The "middle-aged people's Pop Mart" invested by Lei Jun has gone public in Hong Kong.

Ask AI · How can Copper Chef learn from Xiaomi’s model to rise in an unfashionable niche?

Reader Preview

THECAPITAL

The “Pop Mart” of middle-aged people

This article is 4,798 Chinese characters, about 6.4 minutes

By | Wang Tao Editor | Wu Ren

Source | #Rongzhong Finance

(ID：thecapital)

Another “Xiaomi-style” company is getting ready to go public.

Today, Hangzhou Copper Chef Cultural & Creative (Group) Co., Ltd. officially struck the bell at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The brand, known in the industry as “the Pop Mart for middle-aged people,” started in Jiande, Zhejiang. In more than a decade, it turned previously niche copper handicraft products into cultural and creative offerings accepted by the mainstream consumer market.

As of before this piece was published, Copper Chef’s share price was HK$36 per share, and its market value was HK$2.3 billion.

As an entrepreneurial company that Lei Jun described as “the most Xiaomi-like business outside the Xiaomi ecosystem,” Copper Chef has carried a clear Xiaomi DNA from the very beginning. Founder Yu Guang’s “divest to a lower dimension, focus, pursue excellence to the extreme, and build a reputation through word of mouth” Xiaomi playbook has also won consecutive bets from Sinovation Capital and the Xiaomi ecosystem chain.

Roughly calculated, in the Copper Chef project, Xiaomi-related capital invested a total of 160 million yuan, holding more than 22% in aggregate—making it the company’s largest institutional shareholder. With this IPO, Xiaomi’s Copper Chef stock is worth about HK$550 million, becoming the biggest winner of the IPO.

With its successful listing on the Hong Kong market, Copper Chef has stepped onto a brand-new capital stage. But at the same time, real issues—fluctuating profitability performance, upward pressure on raw material copper prices, continued decline in average order value, and the lack of a formed second growth curve—are also laid out in front of the public.

Whether the absolute leader in a niche segment can use the headwind from capital market funding to unlock broader growth space will ultimately depend on time to answer.

Xiaomi-related capital strengthens support from the sidelines

Copper Chef’s story begins with a “pitfall” experience of founder Yu Guang.

In 2013, after more than a decade deeply engaged in the bathroom exports industry, Yu Guang wanted to place a copper Guan Gong statue in his office. But when he asked about the price, he was quoted 1.2 million yuan for a gilded-copper Guan Gong the size of one meter tall. With years of hands-on experience in manufacturing, he quickly worked out the math in his head: at that time, the market price of one ton of copper was around 50k yuan. Even after adding the costs of gold leaf and labor, it was still far from that figure.

“Why spend this ridiculous amount of money? I might as well make it myself.” Once the idea popped up, he couldn’t shake it off.

In March of the same year, Yu Guang formally established Copper Chef, pulling out of the bathroom industry—whose outlook was bright—and plunging into copper handicraft products, an extremely unpopular niche segment. At the time, almost nobody believed in this cross-industry move. In the public’s fixed perception, copper handicraft products always fall into two extremes: either low-priced travel souvenirs commonly seen at scenic spots’ entrances, or “high-end art pieces” priced absurdly high in antique markets—both of which are far removed from everyday consumer life.

But Yu Guang was certain that between these two extremes lay a huge blank space in the market.

Unlike many entrepreneurs, Yu Guang’s business “awakening” was unusually “cross-border.” He was a die-hard fan of Lei Jun and called himself a “hardcore Mi Fan.” At the start of Copper Chef, he bought every Xiaomi-related book on the market, and fully replicated Lei Jun’s seven-character creed—focus, go to the extreme, word of mouth, and speed—word for word into the traditional category of copper handicrafts.

He also set Copper Chef’s eight-character motto—“divest to a lower dimension, focus, pursue excellence to the extreme, and build a reputation through word of mouth.” Compared against Xiaomi’s operating principles, the added “divest to a lower dimension” is the core: using industrialized standardized thinking to reshape traditional handicrafts, and using the internet’s playbook to pry open this copperware segment, which even offline channels considered niche.

