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Unitree Robotics IPO drew 8,000-times retail demand at $9 billion valuation in first mainland humanoid listing

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Unitree Robotics' Shanghai STAR Market IPO drew more than 8,000 times retail oversubscription when subscriptions opened August 10, 2026, at 150.80 yuan per share and a valuation of 219 times 2025 earnings, making Unitree the first humanoid robot manufacturer to list on mainland Chinese exchanges.

Unitree Robotics IPO drew 8,000-times retail demand at $9 billion valuation in first mainland humanoid listing

Retail investors submitted orders for more than 8,000 times the available shares in Unitree Robotics' Shanghai STAR Market IPO, per Reuters, giving the Hangzhou robotics company a valuation of 61 billion yuan (roughly $9 billion) and making it the first humanoid robot manufacturer to list on mainland Chinese exchanges.

What happened

Unitree priced its STAR Market offering at 150.80 yuan per share on August 6, then opened retail subscriptions on August 10. The company offered 40.45 million new shares representing 10 percent of its post-offering share capital, targeting gross proceeds of 6.1 billion yuan (about $900 million), per the prospectus reported by Xinhua.

The lot-winning rate for retail investors settled at roughly 0.018% after Unitree clawed back some shares from the institutional tranche. At 219 times 2025 earnings and 36 times revenue, the valuation is steep even by high-growth tech standards, per Reuters.

The financials behind the premium are real. Revenue reached 1.7 billion yuan in 2025, more than quadrupling from 392.77 million yuan in 2024. Humanoid robot revenue hit 867.8 million yuan and overtook the company's well-known quadruped line for the first time. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoid units in 2025, per the prospectus via Robotics and Automation News. AI company DeepSeek participated as a strategic investor. Net profit for full-year 2025 reached 278.21 million yuan.

One caution from the prospectus: first-quarter 2026 profit excluding one-off items fell 52.6 percent as the company raised research and marketing spending. The company attributed the increase to accelerating product development, not a revenue slowdown.

Unitree plans to invest about 4.20 billion yuan of the IPO proceeds across four projects covering humanoid robot model research, robot body development, new product lines, and an expanded manufacturing base.

Why it matters

The 8,000-times retail demand ratio signals that capital markets are treating humanoid robotics as a near-term commercial bet. That pricing dynamic has downstream implications: it sets a public reference price for the sector at 36 times sales. Companies building enterprise automation roadmaps that include physical AI now have a benchmark against which to evaluate vendor stability and investment horizons.

The competitive context adds weight. Bank of America analysts valued Tesla's Optimus business at roughly $30 billion before it has reached the public markets, per Investor's Business Daily reported by Robotics and Automation News. Unitree's $9 billion listing with actual commercial deployments in logistics and manufacturing creates a public pricing anchor that did not exist before this week.

One material risk to watch: US regulators introduced restrictions in July 2026 that could limit future sales of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots in the United States. Unitree stated that its existing products remain authorized, but the US accounted for 13.3 percent of 2025 revenue. Sustained restrictions would compress that share. The company's Shanghai Stock Exchange application moved from acceptance on March 20 to listing-committee approval on June 1, a 73-day span the China Securities Journal described as a record pace.

What to watch next

The aftermarket price in the first week of trading against the 150.80 yuan IPO price is the clearest near-term signal. A sustained premium suggests institutional buyers are pricing in a multi-year robotics upgrade cycle. A fast correction would indicate the 219-times earnings multiple ran ahead of commercial fundamentals. Watch also whether the 4.20 billion yuan in planned R&D spending moves Unitree from demonstration-heavy revenue toward broader industrial deployment within the next 12 months.

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