Unitree IPO values China's humanoid robotics champion at $9bn as AI hype eclipses e-commerce giants

Unitree, China's humanoid robot champion, lists in Shanghai on 19 August after record demand

The Hangzhou firm priced its STAR Market debut at close to $9bn and raised roughly 6.1bn yuan, while retail investors oversubscribed the offer thousands of times over. Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou company that has done more than anyone else to turn Chinese humanoid robots into a spectator sport, is due to begin trading on Shanghai's STAR Market on 19 August, according to Reuters. The listing makes it the first general-purpose humanoid maker to go public on the mainland, and it arrives having already cleared the paperwork: China's securities regulator signed off on the registration earlier in the year, when the numbers looked far more modest. Unitree priced its shares at 150.8 yuan apiece, selling roughly 40mn new shares, about a tenth of the enlarged company, to raise some 6.1bn yuan, or around $900mn. That values the business at close to 61bn yuan, near $9bn, comfortably above the 42bn yuan the market had pencilled in only weeks earlier and well beyond the $7bn figure floated during the run-up. For a firm that was barely a household name a few years ago, and one that still sells more robot dogs than androids, it is a startling repricing. Retail investors oversubscribed the offer by more than 8,000 times, a record for the STAR Market, and the overall book was covered several thousand times over, leaving an allocation rate of roughly 0.018 percent. Grey-market pricing has pointed to first-day gains of triple to quadruple the offer price, which is less a valuation than a mood. Chinese new listings returned an average of 233 percent on debut in the first half of 2026, so exuberance is, for now, simply the baseline. Also, on Monday, two days before the float and timed to the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing, Unitree unveiled a new high-speed humanoid nicknamed "Superman", built, it says, in little over three months and able to jump two metres from standing and hit 12.66 metres per second, quicker over the ground than Usain Bolt at his peak. Video: Unitree Robotics / YouTube The company freely calls it a work in progress; it also, conveniently, handed investors one more viral clip to pass around in the days before pricing. What is being bought, underneath the theatre, is real enough. Unitree made its name on nimble quadruped robot dogs before moving into bipeds, and its G1 and H-series humanoids are now fixtures of the internet's robot-video economy, running, dancing, sparring and picking themselves up after a shove. The founder, Wang Xingxing, still only in his mid-thirties, holds about a third of the company and is, on paper, China's first humanoid-robot billionaire; backers include Tencent, Alibaba and the AI upstart DeepSeek. The financial picture is more nuanced than the queue outside the offering suggests. Revenue has more than quadrupled year on year, and Unitree, unusually for the sector, has been profitable for several years. Yet its first-quarter net profit fell sharply, by close to half depending on the filing, as research and marketing spending climbed, the familiar shape of a company sprinting to stay ahead of a crowded field rather than coasting on fat margins. It is also, unmistakably, a national project. Beijing has thrown its weight behind humanoids as a strategic industry, and the debut is read at home as a milestone for Chinese hardware rather than a mere corporate event. Competition is thickening accordingly, with rivals such as AgiBot, Leju and EngineAI chasing their own listings in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and whether any can turn viral demonstrations into durable businesses is another matter, on distinctly mixed early evidence. For all the theatre, the underlying question remains unresolved. Unitree makes machines that can somersault; it has yet to prove that it can somersault into a mass market where buyers stay satisfied and orders recur. Even Nvidia, whose chips power much of this boom, has been quietly spreading its bets across other robot makers. I nvestors bidding the stock up thousands of times over are wagering that the demonstrations are a prologue. From 19 August, the market will start, cautiously or otherwise, to find out.

