Chinese retail investors asked for roughly 8,288 times the stock on offer. They got odds of 0.0181% — worse than one in five thousand — even after a chunk of the institutional tranche was reallocated to them. On Wednesday, August 19, Unitree Robotics begins trading on Shanghai's STAR Market as the first general-purpose robotics company ever to list on mainland China's public markets, carrying the most oversubscribed technology offering in the exchange's history.
The company, formally Hangzhou Yushu Technology, priced its IPO on August 6 at 150.80 yuan a share — about $22 — raising 6.099 billion yuan, or roughly $905 million, by selling about 40.45 million shares, 10% of its enlarged capital. That values Unitree at 60.99 billion yuan, near $9 billion. Demand bent the deal upward before a single share traded: the earlier filing had penciled in a 4.202 billion yuan raise at an implied price around 104 yuan, some 45% below the final terms.
The offering drew an unusually institutional roster for a company that sells dancing robots. Strategic investors include the National Council for Social Security Fund — the largest, subscribing 933,402 shares, or 2.31% of the offering, for about 141 million yuan — alongside DeepSeek and investment arms of China National Petroleum Corp, China Southern Power Grid, China Telecom, Tencent and CITIC Securities. The whole process, from application acceptance on March 20 to registration approval, took 104 days.
The numbers underneath the frenzy
What separates Unitree from most humanoid-robot stories is that it makes money. Revenue reached 1.7 billion yuan in 2025, up more than 300% year over year, with adjusted profit of 591 million yuan and net profit up 674%. Humanoids generated 867.8 million yuan of that, overtaking the quadruped "robot dogs" that built the company as its largest single business. Overseas sales accounted for more than 40% of revenue in each reporting period disclosed in the prospectus.
Volume backs it up. Unitree shipped 5,511 humanoid units in 2025, a more than tenfold jump from 2024 and, by its own account, the most of any maker worldwide. It said last week that cumulative deliveries of bipedal humanoids across all models had reached about 18,000 as of July; quadruped sales have passed 33,000 units.
Founder and chairman Wang Xingxing — 36, a DJI alumnus who started the company in 2016 — becomes China's first humanoid-robot billionaire on paper, with a stake worth roughly $2.4 billion. His pitch to shareholders, in the prospectus's Statement to Investors, was not a financial forecast: "Let's realize the ultimate human dream of AGI together!"
On Monday, timed to the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing, Unitree unveiled a high-speed machine it calls "Superman," built in just over three months, capable of a 2-meter standing jump and a top speed of 12.66 meters per second. The company conceded it remains a work in progress.
The valuation argument
At 150.80 yuan, Unitree trades at 219.23 times earnings against an industry average of 38.56 — a gap that is the entire debate in one number. Yang Shuning, executive director and partner at Beijing-based Wenzhi Capital, argued the premium has logic behind it. "Given the scarcity premium enjoyed by leading players in tech sectors and the multibillion-dollar valuations seen among overseas humanoid robotics peers, Unitree's valuation is not without justification," he said — while adding the obvious caveat: "If Unitree falls behind in scaling up commercialization, revenue growth weakens or investors start using a different valuation yardstick, valuations would come under pressure."
Offshore derivatives trading has pointed to a strong debut, helped by a broader recovery in Chinese tech equities; the STAR50 Index has rebounded about 15% from its early-August three-month low.
Why It Matters
The listing is the first liquid, public price on "physical AI" — the thesis that the next phase of the AI build-out happens in motors, actuators and sensors rather than data centers. Until now, exposure meant private rounds in Figure or 1X, or buying Tesla for Optimus. Wednesday gives investors a pure-play ticker, and its opening print becomes the reference multiple every humanoid maker gets measured against.
It also crystallizes where China's advantage lies. Unitree's machines undercut Western rivals on price because they draw on domestic supply chains for motors, reducers, controllers, batteries and sensors, with a local component sourcing rate above 90%. Goldman Sachs has argued that while the US and North Asia dominate semiconductors and frontier models, China's AI opportunity set is better populated in power, infrastructure and physical AI. Zhao Liang, a partner at Unique Capital, put the ambition plainly: "Given China's advantages in industrial supply chains and talent, the country's embodied intelligence industry chain may bring a surprise to the world."
The demand signal is not purely retail mania. UBS, citing exhibits at Shanghai's World Artificial Intelligence Conference, wrote that humanoid robots are "increasingly being evaluated as production tools rather than exhibition assets," with commercialization scaling first in structured B2B settings — factories, logistics, smart pharmacies — and consumer use a longer-term prospect. China's embodied AI sector drew more than 34.5 billion yuan in primary-market funding in the first half of 2026 alone.
What to Watch
The first-day print is the least interesting part. Watch whether humanoid revenue keeps outgrowing the quadruped business that still subsidizes it, and whether shipments convert from pilots and research labs into repeat industrial orders — the gap between 18,000 robots delivered and 219 times earnings is a lot of future to underwrite. Watch AGIBOT's Hong Kong filing and the rest of the pipeline: a second and third public comparable will set fair value faster than any sell-side model. And watch for the shakeout Ethan Qi, associate director at Counterpoint Research, expects — that the number of Chinese humanoid companies will "likely decrease to a few dozen with a consolidation ahead, following the IPOs of the first batch of humanoid companies, including Unitree." Cheap capital is arriving for the leaders and about to get expensive for everyone else.
“Given China's advantages in industrial supply chains and talent, the country's embodied intelligence industry chain may bring a surprise to the world.”— Zhao Liang, Partner, Unique Capital