Duan Yongping said something quite interesting on Snowball on March 30th: "Retract the statement that I don't invest in Pop Mart." As soon as he said that, the market was stunned—because Pop Mart just released a spectacular annual report (revenue of 37.1 billion, profit of 13 billion, growth rates of 185% and 284%), then gave a conservative guidance of "no less than 20% growth by 2026," and the stock price plummeted over 30% in two days.

At this point, Old Duan used a physics analogy: the "growth rate" the market is discussing is actually "acceleration" in physics. Investment is about the total future volume, which is speed multiplied by time. A decrease in acceleration doesn't mean the speed is slowing down.

This immediately made me think of Apple. In 2012-2013, Apple's revenue growth rate dropped from 40%-70% to single digits, even experiencing its first quarterly decline in ten years, with the stock price falling over 40% from its high. The narrative at that time was exactly the same as today’s Pop Mart: penetration rate peaking, insufficient innovation, Samsung stealing market share, and high growth coming to an end.

And then? Apple never returned to 40% growth, but with steady growth of 10%-20% and a huge profit volume, its stock price increased tenfold from that low point. In 2016, there was another slowdown when iPhone sales declined for the first time annually, causing market panic again. But during that slowdown, Apple built up its services business.

Old Duan’s ability to hold onto Apple through three "growth slowdown crashes" relies on this framework: don’t focus on acceleration, focus on speed multiplied by time.

Can Pop Mart replicate this? Some aspects are indeed similar. The business structure during the slowdown is improving: IP matrix diversification (6 IPs over 2 billion, 17 IPs over 100 million), overseas revenue share rising to 43.8%. The management actively slowed down at the peak to give conservative guidance, which is exactly the style Old Duan prefers.

But there’s a fundamental difference: Apple’s moat strengthens over time—your photos, apps, and iCloud are all locked into its ecosystem, making migration costs higher and higher. Pop Mart’s logic is different: consumers today buy LABUBU, but tomorrow they can switch to any other brand at no cost. Its moat isn’t user lock-in but the continuous output capability of its IP incubation system.

After LABUBU, it launched CRYBABY and Star People, proving that this machine is running. But the lifecycle of IP is inherently more uncertain than hardware ecosystems, so this machine cannot stop.