• asiabits
  • Posts
  • 🟠 Unitree: $610 million for the robot revolution

🟠 Unitree: $610 million for the robot revolution

...or just all for show?

March 23, 2026

 

☕️ Good morning friends,

We're back in Shanghai and it never gets boring here either.

Because Unitree has announced that they want to raise a whopping $610 million in their IPO here. More on that in the Top Bit.

Also in today's issue:

  • Samsung invests record sum in AI chips

  • ByteDance sells Moonton for $6 billion

  • Asia burns more coal again

Enjoy reading! 📰

P.S. Our new podcast is online.
Laurent came to Shenzhen in 2007, when the city only had a single metro line. Since then, he has built three million-dollar companies. Chapeau!

Here's the full episode:

Asia's oil stress test: The Iran conflict keeps weighing on Asian markets. Brent crude sits above US$100 after briefly touching US$119 the day before. Hang Seng -0.9%, Singapore's STI -0.4%, only mainland China's CSI 300 bucked the trend at +0.9%.

TOP BIT

UNITREE IPO: THE "CHATGPT MOMENT" OF HARDWARE

Source: Asiabits Visuals

The race for the first listed "pure-play" company for humanoid robotics on the Chinese A-share market has been decided: Unitree Robotics has officially applied for its IPO on the STAR Market in Shanghai.

With a volume of around $580 million and impressive profitability figures, Unitree proves that the industry has definitively left the prototype phase behind.

The financial quantum leap

While skeptics often speak of a "robot bubble," the Unitree numbers deliver a hard reality:

  • Revenue explosion: Over 1.7 billion RMB (~$235 million) in 2025 – an increase of 335% over the previous year.

  • Profit surge: Net profit rose by 674% to over 600 million RMB (~$83 million).

  • Throne change: For the first time, humanoid robots (H1, G1, H2) overtake the famous robot dogs. They now account for 51% of core business.

Strategic focus: brain & factory

Unitree is strategically deploying the fresh capital to close the "usage gaps" of AI:

  1. Video-based world models: Almost half of the IPO proceeds (2.02 billion RMB) flow into the development of "embodied AI" to give robots genuine understanding of physical processes.

  2. Gigantic scaling: A new factory is to increase capacity to 75,000 humanoids per year to massively reduce prices.

  3. From kung fu to toiling: While the robots dominated the Chinese Spring Festival with martial arts performances last month, the focus is now on the "robot employee" for inspection and smart manufacturing.

That Unitree is taking this step now is no coincidence.

The company is considered a national champion. Recently, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited the headquarters in Hangzhou, underscoring global interest in Unitree's cost-effective high technology.

Unitree is a central building block of the Chinese strategy to cushion demographic change through automation.

📊 All details & data: DealStreetAsia, SCMP, Humanoids Daily

OUR PARTNER

MARKET BIT

ByteDance sells Moonton for $6B: Saudi Arabia goes all-in on mobile gaming

ByteDance is parting ways with its gaming studio Moonton. The buyer is Savvy Games Group, the gaming arm of Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund PIF.

  • Price tag: over $6 billion.

The details

ByteDance acquired Moonton in 2021 for roughly $4 billion. Back then, the studio and its flagship title Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) were supposed to be ByteDance's gateway into mobile gaming. Five years later, it's being sold - at a 50% premium.

  • Valuation: $6 billion (+50% vs. 2021 purchase price)

  • MLBB: Over 1.5 billion installs worldwide, top-10 mobile game in multiple markets.

  • Management: CEO Zhang Yunfan stays on, HQ remains in Shanghai.

The retreat: ByteDance launched its gaming division Nuverse in 2019, but not a single title became a real blockbuster.

  • In 2023 came the cull: jobs slashed, unreleased games shelved, full pivot to generative AI. ByteDance never managed to gain ground against Tencent in gaming.

Savvy Games - the shopping spree:

On the buyer's side, Moonton is just the latest piece. Savvy Games, a wholly owned subsidiary of the $1 trillion PIF, has been on an acquisition tear over the past three years:

  • Scopely: $4.9 billion (2023)

  • Niantic's Pokemon GO: $3.5 billion (2025)

  • Moonton: $6 billion (2026)

On top of that, PIF holds stakes in Nintendo, Take-Two and Square Enix. In September, Electronic Arts agreed to a $55 billion buyout with PIF involvement - the largest leveraged buyout in history.

Why Saudi Arabia is the new heavyweight in gaming

Behind the Moonton deal lies Saudi Vision 2030. Gaming is one of the levers the kingdom is using to diversify its economy away from oil.

Moonton, with its massive user base in Southeast Asia, delivers exactly what Savvy has been missing: a mobile publisher with global reach and an established esports ecosystem.

For ByteDance, the exit is an admission that gaming was never part of the company's DNA. Saudi Arabia's PIF, meanwhile, is quietly building the world's largest gaming portfolio.

FOUNDERS INSIGHTS

❝

“We were the first out of Shenzhen to raise one million dollars on Kickstarter.”

“Two years later, the Apple Watch came out. That’s when I knew: pivot or die.” Laurent Le Pen has been living in Shenzhen for 18 years.

Laurent arrived in Shenzhen in 2007, when the city had just a single metro line.

At Philips Mobile, he witnessed the launch of the iPhone firsthand. In 2013, using an unused LG display, he built the first standalone Android smartwatch and raised one million dollars on Kickstarter.

When Apple entered the market, he shifted into niche segments: seniors and children. Along the way, he founded Oclean, an oral care brand with 300+ patents, now number one in Poland.

His third company, Oxtak, is building an AI recorder with live translation.
First market: Japan. Not by design—a distributor reached out at CES.
“The market decides where you start. Not your business plan.”

The full episode:
📺 YouTube
🎧 Spotify
🎧 Apple Podcasts

HIGHLIGHTS 

🇰🇷 Samsung bets record sum on AI chips: The company is pouring 110 trillion won ($73.5 billion) into semiconductors and R&D this year, up 21.7% from 2025. Samsung is shifting its memory business to three-to-five-year supply contracts, replacing the quarterly and annual deals standard in the industry. Mass production of HBM4 started in February, with Nvidia and AMD confirmed as buyers. On the foundry side, Samsung is already manufacturing Nvidia's Groq 3 chips on its 4nm process.

⛽ Asia turns back to coal: The Iran war has severely damaged Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG export facility and rendered the Strait of Hormuz virtually impassable. South Korea, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are ramping up coal power plants to offset gas supply shortfalls. Newcastle futures, the Asia-Pacific coal benchmark, have hit their highest level since late 2024. Indonesia has lifted its production caps to meet surging demand.

🇨🇳 Xiaomi commits $8.7 billion to AI: CEO Lei Jun announced 60 billion yuan for artificial intelligence over the next three years. The company also unveiled three new MiMo models and launched a beta test of its smartphone AI agent MiClaw. The second-generation SU7 starts at 219,900 yuan, 4,000 yuan cheaper than its predecessor. Xiaomi has sold 381,000 first-gen SU7 units, outselling Tesla's Model 3 in the above-200,000 yuan bracket.

🤖 100 humanoids train at Beijing AI base: X-Humanoid has opened an embodied AI training facility where over 100 humanoid robots learn complex tasks. Workers wearing VR headsets perform movements that are converted into training data, from washing dishes to assembling screws. 120 devices generate 400 hours of training data per day. The data qualification rate climbed from 50% to 95% within three months.

MORE ASIABITS

YOUR FEEDBACK

How do you like today's briefing?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.