The stock market boom in Unitree’s Chinese robots is not the end of the world

Valletta. Yesterday in Shanghai, shares in the Chinese robotics giant Unitree opened trading with a 629 per cent surge compared to the placement price, reaching 1,100 yuan per share before falling back below 900. The Hangzhou-based company’s market capitalisation reached nearly 445 billion yuan, approximately 66 billion dollars, effectively making it the leading manufacturer of humanoid robots listed on the mainland Chinese stock market. The initial public offering had already raised 6.1 billion yuan, approximately 905 million dollars, by selling 10 per cent of the share capital at 150.8 yuan per share. Retail demand – which, it is worth noting, is in fact only open to Chinese investors, making the deal all the more significant – exceeded supply by more than 8,000 times, a record for the Star Market, the technology segment of the Shanghai Stock Exchange designed as China’s answer to the Nasdaq. Almost 9.8 million accounts took part in the placement for just 9.7 million shares available in the online tranche.

The financial figures for Unitree, founded in 2016 by Wang Xingxing with an initial capital of 100,000 yuan (the equivalent of nearly 13,000 euros), tell an unusual story for a tech start-up. In 2025, revenue grew by 335 per cent, the gross margin stood at over 60 per cent, and net profit more than doubled, despite a particularly aggressive pricing policy that sees some of its products available on the market for just a few thousand euros. It is one of the few companies in the sector already to be profitable, whilst competitors such as Figure AI and Boston Dynamics are still burning through cash for years before coming close to breaking even. The first quarter of 2026 confirmed the growth in revenue, although adjusted net profit fell by 53 per cent due to increased expenditure on research, development and marketing required to scale up production. A few days before its market debut, Unitree unveiled Superman, its latest humanoid robot model, which the company claims is capable of jumping up to two metres and running at 12.66 metres per second: a launch timed to coincide with media coverage of the IPO.

The launch comes three weeks after the Federal Communications Commission added advanced foreign-made mobile robots – both humanoid and quadrupedal – to its ‘Covered List’, the list of technologies considered a risk to US national security. The measure, which came into force on 28 July, prevents new, as yet unauthorised models from obtaining the FCC’s approval required to be imported and sold in the United States, unless conditional approval is granted by the Department of Defence. Although the document is formally neutral with regard to the nationality of manufacturers, in practice it primarily affects Chinese companies: Chinese manufacturers accounted for around 85 per cent of the global humanoid market in 2025, with Unitree the clear leader, closely followed by fellow Chinese firms AgiBot and UBTech.

Yet the capital markets seem completely immune to geopolitical risk. UBTech and Dobot have already listed in Hong Kong, Leju Robotics has filed an application for Shenzhen’s ChiNext, and AgiBot is preparing its IPO. Beijing regards humanoid robotics as a pillar of its independent industrial supply chain, and domestic capital – now largely excluded from Western technology assets – is focusing on a sector that the government openly protects and subsidises. Outside China, the story is much the same: Figure AI is privately valued at around $39 billion; Tesla has halted production of the Model S and Model X to make way for Optimus; and capital continues to flow into a technology that has yet to deliver on much of its promise.

Of the robots that Unitree ships around the world, the humanoid models are in fact currently used almost exclusively in research, training and entertainment, not in factories. Quadrupeds have real industrial applications, such as inspections and firefighting, but they account for only a minority of the total volume. The real work – the repetitive, reliable tasks required on an assembly line – remains a niche application, not to mention the domestic environment, where a humanoid would have to navigate around furniture, pets and children without supervision; this currently represents an additional level of complexity that no manufacturer has yet tackled on a large scale (except through solutions that are currently skilfully teleoperated by humans, often in countries in the Global South). The vulnerabilities discovered this year in the Go2 and G1 models, which are capable of spreading autonomously from one device to another, serve as a reminder of just how immature the software infrastructure underpinning these machines still is today.

The fact that the market is betting 66 billion dollars on Unitree in a single day, despite the US ban, signals both the superiority of Chinese technology in the sector and the extent to which investors in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen – historically very cautious from a financial perspective – have blind faith in the new five-year plan, and are therefore willing to accept a significant risk for a technology that, when put to the test, still has a great deal to prove.