Selling the 8.8 trendy Sunny Sand, unable to tell the story of "affordable POP MART"

The hot screening of "Ne Zha: The Devil Child Rises" during the 2025 Spring Festival has attracted attention from a number of IP derivative product companies, but so far, perhaps only Sunny Sandy has truly leveraged this momentum to impact the capital market.

As a foreign trade company specializing in supporting toys for international food enterprises, the company's revenue for 2023 and 2024 was 107 million yuan and 245 million yuan, respectively.

By the first three quarters of 2025, the sales volume of IP toy products produced by Sunny Sandy reached nearly 60 million pieces, with revenue reaching 386 million yuan, a growth rate of 134.7%, showing explosive growth.

Among them, the head national trend IP derivatives, such as "Ne Zha 2," contributed approximately 196 million yuan in revenue, accounting for 50.8% of total revenue, supporting the company's "half of the empire."

Strong growth has attracted capital attention.

In September 2025, Hillhouse Capital invested 235 million yuan, pushing the post-investment valuation of the company to 3.4 billion yuan.

In December of the same year, Aurora Management invested approximately 48.58 million yuan, further increasing the valuation to 4 billion yuan, reaching 80 times the valuation level of 2019.

"Authentic and affordable" is currently Sunny Sandy's most distinctive label.

While the price of POP MART blind boxes gradually rose from 69 yuan to 79 yuan, Sunny Sandy still insisted on allowing consumers to "buy a whole set for 69 yuan."

As a result, the market has compared the two, hoping that it can tell a scalable story of "8.8 yuan authentic trendy toys" through supply chain efficiency and channel coverage.

However, compared to the main players in the trendy toy industry, Sunny Sandy appears weak. It lacks monopolistic proprietary IP and does not have deeply bound industrial capital to pave the way for it.

To firmly establish itself as the "affordable version of POP MART," it must find a truly sustainable competitive foothold in the C-end market.

Riding the "Ne Zha" Wind

Sunny Sandy's starting point is a typical Chinese manufacturing story.

Founder Yang Jie worked in food promotional toy OEM in his early years, serving international brands such as Danone and Nestlé. After the company settled in Xiangtan, Hunan in 2015, its core business still deeply imprinted the characteristics of the manufacturing industry.

The real turning point occurred after 2020. Faced with pressure from foreign trade, the company decisively shifted to the burgeoning domestic IP licensed toy market, beginning to supply companies such as Bright Dairy, Liangpinpuzi, and Kayo.

This transformation allowed Sunny Sandy to simultaneously hit two windfalls: the maturity of the domestic IP licensing industry and the explosion of public enthusiasm for IP consumption.

The explosive success of "Ne Zha 2" completely accelerated its fate process.

In October 2024, after learning about the film's scheduled release, Sunny Sandy quickly contacted the producers and secured exclusive licensing within two weeks.

The company simultaneously laid out offline channels, cooperating with Wancheng Group to stock products in "Hao Xiang Lai" stores; online, it formed a 20-person live streaming team to start 24-hour peripheral sales on Douyin.

"The popularity of Ne Zha exceeded expectations. The more than 80,000 blind boxes we launched in advance sold out within three days of the film's release," recalled Yang Zhenlin, assistant to the chairman.

On the sixth day of the Lunar New Year, the company's production lines were operating at full capacity, with 60% of the production lines in its five major bases switching to produce Ne Zha peripherals, increasing daily output from 200,000 pieces to 500,000 pieces With rapid response and production capacity assurance, Sunny Sandy has become the first manufacturer to launch official figurines of "Nezha 2," firmly seizing the critical sales window.

Fans of the Nezha IP recalled that in the first month after the movie's explosive success, the most common official merchandise on the market, aside from cards, was the figurines from Sunny Sandy.

From a financial perspective, Sunny Sandy's focus on C-end business has shown results.

In 2023, its "IP Toys+" business (a sales model that combines toys with food, beverages, etc.) accounted for 72% of revenue.

By 2024, both "pure IP toy products" and "IP Toys+" businesses each accounted for half of the revenue.

In the first nine months of 2025, the revenue share of IP toy products surged to 78.3%, becoming the absolute mainstay.

This optimization of product structure directly boosted the overall profitability.

In the first three quarters of 2025, Sunny Sandy's overall gross margin increased to 35.3%, a year-on-year increase of 20.6 percentage points; at the same time, net profit turned from loss to profit, with a net profit margin of 13.4%.

