Unitree Shares Soar 460% in Debut, Then Test Humanoid Robot Hype

A record debut for a robot maker

Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou company best known for robots that dance, spar and do backflips, became the first humanoid robot maker listed in mainland China when it started trading on Shanghai's STAR Market on August 19. The debut was huge by any measure. The shares were priced at 150.80 yuan, opened at 1,100 yuan (629% above that price) and closed the first session at 845 yuan, up about 460%.1118 The IPO raised about 6.1 billion yuan, or roughly $905 million.111

Demand from investors was extreme even for China's tech board. Reports say the offering was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, a STAR Market record.1 Close to 9.8 million valid retail accounts applied, the highest participation the board has seen.18 Before trading began, the online tranche alone was oversubscribed more than 5,000 times, which meant only about 0.018% of applications won shares.19 Different outlets report different oversubscription figures depending on which tranche they count, but they all point the same way: there was far more demand than stock.

The opening spike briefly valued Unitree at about 445 billion yuan, which outlets put at $62 billion to $66 billion.78 Estimates of the closing valuation also vary. Reuters-cited figures put it near $50 billion, and one tracker put it as high as $53 billion.1115 The exact number matters less than the jump from the offering. At the IPO price, Unitree was valued at about 61 billion yuan, or roughly $9 billion,17 and earlier guidance had pointed to about 42 billion yuan.8

Why the market paid up

Part of the appeal is simple: Unitree sells robots and makes money doing it, which many humanoid startups do not. The company reported 2025 revenue of about 1.70 billion yuan, up from 392.77 million yuan a year earlier.8 Net profit was 278 million yuan.4 It shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025.4 Its prospectus said that gave it a 32.4% share of the global market.18 Counterpoint Research estimates that about 16,000 humanoids were installed worldwide last year, with China accounting for more than 80% of them.7

Humanoids have also become Unitree's main business rather than a side project. Humanoid revenue rose roughly eightfold, from 107 million yuan in 2024 to 867 million yuan in 2025, while quadruped revenue roughly tripled.6 That left humanoids at about 51% of total sales.67

Politics and publicity helped too. Unitree robots performed at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, and founder Wang Xingxing sat in the front row at President Xi Jinping's symposium with technology executives.1 Regulators approved the registration 104 days after accepting the application, the fastest approval in STAR Market history.15 The listing also coincided with the World Robot Conference opening in Beijing.2 Big backers added credibility: Tencent, Alibaba and DeepSeek invested before the listing, and Wang kept about a fifth of the company.3

The first-day pop needs some context. Mainland regulators tend to set IPO prices conservatively to protect retail buyers, so large first-day gains are built into the system.13 Memory chipmaker CXMT rose 466% in its own STAR debut the month before.13 Unitree's gain was extraordinary, but it came out of a market that regularly produces them.

The comedown

The price did not hold. By September 10 the stock had fallen to 513.93 yuan, about 39% below its debut close and 53% below the opening high.8 By September 28 it was at 459.65 yuan, nearly half the first-day close.2 Estimates of the value lost from the peak range from about $20 billion to $35 billion.58

The main problem is valuation. One analysis says Unitree traded at about 250 times its 2025 revenue at the peak and still around 85 times after the fall.5 Another put the price near 125 times revenue and more than 350 times adjusted earnings at around $30 billion.8 Daiwa analyst Kelvin Lau said the fundamentals do not justify the premium, noting the stock trades at 347 times forward earnings against a STAR Market median of 118.10

Reports on Unitree's latest results also gave investors reason to worry. One outlet reported that first-half profit fell 19% from a year earlier and that revenue growth slowed to 48%, after more than 300% the year before.10 Unitree's own guidance had projected first-half revenue growth of about 36% to 45%.8 The figures do not match exactly, but both describe the same trend: growth is still strong, but much slower than last year.

Demos versus deployment

The coverage agrees on the core question: who is actually buying these robots, and for what? Research and educational institutions made up most of Unitree's sales in the first three quarters of 2025. Industrial deployments were under 10%.1 More than 40% of 2025 revenue came from overseas.8 At home, part of the demand comes from what the Financial Times describes as more than 90 humanoid training centres, many co-funded by local governments, that buy robots to collect training data, often by having humans operate them remotely.8

Demand driven by state-backed training centres is not the same as factories putting robots on production lines. One independent estimate cited in coverage counts only about 250 humanoids doing real-world labor as of mid-2026, across all makers.13 Analysts make the same point in different words. Counterpoint's Ethan Qi called the IPO a benchmark for humanoid listings still in the pipeline. Others warned that moving from demonstrations to widespread industrial use will take years.113

Unitree appears to know this. Nearly half the proceeds, 2.022 billion yuan, will fund AI model research and development. Another 1.11 billion yuan will go to robot body development and 624 million yuan to a manufacturing base.14 A week before listing, the company also unveiled a humanoid it claims can jump two metres and run 12.66 metres per second.1 That kind of demo gets attention, but it does not show that customers will place repeat orders.

Regulators cool the listing wave

The sell-off has had effects beyond Unitree. According to The Information, the China Securities Regulatory Commission has used informal "window guidance" to tell banks and companies that humanoid IPO candidates now need recurring revenue, a path to narrower losses, or genuine technological innovation.8 The Wall Street Journal reported similar signals.8 Loss-making applicants such as Deep Robotics and Leju Robot could find it harder to get approved.10 Some market participants describe the pipeline as effectively frozen, although there is no formal ban.3 CNBC reported that few, if any, startups meet the new criteria.2

The cooling comes while private money is still pouring in. Investment in the sector reached 47.09 billion yuan in the second quarter, more than double the first quarter and over six times the level a year earlier.2 Regulators look less worried about robotics itself, which Beijing still treats as a strategic priority, than about speculative money arriving too fast.34

What the debut actually established

The most useful reading of Unitree's first two months is that humanoid robotics now has a public market price, and it is lower than the hype suggested. Before August, the sector's valuations came from private rounds, such as Figure AI's $39 billion.12 Now there is a stock that trades every day. Unitree's market value was still around $34 billion in early September, more than triple its pre-IPO valuation.6 That is a strong vote of confidence, but well below where the first day's buying put it.

The swing from opening high to recent prices looks less like a judgment on Unitree's engineering and more like an adjustment from a scarcity-driven frenzy toward valuing it on revenue and profits. Unitree is the best-placed company in the sector, with real revenue, profits, about a third of global humanoid shipments and in-house components.18 That position also means its share price will be read as a gauge for the whole sector. If it can show multi-unit factory orders and recurring service revenue, its valuation will look justified. If sales keep coming mostly from labs and subsidised training centres, regulators' new caution about humanoid listings will look justified instead.