Pop Mart CEO becomes China's youngest billionaire after fuzzy creatures go viral
The CEO of Pop Mart has become China’s youngest billionaire after a range of fuzzy creatures have gone viral.
Labubu has taken the internet by storm, with the plushie toys becoming the most highly sought after product by Pop Mart.
After going viral on TikTok and Instagram, the stores have seen long lines form hours before they open with people hoping to get their hands on a Labubu.
The toy was first created by artist Kasing Lung back in 2015, and are charactized by their fanged smiles and rabbit-like ears.
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Labubu toys are sold in blind boxes, meaning customers don’t know which color they’re getting before they open it up.
The owner of Pop Mart, WWang Ning, secured the exclusive rights to sell merch for Labubu back in 2019 and the range has become so popular that he has since achieved billionaire status.
According to Forbes, Wang has become the 10th richest person in China with a net worth of $22.7 billion.
At just 38 years old, this has made him the youngest billionaire in the country.
Other billionaires in China include Mag Huateng, who is the co-founder of the gaming and tech company Tencent, and Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok.
So far, in 2025 alone, the price of Pop Mart’s shares in Hong Kong have tripled in value, in large part due to the hype around Labubu.
As reported by Forbes, Deutsche Bank analyst Jessie Xu wrote in a research note about the hysteria around the dolls: “It is rare for a comic/toy IP [intellectual property] to break the culture wall and be embraced by both Asian cultures as well as mainstream Western pop stars and sports stars.”
Last month, Labubu plushies were pulled from UK shelves after fights were reported to have broken out in lines for Pop Mart.
In a statement, the firm revealed that it had put a pause on selling Labubu items in all of its 16 UK-based stores for now in order to ‘prevent any potential safety issues’.
And this seems to be an issue in the US too after a store in San Francisco announced this month that it would be no longer selling Labubu toys after ‘a series of thefts, fights involving pepper spray, and overall chaos broke out in the past two months’.
It doesn’t look like the popularity is dying down anytime soon, with resellers making hundreds of dollars selling the toys that everyone is trying to get their hands on.