Unitree’s STAR Market IPO Filing Puts China’s Humanoid Robot Economics Under a Spotlight
Unitree Robotics has moved closer to becoming China’s first publicly listed humanoid-robot maker after the Shanghai Stock Exchange accepted its STAR Market IPO application on March 20—an event that gives investors one of the clearest financial insights yet on whether “embodied AI” can turn product demos into sustainable revenue.
The exchange’s acceptance followed a pre-review process and two rounds of Q&A replies. Unitree plans to issue no fewer than 40.4464 million shares and raise RMB 4.202 billion, a transaction that will test if China’s onshore market values hardware-led AI growth as the sector shifts from lab purchases to early commercial pilots.
The initial market significance lies less in the listing itself than in what Unitree’s financials reveal: unlike most loss-making early-stage robotics players, Unitree has rapidly turned profitable. This raises the bar for peers and intensifies scrutiny on its profit margins, repeat orders, and the extent to which current demand is driven by “spectacle” rather than practical industrial use.
Financials Re-rate Expectations as Profitability Arrives Early
Unitree’s revenue rose from RMB 123 million in 2022 to RMB 159 million in 2023 and RMB 392 million in 2024, then surged to RMB 1.167 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, according to its prospectus. Net profit swung from a loss of RMB 22.10 million in 2022 and RMB 11.15 million in 2023 to a profit of RMB 94.50 million in 2024, and further to RMB 105 million in the first nine months of 2025.
The company projects its full-year 2025 revenue will exceed RMB 1.7 billion, a year-on-year jump of 335.36%; its non-recurring profit after deductions will top RMB 600 million, surging 674.29% year-on-year. For public-market investors, this combination of triple-digit growth and high margins reshapes the benchmark for China’s robotics supply chain—from actuator vendors to AI software providers—suggesting cash generation in the sector may arrive earlier than previously expected.
A key driver of profitability is its robust gross margin. Unitree reported a 59.45% gross margin for its core business in the first three quarters of 2025, up from 56.41% in 2024. The company attributes this to the independent R&D and manufacturing of core components including motors, reducers and controllers.
Product Mix Shifts as Humanoids Overtake Quadrupeds
Unitree’s prospectus reveals a rapid pivot, with humanoid robots replacing quadruped robots as its primary revenue driver. Quadruped robot revenue accounted for 76.57% of total revenue in 2022 but dropped to 42.25% in the first nine months of 2025. Over the same period, humanoid robot revenue soared to 51.53% of the total, hitting RMB 595 million in the first three quarters of 2025 and surpassing quadruped robots’ RMB 488 million in revenue.
Shipment data underscores this scaling-up trend. Unitree recorded cumulative sales of over 30,000 quadruped robots during the reporting period, holding the No.1 global market share for consecutive years. Humanoid robots entered mass production in 2023, with cumulative sales of nearly 4,000 units during the reporting period and shipments exceeding 5,500 units in 2025 alone.
This product mix shift is meaningful for the sector as it redefines customer demand: quadruped robots have well-defined use cases in inspection and research, while humanoid robots still straddle the line between spectacle and practical work. A humanoid-led revenue structure can boost headline growth, but it also makes the company more sensitive to whether customers will place repeat orders beyond one-off deployments.
Commercial Demand Broadens Beyond Labs, But Remains Fragmented
Unitree’s filing shows humanoid robot commercialization is expanding, though the sector is still in the early stages. In 2023, 100% of the company’s humanoid robot revenue came from the research and education sector. By the first nine months of 2025, this share had fallen to 73.60%, meaning nearly 30% of humanoid robot revenue flowed into new categories in less than two years.
In the first three quarters of 2025, 17.39% of Unitree’s humanoid robot revenue came from commercial consumption, and 9.01% from industrial applications including corporate reception and guided tours, smart manufacturing and intelligent inspection. Corporate guided tour scenarios accounted for 50% to 70% of all industrial application revenue, the prospectus notes.
This breakdown is critical for investors evaluating the repeatability of Unitree’s revenue. Corporate tours, event appearances and robot rentals can monetize the current capabilities of humanoid robots—such as movement, pre-scripted short interactions and coordinated routines—without requiring full autonomy. However, these scenarios are labor-intensive, limiting operating leverage unless the costs of deployment and orchestration are reduced.
IPO Proceeds Signal a Pivot Toward ‘Brains,’ Not Just Bodies
Unitree’s fundraising plan indicates its management believes the next key valuation driver will be improving robotic intelligence and scaling deployments, rather than just manufacturing more robots. The company earmarked RMB 2.022 billion of the IPO proceeds for intelligent robot model R&D, RMB 1.110 billion for robot body R&D, RMB 445 million for the development of new intelligent robot products, and RMB 624 million for the construction of an intelligent robot manufacturing base.
This fund allocation sends a clear signal to the market: Unitree aims to close the industry’s well-known “big brain vs. small brain” gap. The company has excelled in motion control and hardware stability (the “small brain”), but lags in environmental understanding, task planning and autonomous decision-making (the “big brain”)—a challenge plaguing the entire embodied AI sector due to a lack of high-quality native data for model training. By directing the largest share of proceeds to model R&D, