Chinese retail investors put in 9.8 million orders for Unitree Robotics shares. Together those orders asked for about 8.1 trillion yuan of stock, roughly 1.2 trillion dollars, for a company raising 904 million. The retail tranche was oversubscribed 5,526 times. Whatever else the humanoid robot industry has failed to produce so far, it has produced appetite.
What the market paid
Unitree priced its Shanghai listing on 6 August at 150.80 yuan a share, about 22.34 dollars, valuing the company at roughly 61 billion yuan or 9.04 billion dollars. It sold 40.45 million new shares, ten percent of its enlarged share capital, raising 6.1 billion yuan. The offering went to the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market under the ticker 688836, and it makes Unitree the first pure-play humanoid robot maker to list on a mainland Chinese exchange. Subscription closed on 10 August. The trading debut is expected in the window of 17 to 21 August, though the exact date has not been confirmed.
The underlying business is smaller than the valuation suggests, but it is not fictional. Unitree booked 1.71 billion yuan of revenue in 2025, up from 392 million the year before. Gross margin ran near 60 percent. The company shipped roughly 5,500 humanoid robots over the year, which made it the largest humanoid seller in the world by unit volume. At around 250 million dollars of annual revenue, a 9 billion dollar valuation works out to something like 36 times sales.
Who is actually buying the robots
Here is the figure that should shape how anyone reads this listing. More than 70 percent of the humanoids Unitree sold last year went to research and education buyers. Universities, labs, corporate R and D teams. Not warehouses, not assembly lines, not the labour-replacement scenarios that justify the multiple.
Price explains part of that. The average selling price of a Unitree humanoid dropped to about 167,600 yuan in 2025, roughly 25,000 dollars, which is cheap enough for a robotics department to buy three and expensive enough that a logistics operator will want proof of payback first. A research platform and a worker are different products with different sales cycles, and only one of them scales into the numbers implied by this valuation.
None of which makes the IPO irrational. Somebody has to build the hardware that the labs experiment on, and the company selling picks during a gold rush has historically done fine. But investors buying at 36 times sales are not paying for a lab-equipment business.
BYD walks in from the other direction
While Unitree was pricing its book, BYD was preparing to put its first humanoid in front of the public. The carmaker confirmed a debut in early August at its Zhengzhou Di Space, part of a network of science-education and brand experience venues. Leaked specifications describe a service robot called Xiao Di standing 1.61 metres and weighing 58.5 kilograms, with real-time translation across six Chinese dialects and six foreign languages. BYD has not confirmed those specs.
What BYD has confirmed is the deployment plan. Executive vice president Lisa Li said the company intends to put robots into dealer showrooms to greet customers, explain models and demonstrate features, aiming for two or three units per store. That is a narrow job in a controlled environment with a forgiving failure mode, and it is a smarter first commercial target than most of what the industry has promised. BYD joins Tesla, Xiaomi, XPENG, Chery, GAC and several other automakers pushing into embodied intelligence, all of them applying the same logic: perception, control and mass manufacturing transfer from cars to robots more easily than they transfer from anywhere else.
The gap the debut will price
Unitree gives the sector its first public benchmark, which is genuinely useful. Until now, humanoid valuations were private-round assertions with no market to argue with them. A daily share price argues back.
The thing to watch when trading opens is not the first-day pop, which retail demand at 5,526 times subscription has already guaranteed will be dramatic. It is what the shares do once the customer mix becomes a quarterly disclosure and public investors have to decide whether a research-platform business deserves a labour-replacement multiple. For more coverage of robotics and physical AI, visit Mylistingo.
