In an era of national life, will Bubble Mart be abandoned first?

Need to prove again that they have the ability to create global hits

撰文/ 星晚

編輯/ 陳鄧新

排版/ Annalee

On October 27, the third quarter business performance disclosed by Bubble Mart brought the last bit of luck to the capital market. Overall revenue fell by 45% to 50% year-on-year, and all four major regions were spared. The decline in the American market even reached 70% to 75%.

Just a year ago, this company was still immersed in the carnival of LABUBU that swept the world. In the third quarter of 2025, the overall growth rate was as high as 245% to 250%, and the annual revenue was 37.120 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 184.7%. However, in just one year, the carnival turned into self-excitement.

In fact, the halved number itself is not complicated. What is complicated are the quietly changing choices behind the numbers. When a young man who was once willing to pay several times the premium for a vinyl plush toy starts passing by a Bubble Mart store and no longer stops, what happens is far more than just a downgrade in consumption.

The underlying logic of the trendy toy business is undergoing a brutal return from social currency to shelf goods. When all the people enter the era of living, scalpers and speculators are not the only ones who will be lost in this return. And when a LABUBU no longer excites people, what is left in the hands of Bubble Mart?

After the break, LABUBU is no longer an investment

On the first floor of Joy City in Chaoyang, Beijing, the bubble mart box drawer machine is still lit, but the queue scene has not appeared for a long time.

Feng Qian, a blind box enthusiast who works nearby, described her recent observations: “When LABUBU was the hottest last year, there were only seven or eight people in front of the box drawer machine when new products were released, and many people cleared the aisles at once. When they opened the products and found that they were not hidden items, they put them on the second-hand platform on the spot.”

Feng Qian continued: “Nowadays, people occasionally stop in front of the machine, and most of them just take a look and leave. Everyone seems to have suddenly woken up. Spending sixty or seventy yuan to smoke something that you may not like and immediately lose half of the money is not that fun.”

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Suosuo, who has been playing blind box for five years, has also found that the market has obviously cooled down in the past six months. There are nearly ten groups about Bubble Mart in her WeChat, including those in the same city exchanging babies, exchanging IPs, keeping up with market trends to acquire babies, and even forming groups to snatch babies. But no matter which group they belong to, they have all become quiet now.

“Every Friday New Exclusive Day used to be very lively. Everyone would use up all the new exclusive cards, and then discuss who has the best-looking baby and predict the popularity of this series. If you don’t open the group for more than ten minutes, you will get 999+ news.” Suosuo told Zinc Dial that in the past six months, all groups have become deserted, and many former baby friends have also given up.

THE MONSTERS 10th Anniversary Tour Exhibition

Direct evidence of this sobriety is written on the price tags on the second-hand market. After the launch of LABUBU’s “Retro Barber Shop” vinyl plush series, many regular models broke out immediately after release.

In the trendy entertainment circle, break is a word with watershed significance. It means that scalpers are no longer willing to pay for new products, and that when ordinary consumers open second-hand platforms, they no longer see doubled prices, but resale posts at discounts. Consumers can now buy products that were previously unavailable and needed to be snapped up. Everyone will be happy at first, but as time goes by, consumers realize that the products are no longer so difficult to buy, and their psychological state changes accordingly. The excitement of getting it diminishes, and the scarcity disappears.

Bubble Mart itself is not unaware of this. Chief Operating Officer Sid directly listed the high base as the primary reason for the decline in performance during the conference call. The third quarter of 2025 is the “highest sales quarter in history” of Bubble Mart. The global popularity of LABUBU has pushed the year-on-year base to a peak.

However the real problem isHow many of the people who will flood in in 2025 are not coming for Bubble Mart, but for LABUBU, which can make money?

Revenue share of Starman series jumps to second place

Data from the THE MONSTERS series gives part of the answer. In the first half of 2026, the revenue of this series including LABUBU was 4.454 billion yuan, while the revenue of this series in 2025 was 14.161 billion yuan. The gap is not small, and there was negative revenue growth for the first time since the IP exploded, with the revenue share shrinking from 34.7% to 26%.

