Pop Mart: China’s soft power
Analysts poring over data to work out the location of China’s next attempt to flex its global ambitions generally concentrate on the more obvious routes, such as military and tech. They could be forgiven for giving no more than a cursory glance at the soft toy sector, so they may have overlooked Pop Mart’s astonishing success in colonising the globe with furry elf dolls. And the long march of Labubu shows no sign of slowing down.
Driven by endorsement from luminaries such as Lisa from K-pop sensation Blackpink and the occasional Kardashian, this peculiar-looking creature, with pointy ears, huge eyes and a nine-toothed grin is a rare example of a Chinese consumer brand going global, with 39% of sales last year coming from its 130 stores and 192 vending machines outside mainland China.
Pop Mart generally sells the toys in blind boxes, so the customer keeps on buying in the hope of lucking into a rare special edition — unless of course you are the Singaporean grandmother who has gone viral on TikTok for her superpower of being able to shake a box and work out what’s inside.
Pop Mart’s share price has flown by 500% in the past year, giving it a healthy market capitalisation of about $40bn, more than double that of US market leaders Hasbro and Mattel combined.
Demand for the dolls has reached such a level that Pop Mart has had to suspend sales in stores in London and Seoul when customers started a full-on brawl, and its runaway success has made founder Wang Ning the 10th-richest man in China.
Sunnova: Sun sets on solar
These are dark days indeed for the renewables sector in the US, with leading residential solar company Sunnova the latest to file for bankruptcy as it blames “uncertainty over the nation’s commitment” to solar for its woes.
Sixteen major clean-energy companies filed for bankruptcy in the US last year, and with nine already doing so in 2025, this could prove an even more deadly year for the sector. With the Trump administration loud in its support for the oil and gas industries, the engine has been pushed firmly into reverse.
Sunnova stated its commitment to “turning homes into energy-saving powerhouses from sea to shining sea”, but it was always heavily reliant on Biden-era tax credits to soften the blow of high upfront installation costs to its customers.
The “big, beautiful bill” put those credits to the sword, and while the Senate pushed back the timeline for the scrapping of some of the credits, it has created a climate of uncertainty that has led to demand dropping off a cliff, resulting in the likelihood of significant job losses.
While some consumers will still have the luxury to opt for solar on planet-saving grounds, for others it is more of an economic consideration, and the scrapping of tax credits turns a pretty marginal proposition into an expensive one.
Solar technology has made huge advances in the past decade, with panels becoming far more efficient and costing less, but at scale it is always going to be intermittent and unreliable, and the batteries required to store electricity in any meaningful way remain prohibitively expensive. Sadly, the industry may have had its moment in the sun.
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