Having tasted the sweetness of a hit product, Sunny Sandy is attempting to transform the "Nezha dividend" into a long-term growth engine, accelerating the expansion of its IP landscape.

The company's IP licensing fees skyrocketed from 6.481 million yuan in 2023 to 50.768 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2025, with the proportion of sales costs rising sharply from 7.3% to 20.3%.

By early 2026, the company had collaborated on over 20 IPs, covering various categories such as domestic trends, sports, animation, and games, delivering a total of 217 product SKUs.

Greater investments are still on the way.

On the balance sheet, the accrued expenses for IP licensing in "other payables" continued to accumulate, rising from 11.978 million yuan in 2023 to 26.844 million yuan in the third quarter of 2025.

This portion represents the "IP credit" that the company has signed but has not yet paid for, indicating that it will continue to face ongoing licensing expenditures in the future.

The Road to Low-Priced Trend Toys is Long and Challenging

Sunny Sandy interprets its advantages in its prospectus: by offering affordable official products, it opens up a vast sinking market for IP owners and helps them reclaim market share from counterfeit goods.

As a company that has transformed from the manufacturing value chain, Sunny Sandy possesses the genes for large-scale production and cost dilution.

To support its affordable model, Sunny Sandy has built a "black light factory," relying on globally leading fully automated production lines to achieve 7×24 hour operations, ensuring a daily production capacity of over one million pieces.

Investors in the consumer sector pointed out to Xin Feng that this model essentially still reflects a B2B mindset. In China's trend toy market, advantages on the production side are difficult to form competitive barriers; the core that truly determines terminal sales lies in the sustained appeal of the IP and the depth of channel reach.

For example, POP MART has built a brand moat with its own IP and direct sales channels, while card game companies have deeply bound themselves to leading IPs and established large distribution networks.

Other players also have significant industrial capital behind them providing key resources.

In the same "food and toy" track, Jin Tian Animation is supported by the Ultraman IP agent Xinchuanhua; the collectible card brand Suplay has attracted investment from miHoYo; and 52TOYS received investment from Wanda before its IPO sprint; TOP TOY, backed by the "King of Store Opening" Miniso, has a natural channel network.

However, some seasoned toy industry professionals have expressed to Xinfeng that the path of Sangni Sandi is not a typical toy logic, but rather closer to "IP-based fast-moving consumer goods."

"If it can maintain its low-price advantage and choose matching distribution channels, it may indeed open up differentiated survival and development space," said the industry professional.

At this stage, Sangni Sandi appears somewhat thin in terms of IP control, channel layout, and capital support.

In terms of channels, although its products cover over 32,000 retail points, about two-thirds are concentrated in one leading bulk snack channel, indicating a clearly singular structure.

On the IP side, its current performance still heavily relies on two major hits that will debut in 2025.

In Douyin and Tmall flagship stores, products from "Nezha 2" and "Wang Wang Mountain Little Monsters" remain the main sales force: the former has total sales of over 900,000 pieces, with estimated sales reaching 70 million yuan; the latter's blind box figures have also sold 150,000 pieces.

These two IPs not only have weak foundations but also have contracts with Sangni Sandi that last only one year.

The film and television industry itself is highly volatile, and the probability of successfully betting on and securing national-level hits like "Nezha 2" in advance is extremely low; success like that of "Wang Wang Mountain Little Monsters" is similarly hard to come by.

The low-price strategy also limits the complexity and creativity of product forms, making it difficult to build product depth and player stickiness like brands such as 52TOYS through a matrix of static, movable, and transforming mecha products.

Therefore, the first-mover advantage and influence established by Sangni Sandi with "Nezha 2" are not solid in the low-threshold, fast-copying affordable toy market.

In the long run, adhering to an affordable mass-market route also means that the company is unlikely to pursue a "small but beautiful" selective model, but must continuously chase popular IPs, bear high licensing fees, and compete head-on with many competitors who have obtained similar licenses.

Beyond the sinking market, Sangni Sandi is also seeking opportunities overseas, obtaining licenses for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in over 60 countries and regions, revealing its ambition to go global.

Sangni Sandi's inventory has surged from 33.5 million yuan at the end of 2023 to 126 million yuan by the end of September 2025, an increase of 276%.

Before the "Nezha" dividend fades, whether Sangni Sandi can establish a sustainable competitive barrier remains an unresolved question