China's robot star comes back down to earth

On its first trading day, 19 August, a Unitree share peaked at 1,100 yuan, around $164. On Friday it closed at 530 yuan, around $79.

That wiped $34 billion off the company's market value.

Only 7% of the shares actually trade

Unitree has issued 404 million shares, and only 30 million of them can be traded. The rest sits with the founder, early investors and subscribers who are not yet allowed to sell.

When that few shares are in the market, every sizeable purchase pushes the price up and every sizeable sale pushes it down.

The drop did not come in a single day. Since 21 August the stock has closed lower on eight of eleven trading days.

Ten years to the ChatGPT moment

A day after the listing, Wang Xingxing stood on stage at the World Robot Conference in Beijing and said the big leap would come in two to three years at the earliest and five to ten at the latest.

He means the point at which a robot handles roughly 80% of tasks on its own in an unfamiliar environment, working from spoken instructions alone.

Asked why his machines are still not in factories and homes, he was just as direct: they work slower than people.

UBTech is falling too, even as revenue climbs

UBTech of Shenzhen, listed in Hong Kong since late 2023, is down about 35% this year. On Friday the stock stood at HK$85.65, against a high of 161 this year.

Yet the company doubled its first-half revenue to 1.27 billion yuan, and its gross margin rose to 44.7%.

Into this market, AgiBot of Shanghai is preparing its own Hong Kong listing, targeting HK$40 billion to 50 billion.

Even after the fall, Unitree is worth €27.5 billion on the exchange.

Midea bought the German robot maker Kuka in 2016 for €4.5 billion, when it had €3 billion in annual revenue. Unitree's 2025 revenue was €218 million.

FROM THE TEAM

Brazil at Unitree and Robonova

Last week we took a Brazilian executive delegation to Robonova and Unitree.

The group flew home from Hangzhou and Shenzhen with ideas they will not find in South America.

If you want to visit robotics, AI or other innovative companies in China, or work with them, we open the doors. Write to us.

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5 STORIES YOU MISSED LAST WEEK 

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🇨🇳 ByteDance borrows $29.6 billion: The TikTok owner closed Asia's second-largest dollar loan of the year on Thursday. Only SoftBank's $40 billion bridge loan in March was bigger. ByteDance had planned on $20 billion and the banks offered more than $30 billion. Citigroup and JPMorgan coordinated the deal, which runs three years and can be extended to five. The margin over the US benchmark rate is 0.68 percentage points, against 0.85 on the previous loan. The money goes into data centres: capital spending is set to reach around $70 billion this year, more than double the year before.

🇹🇼 TSMC is building 20 plants and cannot find construction workers: The world's largest contract chipmaker currently has around 20 fabs going up at once, 13 of them in Taiwan and five to six abroad. In the past it ran four to five at a time. Equipment orders in July stood at 1.9 times the level of late 2025, and the capital budget has been raised to $60 billion to $64 billion. Customers still report too little capacity. TSMC names its biggest obstacle as the shortage of experienced construction workers, in Taiwan as much as in the US. The limit on the AI boom currently sits on the building site.

🇨🇳 CATL's chairman warns of batch failures in batteries: Robin Zeng, founder of the world's largest battery maker, spoke on Thursday at the World Power Battery Conference in Yibin. More than 600 new vehicle models came to market in China this year, nearly three a day. Validation cycles have grown so short, he said, that several battery products failed at the level of entire production batches. CATL works to a target of one defect per billion cells, where the industry standard is one per million. In July around 213,000 GAC Aion vehicles were affected by swelling cells. Zeng puts the quality problems down to the pace itself.

🇰🇷 Washington wants more US investment from Samsung and SK Hynix: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Friday that both companies should raise their US spending substantially. Samsung has invested $37 billion there so far, SK Hynix $3.9 billion. To match what Taiwan has committed to, the two would together have to put in 6.5 times what they have spent. Behind it sit the threatened American tariffs on chips.

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🇯🇵 The Nikkei rose 806 points on Friday to 65,020.94. That is 1.26% after four losing sessions in a row. SoftBank alone gained 10.28%. The broader Topix managed only 0.03%, so the move rested on a handful of AI names.

🇨🇳 Alibaba has sharpened up Qwen3.8-Max. The new version, dated 2 September, is trained for coding work, with architecture and pricing unchanged at $2 per million input tokens. Its CodeArena score rose by 22 points to 1,691, putting it in first place.

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