China's robots conquer the world - now also in the cockpit

90%.
That was China's share of global humanoid robot sales in 2025.

Over 140 manufacturers, more than 330 models, all from the Middle Kingdom. Beijing's current Five-Year Plan explicitly names humanoid robots as a top field of science.

Unitree: the first manned mecha

Wang Xingxing from Hangzhou stood next to his latest machine on Tuesday and barely reached its shoulder. His company Unitree has introduced the GD01: 2.80 meters tall, with a cockpit in the chest.

A person climbs inside and controls the thing. It walks on two legs or converts into a quadruped. Price: 3.9 million yuan, around $650,000.

Unitree now controls around 70% of the global quadruped market and delivered more than 5,500 humanoids in 2025. More than any other manufacturer worldwide.

X-Humanoid: the human face

In the X-Humanoid lab in Beijing, robots with artificial hair and synthetic skin are being created. NBC News was allowed to walk through the workshop last week.

Several dozen half-finished humanoids stood in rows, without heads, some with box-shaped wheels instead of legs.

"We want the robot to help people and free them from dangerous, hard, and repetitive work environments." The vision of X-Humanoid

What's it all for?

Beijing's plan is concrete: robots should care for the aging population, work shifts no one wants, inspect power grids, crawl through narrow shafts.

Fact is: robots will change our world of work. For companies, the question is not whether to deal with the topic, but when and how intensively.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we're on the road again with the board of a German company in Hangzhou/Suzhou and Guangdong to prepare them for the robotics revolution.

If you're also interested, contact us! Just reply to this email.

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Tak served in Korea as an army engineer, then was a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton in Virginia, did an MBA at London Business School, and supported 60 European startups at Techstars.

In 2017, he founded Zeroth.ai there.

While Silicon Valley debated ethics, Chinese people pressed "Install."

• Zeroth.ai invested in around 50 AI startups, with one IPO and two acquisitions as exits, before Animoca Brands joined.

Today, Tak is building two new funds with Komputational Kulture, one for media and entertainment, one for space.

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CHART OF THE WEEK 

An often-mentioned problem: The world (and especially Asian countries) is getting older and older.

But as they say in China: In every crisis 危 there are also opportunities 机.

We believe robots will play a major role in this and are therefore extremely excited to see how this industry will develop.

5 STORIES YOU MISSED LAST WEEK 

🇯🇵 SoftBank's OpenAI Bet Quadruples Annual Profit: Masayoshi Son booked a record annual net profit of 5 trillion yen ($31.6 billion) for the year ended March, four times the prior year. Almost all of it came from one position: the Vision Fund posted a $46 billion mark-up on its OpenAI stake. To finance the bet, Son sold $16.25 billion of T-Mobile, trimmed Nvidia, and arranged a $40 billion bridge loan in March. S&P moved the outlook to "negative" the same month, but OpenAI's valuation then jumped to $852 billion in the March round, lifted by accelerating enterprise revenue and the now firmly committed Stargate datacenter capacity from Oracle and SoftBank itself.

🇨🇳 Ford-CATL Partnership, ByteDance-Style: Ford's $3 billion BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan is about to open with 1,700 employees making lithium iron phosphate cells under license from CATL. Ford owns the plant; CATL keeps the technology, holds no equity, licenses the chemistry to Ford, sends engineers in to train the staff, and collects recurring fees. The recipe, the process and the R&D pipeline stay in China; the factory and the jobs are American. The structure mirrors TikTok: ByteDance licenses the algorithm rather than owning the US operation. The European contrast: 90 percent of CATL's $5 billion Hong Kong listing proceeds is flowing into its fully owned plant in Debrecen, Hungary.

🇰🇷 Hana Bank Buys Into Korea's Crypto Champion: Hana Bank is paying 1 trillion won ($700 million) for a 6.55 percent stake in Dunamu, operator of Upbit. Implied valuation: roughly $10.7 billion. Upbit handles more than 80 percent of Korea's crypto trading volume and is one of the country's most profitable fintechs. Seller Kakao Investment is cutting its stake to 4.03 percent. The signal: one of Korea's three largest commercial banks is buying into the crypto stack rather than building a competitor. With Seoul still finalising its stablecoin framework, the line between bank balance sheet and digital-finance platform is now being drawn through M&A.

🇨🇳 DeepSeek's Latest Model on Huawei Chips: DeepSeek confirmed for the first time that its latest model is optimized to run on Huawei chips for inference, the first concrete break from Nvidia hardware at a Chinese frontier lab. Training is still done on Nvidia per two industry sources. Huawei plans its own training chip this year, with parity to Nvidia's current generation still a year out. The workaround in the meantime: many weaker SMIC-produced chips strung together to match modern processors. US export controls are not freezing China's AI development. They are forcing China to build its own stack.

🇩🇪 Xpeng in Talks to Buy a Volkswagen Plant in Europe: Xpeng is in active talks with Volkswagen and other carmakers about buying or sharing a factory in Europe. VW already holds a stake in Xpeng, and CEO Oliver Blume has said he wants to bring China-developed cars to Europe. For Xpeng, a German plant is one of the few structures that sidesteps the EU's anti-subsidy tariffs on China-built EVs. For VW, Europe plants are below capacity and Northvolt's collapse left a supply-chain hole. Two days later, Stellantis signed a $1.18 billion deal with Dongfeng for Peugeot and Jeep EVs out of China.

ALSO LAST WEEK 

South Korea's Kospi climbed to 8,000 points, a first, before profit-taking pulled it back below 7,600 by the close. Samsung and SK Hynix drove the run on the AI memory wave, helped by expectations around the Beijing summit.

Shanghai AI lab StepFun is closing in on a $2.5 billion pre-IPO round, with strategic industrial investors joining alongside existing backers. The round puts StepFun, founded by former Microsoft Asia chief Jiang Daxin, directly behind DeepSeek and Moonshot in China's second tier of AI labs.

Unitree unveiled the GD01, the world's first mass-produced manned mecha robot with a cockpit, priced at $574,200. Half humanoid, half exoskeleton, fully transformable, and unlike anything Boston Dynamics or Tesla currently has on the road. The toy shelf for billionaires just opened a new aisle.

Japan's defence sector is heading for a structural earnings jump. Mitsubishi Heavy guided for a profit surge after the Takaichi government eased arms export rules, opening the door for big-ticket exports via KUSPI and the Australia critical-minerals deal.

Korean PE giant MBK Partners is buying Japanese aluminium components maker Altemira Holdings, continuing the wave of cross-border PE deals into "undervalued" Japan. It is MBK's biggest Japan carve-out since the 2024 Toshiba take-private.

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