Inspired by Xiaomi’s “Mi Fan Festival,” Copper Chef held the “Copper Fan Heroes Conference.” Former Xiaomi co-founder Li Wanqiang attended to take the stage. The warmth and enthusiasm from the现场 fans shocked him. Afterward, he posted on his朋友圈,感慨ing that he hadn’t expected such a small company, in such an unpopular industry, to have such a crazy fan community.

In May 2014, Copper Chef’s Tmall flagship store officially opened. Among the 50 products launched on day one, the best seller was a copper horse priced at 999 yuan. It sold more than 500 horses in a single day, and the store’s daily revenue immediately surpassed one million yuan. And before that, in the previous eight months, the company had not sold a single product.

In the years that followed, on Taobao crowdfunding, Copper Chef repeatedly set records: the “Delightful Journey to the West” series raised 50k yuan, and the single product “The Great Sage’s Great Victory” raised 2.16M yuan, directly resetting the historical record for Taobao design-category crowdfunding.

In 2017, Yu Guang, with a “black background red text PPT that looked like a giant banner slogan” and several copper statue samples, walked into Sinovation Capital’s roadshow venue. Originally, he had only been given 20 minutes to present. But he spoke for more than an hour in one go.

Right after the roadshow ended, Sinovation Capital sent word: “Mr. Lei has decided to invest in you—let’s talk about the price.” Yu Guang replied with just three words: “You decide.” In a single sentence, the financing price was settled.

That August, Copper Chef received 110 million yuan of Series A financing led by Sinovation Capital and Xiaomi ecosystem chain. Later, Lei Jun publicly commented: “Copper Chef is the entrepreneurial company most like Xiaomi outside our entire Xiaomi system.”

In 2018, Copper Chef completed 310 million yuan of Series B financing. Sinovation Capital and Xiaomi continued to add investment. Before the IPO, Sinovation Capital held 13.39% and Tianjin Jinmi, a Xiaomi subsidiary, held 9.56%; together they held 22.95%, making them Copper Chef’s largest institutional shareholders. Roughly calculated, their combined investment cost was about 160 million yuan.

Based on the market value of HK$2.4 billion prior to publication, Xiaomi-related shareholders’ combined stake is worth about HK$550 million (about RMB 480 million). That means the 160 million yuan invested back then has doubled—making it unquestionably the biggest winner of this IPO.

Resilient profitability,

but stability has always been a hard weakness

No matter how moving a company’s story is, it must ultimately return to performance.

When you open Copper Chef’s prospectus, you can clearly see the company’s revenue and profit performance over the past few years—there are notable strengths, but there are also risks that cannot be ignored.

In terms of revenue size, from 2022 to 2024, Copper Chef’s operating revenue was 503 million yuan, 506 million yuan, and 571 million yuan, respectively. Its compound annual growth rate over the three years is about 6.54%. If you place it in the coordinate system of the entire new consumer sector, this growth rate looks rather ordinary.

In the same period, Pop Mart’s revenue growth rate has stayed at above 50% year after year, and Miniso’s revenue growth rate has also remained stable at above 30%. Compared with these brands, Copper Chef’s growth rate gap is very obvious.

Until the first nine months of 2025, Copper Chef’s revenue growth only began to recover slightly. In that period, it achieved revenue of 448 million yuan, up about 12% year on year. But even so, this growth rate still remains far below the average level in the consumer segment.

In the company’s revenue structure, copper-based cultural and creative products are Copper Chef’s absolute pillar, accounting for more than 95% of the company’s revenue. In effect, the entire company’s revenue is propped up by a near single product category. Copper Chef has tried diversification multiple times, gradually launching new categories such as plastic trend toys, silver cultural and creative products, and gold cultural and creative products—aiming to build a second growth curve.

But based on actual results, these new businesses have developed very limitedly and have not met expectations at all. In full-year 2024, the plastic trend toy business’s revenue was only 14.25 million yuan. The sub-brand “Xijiang Jinpu,” which focuses on gold cultural and creative products, generated merely 1.27 million yuan for the whole year—almost negligible.

Worth noting is what the prospectus discloses: Copper Chef achieved net profit of 56.94 million yuan in 2022, which then fell directly to 44.13 million yuan in 2023, a year-on-year decline of more than 20%. For the sharp drop in net profit, the company explained that during the process of production method improvements, there were phase-based production interruptions, which in turn affected overall profit. In 2024, net profit quickly rebounded to 78.98 million yuan. Over the three years, its profit curve was like a roller coaster—rising and falling sharply.

Besides fluctuating profitability, the company’s cash flow reserves are also not particularly strong. As of the end of September 2025, Copper Chef’s cash and cash equivalents on its books were about 91.94 million yuan. For a company with annual revenue at a 500 million yuan scale, this cash reserve size looks somewhat tight.

For Copper Chef, the word “copper” is not only the core of the brand name, but also a key variable in the company’s cost structure. Every fluctuation in copper prices will directly affect the company’s profitability.

From 2022 to 2024, the share of copper and other direct raw materials in the company’s total operating costs was 51.9%, 47.1%, and 47.1%, respectively—almost half of operating costs went to purchasing copper materials. The pressure from raw material costs is therefore self-evident.

More troublesome is that in recent years, domestic copper prices have stayed on a path of extremely volatile upward movement. In 2019, the market price of copper was about 47.6k yuan per ton. By 2024, it had risen to 75k yuan per ton. In May 2024 alone, it even touched a historical peak of 88.6k yuan per ton.

In just a few years, the increase in the price of core raw materials is close to 60%. This is like a bakery where the most critical ingredient—flour—suddenly rises sharply in price. Pressure on the cost side will directly transmit to corporate profitability, and operating difficulty will increase significantly.

In Copper Chef’s operating data, another set of continuously declining figures is especially worth paying attention to: the company’s online average order value.

In 2022, Copper Chef’s average order value in online channels was about 958 yuan. In 2023, it fell to 822 yuan. In 2024, it further dropped to 777 yuan. By the first half of 2025, this figure had already declined to 556 yuan. In just three years, the online average order value has hit a 40% discount.

For the sustained decline in average order value, Copper Chef’s explanation in its prospectus is that consumers’ purchase preferences are shifting toward lighter, more refined, smaller copper product offerings. In more straightforward terms: the core customer base hasn’t changed too much, but consumers are more willing to buy small items and lower-priced copper cultural and creative products, rather than purchasing expensive large display pieces.

So overall, Copper Chef is a company with the ability to sustain profitability—able to generate stable profits in a niche segment. But its scale of profits is limited, and its profitability stability is insufficient.

For a company that wants to tell a growth story in the capital market, this set of financial results is technically passing, but still not outstanding.

The leader in a crowded niche,

urgently needs to break through the market’s ceiling

China’s cultural and creative handicrafts market is a large consumer market. According to authoritative data from Frost & Sullivan, the domestic cultural and creative handicrafts market size grew from 286.9 billion yuan in 2019 to 354.0 billion yuan in 2024. Over the past six years, the compound annual growth rate has been about 4.3%. Based on the current growth trend, the market is expected to further expand to 464.7 billion yuan by 2029.

If you look only at the overall cultural and creative market data, this is undoubtedly a blue ocean. But the copper-based cultural and creative handicrafts segment that Copper Chef operates in is only a tiny slice of that blue ocean.

In 2024, the overall market size of domestic copper-based cultural and creative handicrafts was only about 1.58 billion yuan. Out of the entire cultural and creative handicrafts “big pie,” this accounts for just 6.3%—a negligible share.

This is the most core development contradiction that Copper Chef faces today: it is the absolute leader in a niche segment, yet trapped in a market with such small volume that it can’t fully unleash its potential. At present, Copper Chef holds 35% of the market share in the copper-based cultural and creative segment, firmly ranking first in the industry. But crucially, the segment itself has an extremely small market size. It’s like a big fish trapped in a small pond.

However, niche segments also have their niche advantages. The growth rate of the copper-based cultural and creative handicrafts segment is far higher than that of metal cultural and creative products and even the overall cultural and creative market growth rate. From 2019 to 2024, the copper-based segment’s compound annual growth rate reached 7.3%, clearly outperforming the overall metal cultural and creative segment growth rate of 1.8%, showing stronger growth vitality.

But even under the most optimistic industry forecasts, by 2029 the market size of the copper-based cultural and creative segment will be only around 2.3 billion yuan. With Copper Chef already capturing more than one-third of the segment’s share, the industry’s growth ceiling is right around the corner. As market share gradually reaches its peak, it will become increasingly difficult for Copper Chef to achieve high-speed growth relying on the existing segment. Breaking through the market ceiling becomes a development challenge the company must solve.

Besides the small market size, the market penetration rate of copper-based cultural and creative products is also extremely low.

In 2024, the penetration rate of copper-based cultural and creative handicrafts in domestic urban areas was only 2.34%, and in rural areas it was even less than 1.4%. Even by 2029, the penetration rate in urban areas is expected to rise to only about 2.58%. This means that in the daily lives of the vast majority of consumers, copper-based cultural and creative products have not become necessities. For many people, they have never even been exposed to such products.

Extremely low penetration makes the road to popularizing the copper-based cultural and creative segment full of challenges, but it also implies a huge space for market expansion in the future. The key issue is whether the improvement in penetration of copper-based cultural and creative products is a certain long-term trend that will arrive sooner or later as consumer awareness increases, or whether it is constrained by product attributes and consumption habits—leading to a forever-unfulfilled dream of mass-scale popularization. This requires time and the market to provide the answer.

Fortunately, Copper Chef’s future development is not completely limited to just this niche segment of copper-based cultural and creative products. The company’s true core competitiveness lies in precisely riding the large trend of the rise of guochao (Chinese-style cultural trends) and the upgrade of cultural and creative consumption.

In recent years, guochao culture has continued to sweep through the consumer market, becoming a core driving force behind the cultural and creative industry. Data from the Tmall platform shows that in 2023, sales revenue of guofeng (Chinese-feng style) cultural and creative products surged by 156% year over year, making guochao cultural and creative products a hot segment in the consumer market. From the “ChaZhu Earphones” of Palace Museum cultural and creative products going viral, to the “Bronze Mask Blind Boxes” of the Sanxingdui Museum selling out overseas, and then to Pop Mart’s LABUBU series exploding in overseas markets— the entire cultural and creative sector is undergoing a round of reshaped consumer recognition. The combination of traditional culture and modern consumption has become the industry’s mainstream trend.

Copper Chef’s product positioning is precisely at the intersection of “traditional culture IP” and “modern consumer experience,” perfectly fitting the core needs of guochao consumption. Founder Yu Guang once described the company’s positioning plainly: “Pop Mart makes trend toys; Copper Chef makes trend toys with traditional themes.” This is also the core reason Copper Chef is called “the Pop Mart for middle-aged people” in the industry.

The clever part of this positioning is that Copper Chef did not choose to compete with trend toy brands like Pop Mart for the younger consumer group. Instead, it took a different path and targeted traditional consumption scenarios such as business gifting, office desk displays, and Chinese-style home decor.

At the same time, Copper Chef’s “Huanxi Xiaojun” brand does modernized second-creation for classic traditional culture IPs such as Journey to the West, helping traditional copper figurines shake off the labels of “old-fashioned” and “stale,” and enter the view of more young consumers.

Of course, as the cultural and creative segment continues to heat up, the industry’s competitive landscape is becoming more and more complex. Museum cultural and creative products, hot IP trend toys, independent designer brands, and other players have all entered the arena, competing for consumers’ limited cultural spending budgets.

In such a competitive environment, Copper Chef needs to prove not only the excellence of its copper crafting process, but also answer a deeper core question: among the many cultural and creative products available, why would consumers choose copper-based cultural and creative products, and what unique value can Copper Chef’s products bring to consumers.

# 线索爆料 # rzcj@thecapital.com.cn

Media partnership: 010-84464881