Management explained this as the price of actively promoting “multi-IP balance”, but the signal seen by the market is more straightforward:When the only super IP that supports global popularity begins to ebb, and the successor has not yet proven that it has the same level of explosive power, the growth story loses its most critical anchor.。

In the first half of the year, the Xingxingren series revenue was 2.65 billion yuan, a surge of 580.6%. The revenue scale jumped to the second largest IP of the group. However, its size and degree of out-of-circle are still not on the same level as the global impact brought by LABUBU at its peak.

The online rout coincided with the decline in the four major regions

A closer look at Bubble Mart’s third quarter report reveals an easily overlooked but highly informative detail: China’s offline channel revenue only dropped 5% to 10% year-on-year, while online channels plummeted 45% to 50%.

Against the backdrop of overall halving, the resilience of offline stores seems particularly abrupt. Some people interpret this as the special nature of blind box consumer goods, that is, consumers are still willing to walk into the store, touch the real thing, and enjoy the moment of unboxing. But the other side of the fact is that the cliff-like decline of online channels has just punctured the false prosperity that was previously built up by traffic and topics.

LABUBU’s global popularity in 2025 is largely a spectacle driven by social media. Unboxing videos on TikTok, celebrity street shots on Instagram, and “hidden style guides” on Little Red Book all create a sense of urgency that if you don’t own something, you’ll be left behind.

Online channels are the most efficient way to monetize this sense of urgency. Even if there are no Bubble Mart stores or box-drawing machines in your living area, you can still place an order online with one click and have it delivered to your home. It’s just that when the heat subsides and the sense of urgency dissipates, the shortest transformation path is naturally the first to collapse.

The reason why the decline in offline stores was moderate is not because more people came to the store to consume, but because the offline scene itself carries some non-LABUBU, more daily consumer needs, such as choosing a birthday gift for a friend, or simply taking a child for a walk.

Bubble Mart City Park

in other words,The rapid decline in online channels has squeezed out the water injected by speculative buying and impulsive following in the past two years. After the water is squeezed out, what remains is the real and sustainable consumption base.. But how big this fundamental market is and whether it can support a company with a market value of more than HK$170 billion is another question.

As for who is abandoning Bubble Mart? The answer lies between “have bought” and “still buying”.

To understand who abandoned Bubble Mart, we need to distinguish between two types of consumers.

The first category is people who buy and leave. In a certain month of 2025, they completed their first trendy consumption in their lives because of a certain LABUBU short video or a certain star’s picture. The decision-making logic of this consumption is not essentially different from buying a cup of Internet celebrity milk tea or checking into a newly opened bakery.

When the topic cools down, their purchasing behavior will naturally stop. The plunge of online channels in the third quarter report is largely the result of the collective withdrawal of this group of people. Their abandonment was complete, but also predictable.

The second category is people who are still buying, but buying less. They may have never owned a LABUBU, but there are MOLLY, SKULLPANDA, Zsiga, Polar or Starman in their cabinets. Its management revealed in the conference call that the Asia-Pacific market no longer relied on a single IP in the third quarter, and six IPs jointly contributed to the main performance. This is certainly a structural improvement.

However, the gap in revenue between “six pretty good IPs” and “one IP that the whole world queues up to buy” cannot be filled by equilibrium.

Bubble Mart total revenue trend

What’s more worth mentioning is thatThe performance of Bubble Mart’s third quarter report has a strong causal relationship with the rapid decline of overseas markets.。

The financial report shows that Bubble Mart’s overall revenue in the third quarter of 2026 fell by 45% to 50% year-on-year. Among them, the Chinese market dropped by 25% to 30%, the Americas dropped by 70% to 75%, and Europe and other regions dropped by 50% to 55%.

As for the reasons, on the one hand, the overall popularity of the brand and IP has declined. On the other hand, when Bubble Mart was at its peak, a large number of overseas buyers and scalpers were purchasing blind boxes and peripherals in large quantities. Even though overseas pricing was higher and transportation costs were high, because of the high domestic premiums and high profits, overseas stores were also snapped up. As the popularity recedes, this audience group will naturally shrink rapidly, making it difficult to support overseas store sales.

As a kind of emotional consumer goods, the demand elasticity of trendy toys is much greater than that of functional goods.. When a young man begins to feel that spending 70 yuan to buy a blind box is “not worth it”, he will not hesitate for half a year like changing mobile phone brands, but will turn around and leave, rarely looking back.

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