New Stock Analysis | "Middle-aged Men's POP MART" breaks through the Hong Kong stock market: Capital game of Copper Master IP Harvesting and Copper Price Fluctuations

In the consumer market, the integration of culture and commerce is becoming a trend of continuous expansion. From cultural and creative products to domestic trend brands, more and more companies are trying to transform traditional cultural elements into scalable consumer goods. In the world of trendy toys, people are used to discussing the "blind box economy" of POP MART. But in another hidden and vast niche track - the bronze cultural and creative field, a company known as the "POP MART for middle-aged men" is trying to knock on the door of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. After experiencing the termination of A-share counseling and the failure of the first Hong Kong listing, the Bronze Master, who re-submitted the application, recently went through a hearing at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, one step closer to listing in Hong Kong. With improvements in traditional lost wax casting techniques and the use of IP authorization, the Bronze Master has grown into the industry leader in market share in just ten years. However, under the multiple pressures of a revenue structure highly dependent on online sales, fluctuating net profits, and fluctuating bronze costs, the Bronze Master's prospectus, is it a second leap in brand value, or a reluctant breakthrough in the game of capital? Cultural accumulation and IP operation, creating a "kingdom of trendy toys for middle-aged people"? It is understood that the core competitiveness of the Bronze Master lies in its deep integration of ancient lost wax bronze casting techniques with modern industrial design and IP operation, opening up a standardized brand path in the highly fragmented metal crafts market. According to a Frost & Sullivan report, the Chinese bronze cultural and creative craft product market is a highly concentrated niche area, with a market size of approximately 1.576 billion yuan by 2024, with the top three participants collectively holding over 70% of the market share. Among them, the Bronze Master leads significantly with a total revenue share of 35.0% and a high online revenue share of 44.1%, far ahead of the industry's second place. This dominance is due to its unique product positioning: transforming traditional expensive copper art products through industrial improvements into relatively affordable and collectible cultural and creative products. However, the hidden worry behind the prosperity lies in the "ceiling" effect of the track itself. Currently, the Bronze Master has already occupied over one-third of the market, and its annual revenue has long hovered between 500 million and 600 million yuan. On the IP operation front, the Bronze Master's strategy is characterized by "self-developed IP as the main, authorized IP as the auxiliary." According to the prospectus, the vast majority of the company's income comes from self-developed IP products, and from 2022 to 2024, the proportion of income contributed by self-developed IP-based SKU remained around 90%. To break through the limitations of the niche market, the Bronze Master has recently been aggressively pursuing an "IP harvest" model, enriching the product pipeline through active licensing cooperation with globally renowned IPs such as "The Avengers," "Transformers," "Game of Thrones," and "Nezha 2". The prospectus shows that from 2022 to the first nine months of 2025, the revenue generated by the company's top five IPs accounted for about 20% to 24% of the total revenue. It is worth mentioning that the endorsement of IPs has indeed brought a traffic dividend to the company, especially the launch of the authorized official hand-made of "Nezha 2" which attracted a large number of "Bronze fans". However, the potential risk of this model lies in the high copyright licensing fees and marketing expenses that are gradually eroding profit margins. For example, the significant decline in the company's net profit in 2023 is largely attributed to increased sales and marketing expenses, as well as the pains of technological upgrades. By 2024, the total number of new SKUs introduced by the Bronze Master had reached 707, effectively maintaining the brand's freshness and market response speed through high-frequency iterations. In order to break through the growth bottleneck brought by a single material, the Bronze Master has accelerated the horizontal extension of its material portfolio in recent years, establishing brands like "Xijiang Gold Shop," "Yueyin," and "Happy Little General," extending its reach to the fields of gold, silver, wooden cultural and creative products, and even plastic trendy toys. Seeking certainty growth in the hardcore track Despite having a leading market share in the industry, the Bronze Master's financial performance during the historical period shows a certain degree of volatility, facing challenges in profit stability. It is understood that from 2022 to 2024, the company's revenues were 503 million yuan, 506 million yuan, and 571 million yuan respectively, achieving growth, but the growth rate significantly slowed down in 2023. During the same period, the company's annual profit showed a "V-shaped" reversal trend, with profits dropping to 44.13 million yuan in 2023, a 22.5% year-on-year decrease, mainly due to a temporary reduction in production volume caused by upgrades in production technology and significant increases in sales, marketing, and research and development expenses. By 2025, due to confirming approximately 12.8 million yuan in listing expenses in the first three quarters, and being squeezed by rising raw material costs, the company's net profit decreased by 22.0% compared to the same period in 2024, and the net profit margin narrowed from 13.8% to 9.3%. This situation of "increasing revenue but not increasing profit" reveals the financial pressure of declining consumer purchasing willingness and average transaction price under macroeconomic fluctuations for cultural and creative products as freely disposable expenses. In fact, the Bronze Master's online average transaction price has dropped significantly from 958 yuan in 2022 to 598 yuan in the first nine months of 2025, reflecting the company's strategy of transformation towards entry-level SKUs to reach a broader customer base, but also indirectly confirming the changing consumer environment. Furthermore, the high reliance on online platforms is another major risk that the Bronze Master must face. The prospectus shows that a majority of the company's revenue in China comes from centralized third-party e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, Douyin, and JD, with online sales accounting for about 80% of the total revenue for a long time. While this highly concentrated channel layout initially brought the company high fulfillment efficiency and explosive power in its brand establishment phase, it has become a "double-edged sword" as the brand seeks listing and moves towards mass-market. Over-reliance on third-party e-commerce platforms means that the cost of acquiring traffic is increasing year by year, and the company is susceptible to the influence of platform algorithms and commission policy adjustments. Therefore, since 2024, the Bronze Master has significantly accelerated the expansion of offline direct-operated stores, increasing the number of direct-operated stores from 18 to 36 in a short time, aiming to hedge the risk of plateauing online traffic with immersive spatial displays and increase the sales proportion of high average transaction price products. Moreover, as a raw material-intensive enterprise, the profit-making ability of the Bronze Master is significantly affected by the fluctuation of copper prices, with the direct material cost accounting for a proportion of total operating costs that has long been between 47% and 52%. The continuous rise in copper prices may directly compress the profit margins of the products. As the leader in the bronze cultural and creative track, the success of the Bronze Master lies in giving "cold" metal a lively cultural emotion and accurately capturing the strong purchasing power of middle-aged males. However, under the spotlight of the IPO, issues such as limited market space, skewed sales channels, and questionable profit stability are also revealed. In the wave of the "national trend," can the Bronze Master, with the support of the Hong Kong capital market, transform from a simple "copper-making factory" into a culture and creative platform with continuous innovation capabilities, and break the cycle of declining average transaction prices and traffic anxiety, still requires further validation from the market.