Unitree vs. Shein: How August's big China IPOs show how AI hype is leaving e-commerce giants behind | Fortune

Size isn't everything in China's IPO markets. Unitree, perhaps China's most famous humanoid robotics maker, is in the middle of an initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR market, the city's board for tech startups, with a trading debut expected for this week. Then, later this week, the fast-fashion platform Shein will reportedly start its own IPO in Hong Kong, with shares potentially debuting as soon as Aug. 28, according to Reuters. Shein's IPO dwarfs Unitree's, with the fast fashion giant hoping to raise as much as $3 billion, roughly three times what Unitree is targeting. And yet Unitree's IPO is getting most of the attention: Retail investors are scrambling to buy into the company, and secondary markets are predicting a massive jump in valuation after the startup's debut. Unitree may be smaller and younger compared to Shein, which has a decade of global expansion under its belt. But in the eyes of investors, the robot maker is the more exciting bet, as appetites shift to AI and hardware, and away from e-commerce and internet platforms. A robotics boom Unitree, founded by Wang Xingxing in 2016, has become a fixture in China's pop culture, thanks to its robots' dance routines at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, China's most-watched television broadcast. Unitree is raising 6.1 billion Chinese yuan ($904 million) in its IPO, at a market valuation of around $9 billion. The company claimed last week that the retail portion of its offering was more than 8,000 times oversubscribed. The company reported 1.7 billion yuan ($252 million) in revenue last year, a fourfold increase from its revenue in 2024. Almost 45% of the company's revenue came from overseas sales. Unlike many of its peers, Unitree is also profitable, with net income of 600 million yuan ($89 million) in 2025. Over 70% of Unitree's humanoid robots go to academic and research institutions, though some Chinese state-owned enterprises and major manufacturers are dabbling with using robots from Unitree and other robotics startups. Fellow robotics company UBTech, which is already listed in Hong Kong, posted a net loss of $104 million last year; U.S. labs like Boston Dynamics and Figure AI are also unprofitable. Unitree is part of a broader wave of Chinese robotics manufacturers that are dominating the industry, not just in humanoid robots but also in quadrupeds, household robots, and industrial machines. Smart Analytics Global, a Californian research firm, calculated that Chinese firms were responsible for 97% of all humanoid robots shipments in the first half of the year. That same report notes that Unitree isn't even the market leader any more; that title goes to Agibot, a Shanghai-based rival that's currently preparing for a Hong Kong listing later this year. That dominance is spurring concern in Washington. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission in late July banned imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots. "These devices could create supply chain vulnerabilities that could disrupt U.S. economic and national security," the FCC said in its announcement. Shein's long road to an IPO Shein's IPO is significantly larger than Unitree's. Media reports from the Financial Times and Reuters suggest that Shein is targeting a valuation between $25 billion and $30 billion. That figure would mark a deep discount from the $64 billion valuation Shein fetched in 2024, let alone the $100 billion valuation it got in 2022. According to its prospectus, Shein generated $41.2 billion in revenue last year, up from $38.8 billion in 2024. It earned about $2 billion in profit. Europe is now Shein's largest market, making up 35.4% of its revenue, compared to 24.1% from the U.S. Growing protectionism is squeezing Shein's profits. Shein long benefited from "de minimis" rules, which exempted small packages from customs duties. The U.S. eliminated these exemptions last year, and Europe followed suit in July. "Although it remains too early to fully assess, it is possible that trends in the EU could be generally in line with or exceed the impact observed in the U.S. after the removal of the U.S. de minimis exemption," Shein admitted in its IPO prospectus. Shein's long path to an IPO might also have done damage to its valuation. The company first pursued a New York listing, following in the footsteps of other Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu. Yet U.S. officials raised concerns about allegations of forced labor in Shein's supply chain and the platform's handling of customer data. Shein even moved its headquarters to Singapore in order to smooth its path to a U.S. listing -- an attempt at "Singapore-washing" -- to no avail. The company then considered a London IPO, yet Chinese regulators never gave approval for Shein's overseas listing. That left Hong Kong as the last option. It may also be that Shein's time has passed. E-commerce boomed during the pandemic, when shoppers, flush with stimulus cash, splurged on new items. Now, rising protectionism and inflation have made growth harder for global e-commerce platforms. Investor attention is instead shifting to AI infrastructure and hardware. Last month, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) raised $8.6 billion in its own Shanghai STAR Market IPO. Shares surged by as much as 530% on their first day of trading; the chipmaker, the world's No. 4 producer of dynamic random-access memory, is now the most valuable Chinese company, ahead of Tencent. Several other AI companies are considering IPOs in either Shanghai or Hong Kong, including AI developers DeepSeek and Moonshot AI as well as chipmaker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp.