% from the same period a year ago to 17.17 billion yuan, equivalent to US$2.55 billion, slowing sharply from the threefold gain seen a year earlier and missing the 37% rise expected in a Visible Alpha poll.

Chief Executive Wang Ning said in an earnings briefing that the company is likely to miss its target of 20% top-line growth this year, noting that it encountered more difficulties than expected.

Labubu fatigue, a global slowdown and margin pressure point to a harder landing in the second half for the Beijing-based toy company, said Deutsche Bank's Sammi Xu.

While Labubu remained central to the company's revenue, the share of sales from the Monsters collection--which includes the jagged-tooth, ugly-cute character--accounted for about a quarter of overall first-half sales, down from roughly one-third a year earlier.

The DB analyst doesn't expect Pop Mart's 2025 success to be repeated in 2026, noting that the management described part of 2025's performance as driven by "luck". Signs that the company could miss its annual target also reflects heightened uncertainty into the latter half of the year, Xu added.

"[Intellectual-property] momentum has become harder to predict after Labubu's peak and new launches have yet to show comparable traction," the analyst said.

Write to Megan Cheah at megan.cheah@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 20, 2026 23:20 ET (03:20 GMT)