A company famous for robots that dance and do martial arts went public on Wednesday, and the stock gained more than 600% on day one before the gains pared back to nearly 500%.
Unitree, officially Yushu Technology, listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market at an IPO price of 150.8 yuan per share, with the price touching as high as 1,100 yuan in the first session. The company raised 6.1 billion yuan, about $904 million, and became the first listed humanoid robot maker in mainland China. At the peak, the market capitalization was close to 445 billion yuan, roughly $62 billion, more than seven times the IPO valuation.
The demand was mostly retail. The tranche of shares reserved for non-professional investors was oversubscribed by thousands, which tells you something about what a public market does when it is hungry for a robotics story.
The numbers behind the hype
Strip the viral videos away and the business is smaller than the stock price suggests. Unitree, founded in 2016 by Wang Xingxing, shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year. That is a real number, and it is also a small number. The analysts’ projection is the one the market is actually trading: humanoid robot sales rising from around $2 billion in 2025 to $300 billion by 2035.
That is a 150x in ten years, and it is the gap between the demo and the deployment that the stock is asking you to believe in.
The company is backed by Tencent and Alibaba, and the debut coincided with the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing, where hundreds of companies spent the week showing humanoids doing industrial work. At least half a dozen other Chinese humanoid companies are preparing to go public, including Deep Robotics and Leju Robotics. The queue is the signal.
What the market is actually buying
I wrote about robotics startups raising $1.2 billion in a single week back in March, and about Boston Dynamics putting Atlas on a factory floor earlier this year. The pattern has not changed, but the venue has. Private money made the thesis. Public money is now pricing it.
That matters because the two markets ask different questions. A venture investor asks whether the technology is real. A public market asks whether the revenue can compound, and it prices the answer on day one. Unitree’s debut is the first time the humanoid thesis has had to survive that second question with a real balance sheet attached.
The regulatory footnote is worth stating plainly: US regulators have banned imports of future foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robot models on security grounds, and the Pentagon has listed Unitree as a contributor to China’s defense industrial base. The American market is not where this company is going to get its growth, and the stock knows it.
The question for the next few years is not whether humanoid robots get better. They will. The question is whether the factories that buy them can make the machines pay for themselves, and whether the public market’s patience lasts that long.
Sources: The Guardian, Bloomberg