HANGZHOU, 8 AUG 2026 — Unitree priced its Shanghai listing at 150.8 yuan a share on 6 August, valuing the company at about 61 billion yuan, or US$9.04 billion. Its 2025 revenue was 1.699 billion yuan. The market is being asked to pay roughly 36 times sales for the first humanoid robot maker to list on the mainland.
Subscriptions open on 10 August with payment due on 12 August, so the figure is about to be tested rather than debated.
The offer
Unitree, also known as Yushu Technology, is selling 40.45 million new shares on Shanghai's STAR Market, about 10% of its enlarged share capital, to raise 6.1 billion yuan. Preliminary pricing inquiries ran on 5 August. DeepSeek is among the strategic investors.
That DeepSeek is a strategic investor is significant. A Chinese frontier-model developer taking a position in a Chinese robot maker financially links two of the country's most-watched AI names and signals where both think the value in this space will accrue.
The bet's thesis is that the constraint on humanoids has shifted. Two years ago, it was actuators and balance; now that those are largely solved at the demonstration level, the problem is getting robots to follow instructions in unstructured environments. This is a software problem, not a mechanical one. A model developer investing in the leading hardware manufacturer is positioning at the seam between the two, in a market where both halves are domestic. Whether that vertical logic survives contact with margins is a separate question, and one the listing will start answering in public.
The multiple, and what it is not evidence of
Thirty-six times revenue is a growth-company multiple applied to a hardware manufacturer, which is the tension in this listing.
Hardware businesses are usually valued closer to their gross margins and their unit economics than to a software multiple, because each additional unit costs real money to build. Unitree reports a gross margin of 60.13% on core businesses. That figure is high for hardware, closer to a components or software profile than to consumer electronics.
Two cautions belong with that number. "Core businesses" is a qualifier, and what falls inside and outside it is not something an outside reader can check from the published summary. A high gross margin on 1.7 billion yuan of revenue may not hold at ten times the volume. The costs that compress margins—support, warranty, field service for walking machines—tend to arrive with scale.
The shipment figure needs care
Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, a figure it claims leads the world. While impressive, this number is easily misused.
Dividing 1.699 billion yuan of revenue by 5,500 humanoids gives an arresting figure per machine, and it would be wrong. Unitree's revenue includes its quadruped line and other products, so that division mixes a numerator covering several product families with a denominator covering one. We are not going to publish the result, and readers should be sceptical of anyone who does.
What the shipment figure does support is narrower but still significant: the world's largest humanoid manufacturer ships units in the thousands, not tens of thousands.
Why the listing venue matters
The STAR Market is Shanghai's board for technology and hardware companies, and a first-of-category listing there does something a private round cannot: it produces a public comparable.
Until this week, humanoid robot valuations were set in private markets, where a number reflects the terms and preferences negotiated by whoever last invested. From 10 August there will be a screen price, moving daily, that every other humanoid company in the region gets measured against — by its own investors, by acquirers, and by anyone deciding whether to fund the next one.
This is the listing's longest-reaching development. The first public comparable in a category tends to set the frame for years, regardless of whether this particular price proves right.
What a 10% float means for the price you will see
One structural detail will shape the first weeks of trading and is easy to miss in the valuation arithmetic: only about 10% of the enlarged share capital is being sold.
A small free float concentrates demand into a thin supply of tradeable shares. That tends to amplify moves in both directions, and it means an opening price says as much about how many shares are available as about what the business is worth. On a first-of-category listing with retail participation and a widely covered story attached, that effect is at its strongest.
The screen price in the first fortnight, then, will be a poor estimate of consensus. A more informative figure will emerge when lock-ups expire and a larger share of the company can trade, testing the valuation against actual supply.
What Southeast Asian readers should take from it
The regional interest here is manufacturing and deployment rather than portfolios.
Humanoids are being pitched hardest at exactly the work ASEAN economies do at scale — warehouse handling, electronics assembly, inspection in places people would rather not stand. For a factory operator, procuring from a listed, capitalized supplier with the volume lead is a different risk assessment than running a pilot with a startup. It changes the conversation.
The honest counterweight is that nothing in this filing demonstrates the machines are economic in those roles yet. Shipping 5,500 units is evidence of demand for evaluation, not of deployment at production scale, and no one has published the unit economics that would tell a Malaysian or Vietnamese plant manager whether a humanoid beats the alternative.
What to watch
The first thing to watch is whether the 12 August payment date passes cleanly and where the price settles. Next, look for whether Unitree breaks out humanoid revenue in its first results as a listed company; that single disclosure would replace most of the guessing above. Finally, see if a second humanoid listing follows quickly, as a first-mover comparable often draws the rest of the category to market.
