Unitree: $905 million on offer, $1.2 trillion bid

Last week, 9.8 million Chinese put down money for a share that isn't trading yet.

Together they bid 8.1 trillion yuan, around $1.2 trillion, for stock worth $905 million. No listing on Shanghai's tech board has ever collected more orders. The previous record, set by memory chipmaker CXMT in July, stood at 7.1 trillion yuan.

From robot dogs to humanoids

Unitree of Hangzhou has sold 30,000 robot dogs since 2022. The humanoid business came later and picked up speed fast: in 2023, humanoids made up 1.9 % of core revenue, by 2025 it was 51.5 %. Last year 5,500 units went out the door, more than any other manufacturer in the world.

For the first half of 2026, the prospectus puts revenue at up to 1.13 billion yuan, a gain of 45.4 %. Adjusted profit over the same period falls to 236 million yuan, 22 % less than a year earlier. In the first quarter the gap was wider still: revenue up 68.5 %, profit down 52.6 %. The money went into research and into marketing, including an appearance on state broadcaster CCTV's New Year show.

The price: 219 times earnings

The company is issuing 40.45 million shares at 150.80 yuan. That is 10 % of the firm and brings in 6.1 billion yuan, around $905 million. It values Unitree at roughly $9 billion, 219 times annual earnings.

The retail tranche was 5,526 times oversubscribed. Founder Wang Xingxing still controls about a third of the company after the listing.

70 % of the robots go to universities

Who buys these machines? Around 70 % of the humanoids sold in 2025 went to universities and research institutes that need a walking platform to train their models on. The rest stand at trade fairs, in showrooms and at live events.

Research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that by mid-2026 about 250 Unitree humanoids are doing productive work.

So Unitree makes its money selling research equipment, not labour. Chinese analysts write this openly: the profit comes from selling the robots, not from what the robots do.

The next listing is already lined up. AgiBot is preparing to float in Hong Kong, with cornerstone investors targeting HK$40 billion to HK$50 billion. Last year the company was valued at 15 billion yuan.

RATHER WATCH THAN READ?

In the world's biggest battery plant, a robot has been plugging the test cables into finished battery packs since December, several hundred volts each. It has done close to a thousand packs without a single fault, and the station now runs at three times the throughput.

That is what the new episode of our Robotics News is about, 18 minutes from Shanghai.

Also in it:

• Lingbo belongs to Ant Group, the company behind Alipay, and is 16 months old. One of their robots is already working in a pharmacy in Shanghai, and I filmed it.

• Bambu Lab and three neighbours in Shenzhen build 9 out of 10 3D printers sold to consumers worldwide. China exported 3.6 million of them in the first half, 90% more than a year earlier.

• WeRide is bringing robotaxis to Denmark. Its partner is GreenMobility, a car sharing operator with 1,500 electric cars, and public service is planned for the first half of 2027. Denmark is its sixth European market this year.

Watch the episode

FROM THE TEAM

What looks like an ordinary group photo is a milestone for us. We brought together the German automotive supplier Kostal and the Shenzhen robotics company Daimon Robotics.

The project started last week.

Further up in this newsletter you read that 70% of Unitree's humanoids go to universities. In Chinese plants they have been standing in production for a while, training on specific tasks.

We picked four of those tasks in Kostal's production. The robot is training on them in Shenzhen right now, then it moves to the plant in Shanghai and keeps learning on the line. If it hits the same numbers there, Kostal wants to use it at all its sites.

China speed and German quality at one table, that was the idea. We will keep you posted.

If one task in your production runs the same way every day and gets measured, write and tell us which one. We will tell you whether China already has a robot for it.

OUR PARTNER

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

INFOGRAPHIC OF THE WEEK

5 STORIES YOU MISSED LAST WEEK 

🇯🇵 TSMC and Sony to build image sensors in Kumamoto: The world's largest contract chipmaker is putting money into the development and mass production of image sensors together with Sony, the chips inside every phone camera. The site is Kumamoto in southern Japan, where TSMC has run a plant since 2024 and is building a second. With this project, foreign investment in Japan's semiconductor industry adds up to 6 trillion yen, around $37 billion. US memory maker Micron is expanding in Hiroshima as well. Japan lost chip production to Korea and Taiwan 20 years ago and is buying it back with subsidies.

🇰🇷 Samsung hits 80% yield on HBM4: HBM is the memory that sits right next to an AI chip and feeds it data. On the fourth generation, Samsung now gets 80% usable chips per wafer, the threshold where production pays off. The company expects HBM4 revenue to more than triple in the third quarter, and over 60% of its entire HBM business to come from it in the second half. Swiss bank UBS expects Samsung to overtake SK Hynix on shipments next year. For Nvidia chips, HBM4 costs $31 to $32 per gigabyte, almost double the previous generation. That makes memory the single most expensive item in an AI data centre.

🇨🇳 China's robot startups raise 93.5 billion yuan: In the first six months, 93.5 billion yuan, around $13.9 billion, went into Chinese embodied AI companies, meaning the software that runs a robot. It was spread across 322 funding rounds and is five times the same period last year. August carried on the same way: Discover Robotics pulled in $100 million less than a month after its first round, Noin Intelligence $74 million, PokeBot a nine-figure sum. At this pace, the next two years decide whose software runs on these machines.

🇨🇳 2,056 robots line up in Beijing at the end of August: From 22 to 26 August, the second World Humanoid Robot Games take place in the Olympic speed skating oval. 666 teams from 16 countries have entered, 138% more than last year. On top of that come 51 competitions with 1,301 individual matches. The tasks run from sprints and football to sorting and gripping drills, where manufacturers show off fine motor skills. According to market researcher Smart Analytics Global, more than 97% of all humanoids shipped in the first half came from Chinese manufacturers. Anyone who wants to see which companies will supply factory floors in two years will find them all in one place that week.

🇮🇳 Yulu raises $93 million for electric scooters: The Bengaluru company rents electric scooters to food couriers and parcel riders in Indian cities. The round consists of $63 million in equity led by GEF Capital Partners and $30 million in debt. In the same week, 14 Indian startups raised $151.5 million between them, 60% less than the week before. Almost two thirds of that went to this one company. India's delivery services are growing faster than its charging infrastructure, and that is the gap Yulu fills.

ALSO LAST WEEK  

🇻🇳 Vietnam reports $38.06 billion in foreign investment pledges for the first seven months. That includes 2,429 new projects worth $21.05 billion, led by investors from Singapore and South Korea. Vietnam has now been promised more in seven months than in some full years before.

🇰🇷 JI Tech enters India's chip materials market with Japanese trading house CBC. The Korean maker of semiconductor and display materials issued new shares worth 4.26 billion won to CBC, around $3.1 million, and signed a strategic partnership the same day. Korea supplies the material, Japan the distribution, India builds the plants.

🇯🇵 Japan's TOPIX index closed at a record 4,176 points on Thursday. Chip stocks carried the session: Kioxia and circuit board maker Ibiden each gained around 10%, printing and materials group Toppan 14%, and the Nikkei 225 rose 1.6% to 68,601 points. 18% of TOPIX companies with a March year-end raised their profit forecast after the first quarter, while only 2% cut theirs.

YOUR FEEDBACK