Unitree Shares Jump as Much as 600% in Shanghai Debut

Unitree priced its initial public offering at 150.8 yuan per share. The shares climbed to as high as 1,100 yuan before paring gains to nearly 500 percent, The Guardian reported. CNBC described the debut as a 460 percent surge. The stock fell 18.7 percent on Thursday.

The company was founded in 2016 by Wang Xingxing, who remains chief executive and owns about a fifth of the business. After the first-day rally, Wang’s paper stake was worth more than $12 billion, according to Reuters. Unitree has become known worldwide through viral videos of its robots performing martial arts, running at speeds comparable to Olympic sprinters and serving as backup dancers. It shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year. Slashdot, citing the BBC, reported that Unitree earned a net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025, making it one of the few profitable companies in the sector. The portion of shares reserved for Chinese retail investors was oversubscribed by thousands, The Guardian reported.

The listing coincided with the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing, where hundreds of companies, most of them Chinese, are presenting new products and technical demonstrations. The day after the debut, Wang told the conference that humanoid robots are not yet as efficient as humans and need time to learn new skills, creating a bottleneck for the industry.

The technology still faces limits. Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, told CNBC that customers in the United States are looking for solutions to specific problems and do not necessarily care whether the machine that solves them is a humanoid. Wan Bin, chief operating officer of Keenon, a startup building humanoids for hotel laundry services, told CNBC that completing 50 percent of a task is relatively easy, and even 80 percent is manageable, but reaching a 99.9 percent completion rate tests engineering and training capabilities. Keenon has shipped more than 100,000 robots, including simpler delivery models, and expects to exceed 150,000 by the end of next year.

The investment case for humanoid robots rests on rapid expected growth. Analysts project sales could rise from about $2 billion in 2025 to $300 billion by 2035, according to The Guardian. Unitree remains one of the few publicly traded humanoid robot makers globally; its biggest competitor AgiBot is private, and smaller rival UBTech is listed in Hong Kong. At least half a dozen other Chinese humanoid companies, including Deep Robotics and Leju Robotics, are preparing to go public, The Guardian reported. Domestic policy has also supported the industry: Slashdot, citing state-run China Daily, said the number of Chinese robotics firms more than tripled between 2020 and 2024, helped by government investment around Unitree’s home base of Hangzhou.

The company has also become a point of tension in Sino-American technological competition. Last month, the US Federal Communications Commission restricted imports of foreign-made advanced robots, including humanoids and quadruped robots, citing national security concerns. This summer, the Pentagon placed Unitree on a list of Chinese military companies, describing it as a contributor to the Chinese defence industrial base. Unitree has said its robots are for civilian use.

Unitree has been selling humanoid robots since 2023, with a $13,500 child-sized G1 model introduced in 2024. Its robot dogs start at $2,700, a fraction of the roughly $70,000 price of Boston Dynamics’ Spot. Major US rivals, including Tesla, have not yet begun delivering comparable products, according to Slashdot. Jack Pearson of the investment firm RoboStrategy said the listing gives the public a rare chance to invest in a humanoid robot maker and could set a benchmark for other manufacturers.