A post-95s young man who made his fortune in the trading card business started from scratch and bought a listed company.
An agreement can be signed within a single day, but the value of a collection needs time to be proven, and running a listed company is no different.
On November 9, a Share Transfer Agreement linked two completely unrelated businesses together.
The controlling shareholder of Yamaton, a listed photovoltaic glass enterprise, plans to transfer 20% of the company's shares to Shanghai Qixing Network for a total consideration of 680 million yuan. The latter is a trendy toy trading card company. After the transaction is completed, Qixing Network will become the controlling shareholder, and its founder Zhao Yunpeng will become the actual controller.
The capital market responded rapidly. On November 10, Yamaton resumed trading and hit the 10% daily price limit, and continued to hit the daily limit in the following two trading days. Adding the daily limit before the trading suspension, the stock has recorded four consecutive daily limit rises. As of November 12, the company's share price stood at 25.66 yuan, with a market capitalization of 4.954 billion yuan, while this figure was about 3.7 billion yuan before the suspension.
The buyer and the seller hardly seem to be able to "dine at the same table". Founded in 2006 and listed in 2011, Yamaton generates more than 80% of its revenue from photovoltaic glass business. It recorded consecutive losses in 2024 and 2025, and lost another 145 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2026. Qixing Network launched its brand Hitcard in 2021, focusing on collectible cards in the fields of film and television dramas, animations, celebrities and other segments. Zhao Yunpeng previously stated that the company's revenue in 2024 was about 400 million yuan, representing a year-on-year increase of over 600%.
Doubts emerged along with the consecutive daily limit rises: what will happen to the glass business, and when will the card business be injected into the listed platform?
The announcement did not give the answer most expected by the capital market. Qixing Network promised that it will not inject assets belonging to itself, the enterprise and its related parties within 36 months after the share transfer, and there is no injection plan at present; the transferred shares will not be resold within 60 months, and will not be pledged within 36 months. Among the acquisition funds, self-owned funds account for no less than 50%, and the rest may come from M&A loans. Part of the funds are still being raised, 11.2323 million shares of the proposed transferred shares are under pledge, and the transaction still needs to go through procedures including the shareholders' meeting exempting the original actual controller from the share lock-up commitment, compliance confirmation from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and share transfer registration.
Hitcard thus squeezed to the threshold of "the first trading card stock", even though its core trading card business has not yet been integrated into the listed shell.
There was originally another popular candidate in this race. Kayou recorded a revenue of 10.057 billion yuan in 2024, and accounted for 71.1% of the domestic trading card market share in terms of total merchandise transaction value. It submitted its listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange twice, but failed to complete the issuance after passing the hearing in 2025, and its prospectus subsequently became invalid. Suplay's prospectus also expired half a year after its submission. In terms of scale, Hitcard is only a fraction of Kayou; in terms of capital path, Zhao Yunpeng took a detour to the A-share market and first signed a control transfer agreement of a listed company.
However, the timing he chose is far from easy. Data from Frost & Sullivan shows that the GMV of China's non-battle trading card market dropped from 32.1 billion yuan to 23.5 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year decline of 26.8%. Among them, consumer-grade collectible cards with a unit price below 10 yuan shrank by 10.4 billion yuan to 15.5 billion yuan, with a decline of over 40%; collectible cards priced above 10 yuan instead increased by 29% to 8 billion yuan, which is exactly Hitcard's main business. Trading card consumption began to diverge, and the listing processes of several leading enterprises have slowed down one after another.
A year ago, *China Entrepreneur* had a conversation with Zhao Yunpeng about listing-related issues. He believed that the funds obtained from one listing might exceed the total of two or three rounds of financing, and the company could also go deep into the upper reaches of IP through this move. At that time, news just came out that Hitcard was pushing for listing, and he was quite cautious about the capitalization descriptions in relevant reports, preferring to talk about products and factories.
During the interview, he kept showing the reporter Hitcard's card products, including a ceramic card. He tapped it with an object and asked the reporter to feel its hardness. The card is as thin as an ordinary card, but alumina is added to improve its toughness, and the team also solved the technical problems of thin ceramic transportation and painting on uneven surfaces. It is an ancient Egyptian themed ceramic card. The ancient Egyptians used to record history on clay, and he wanted buyers to touch the texture of objects from 3,000 years ago.
When the reporter asked him why he was "fascinated" by technology, he said that he wanted crafts to serve content, and then dilute costs through technology reuse.
This is not Zhao Yunpeng's first entrepreneurship, but the same logic has run through his past more than ten years: identifying a specific demand, making a sufficiently durable product, and then leaving the cost, organizational adjustment and failure risks to himself to digest slowly. But whether this acquisition is still a new extension of his business logic, there is not enough evidence to confirm at present.
Tinkering
The first time Zhao Yunpeng brought his hobby to a large public stage was at Wukesong.
At the age of 16 or 17, he was fond of ancient-style Chinese music. When he was still in high school, he produced an album through crowdfunding and earned his first bucket of gold. The singers participating in the album were scattered in online communities, each with their own fan base, but rarely appeared in formal performance venues. Fans could only listen to songs on platforms such as YY Voice and 5sing in the past, and it was difficult to meet these singers offline. He thought the cultural expression contained in the lyrics and musical forms of ancient-style music was "worthy of being brought to the public stage".
In 2014, shortly after turning 18, he invited this group of online singers to Wukesong and held a "four-sided stage" concert, becoming the "youngest event organizer in Wukesong" at that time.
In the autumn of the same year, he was admitted to the Digital Media Art major of Communication University of China. Soon after, he saw a person on Baidu Tieba running a late-night snack shop for students called "Zhai Mi", which was a popular campus O2O project at that time. After the dormitory door was closed, students who felt hungry and unwilling to go downstairs could get snacks delivered to their dormitories. Zhao Yunpeng loved snacks, did not want to wait for takeout, and did not want to get out of bed, so he immediately understood the logic of this business, bought a plane ticket to Shanghai to meet the project initiator, and then suspended his studies to join the project.
Media reports in 2015 recorded his daily life at that time: he loved to wear cartoon T-shirts printed with superhero patterns, and squeezed with three other colleagues in a 54-square-meter two-bedroom apartment, mixing living and working spaces. On the first day he arrived in Beijing, his total mobile phone call duration reached 581 minutes. The North China team, which initially had only 8 people, expanded to 50 people in one month, and the covered cities increased from 2 to 15. He later recalled that Zhai Mi had up to 1 million orders per day at its peak.
After leaving Zhai Mi, he began to serve as the top leader of his own business, and soon suffered a major setback.
The new project was called Qingcao Mutual Aid, which provided mutual insurance services for college students. If a student's mobile phone screen was broken, they could raise funds for repair through the platform, and the individual would only bear about 5 yuan for a total 300-yuan repair cost. The project obtained initial users and financing, but customer acquisition costs kept rising. He went to school at 6 o'clock every morning and worked continuously for 18 hours, but there was no positive cash inflow on the books, as the public demand for insurance had not been fully stimulated.
Zhao Yunpeng decided to shut down the project. He looked back at his daily life and found that birthday celebrations and team building activities still could not do without eating, drinking and singing. In KTVs, it is common for one person to sing while others play with mobile phones in the background. He does not drink alcohol, and likes board games, game consoles and organized parties, so he used the remaining 2 million yuan to open an offline entertainment space called "Dark Circles", aiming to provide young people with a place to have fun without going to bars.
The first store covered an area of about 600 square meters, opened in Hangzhou, with KTV, billiard room, chess and card room, screening room and restaurant, with a charging standard of about 2000 yuan for a 20-person team. After the orders of the first store became stable, he did not rush to replicate the model in the same city, but first went to second- and third-tier cities to test long-distance management. According to reports at that time, the monthly revenue of a single Dark Circles store reached about 50,000 yuan.
By 2018, he already had 7 stores, another 4 to 5 were under decoration, and he also completed an angel round financing of about 10 million yuan. Gradually, the stores moved from villas to shopping malls, and later even rented an entire property of 4000 to 5000 square meters, equipped with VR devices, Switch consoles and "butlers" responsible for organizing interactive games. Zhao Yunpeng once again turned his personal hobbies into physical commercial spaces.
The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted this business. Offline entertainment activities were suspended, most of the properties were owned by private landlords, and it was very difficult for landlords and tenants to get through the long vacant period together. The underlying demand did not disappear, but the company lost the ability to recover from the crisis.
Taking Light Matters Seriously
After ending this entrepreneurship, Zhao Yunpeng picked up Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards at home again. He had collected several boxes of cards since he was a child, and also collected sports cards. He found that there were very few officially authorized and exquisitely made adult collectible cards for anime and film & television IPs that his peers in China liked.
As a senior player, he knew this market was feasible: the US sports card market has multiple segmented tracks including authorized issuance, grading and secondary trading, and the Japanese Pokemon card market has both a mature collection market and official competitive tournaments. A well-developed trading card business can accommodate collection, competition and circulation functions at the same time. Without conducting formal market research, he decided to launch the trading card project - he wanted to make a card that he was willing to buy, and this judgment came from the intuitive experience of a long-time veteran player.
Guo Xiaoya, who had been exposed to sports cards and trading card blind boxes abroad, joined Zhao Yunpeng's team and was responsible for branding. The other partners came from Zhai Mi and Zhao Yunpeng's previous entrepreneurial team, in charge of production, product sales and finance respectively. They integrated their familiar industrial links and launched the trading card trendy toy brand Hitcard in 2021.
The trading card market was already large enough at that time. In 2021, Kayou's revenue exceeded 2 billion yuan, almost all from trading cards, with Ultraman cards as its core product portfolio, covering stationery stores, small shops and supermarkets across the country, targeting the primary school student group; in June of the same year, it received investment from HSG, and its post-investment valuation was estimated to reach 1 billion US dollars. Later, card unboxing live streaming rooms on Douyin and Kuaishou became popular, and "unboxing recording, consecutive unboxing, proxy unboxing" became new ways to attract consumers, and public awareness of trading cards was gradually improved.
Seizing channels and users was the core competitive point, and the common practice at that time was to sign a large number of IP authorization agreements first, and then quickly develop corresponding products.
Zhao Yunpeng reversed this order instead. He launched R&D first in March 2021, and started building factories after receiving financing from Pop Mart in the middle of the year. His logic was: if the cards produced are no different from those already on the market, this business has no long-term value. It is not a pity to miss a certain IP, but backward product quality is fatal. Trading card authorization has a validity period, and the team does not want to waste time making up for R&D after signing the IP.
But he immediately encountered resistance from traditional factories. The mounting cards he wanted to make could carry more complex crafts, but it required printing the two pieces of paper on the front and back separately, aligning them precisely and then laminating them together. The slightest deviation would damage the pattern during the cutting process. External printing factories were used to large-scale repeated production, and were unwilling to adjust machines frequently for small orders. "They think this is a waste of time." Zhao Yunpeng said.
The team had to start with a small workshop of 50 square meters. They cooperated with one manufacturer for plate making, another for raw materials, and a third for printing, adding new processes step by step. Zhao Yunpeng spent half of the month in Shanghai and half of the month in the factory every month, and dozens or even hundreds of tests were done for a single craft effect. In 2022, the company only had 20 to 30 employees, with not many professional designers, and most of the energy was spent on material selection and printing process optimization.
At that time, almost no one could understand his choice, and investors also advised him to switch to making cards for primary school students - Kayou had proved the huge potential of the low-age consumer market, and there was no successful business sample in the adult collectible card market.
Zhao Yunpeng also wavered. He first suspected that the team without formal printing professional background had misjudged the product, "I don't think that low-age market is not feasible, I was wondering if my team and I were not capable enough." But after showing the samples to many people and finding that almost everyone liked the products, he judged that the problem might lie in product reach and IP selection, so he gritted his teeth and continued to move forward.
Hitcard's first three or four products were not successful. Large-scale mass production would lose the delicacy of small trial batches, and the sales channels had not been fully opened. They made fabric cards for *Youth in Flames of War*, embedding real costume fabric into the card surface, thinking that the real physical material would be enough to impress fans, but users thought the appearance of the cards was ugly.
"Giving you a piece of fabric that was once worn by the actor, I thought it was amazing, but this kind of design is actually self-satisfaction that does not resonate with users." Zhao Yunpeng said in a business review. He thus sorted out the priority of product design: aesthetic design comes first, then content expression. Later, when developing products for *Notes on Tomb Raiders*, the team adopted the "Wu Xie perspective": each card presents the scene that the protagonist Wu Xie saw. When developing products for *The King's Avatar*, they designed according to the e-sports relationships of different teams and characters, and even fictionalized a set of sports cards issued in the imaginary e-sports world of the story.
He also paid the tuition for overprinting mistakes. Zhao Yunpeng learned from Bandai's reprint practice, using different color codes to distinguish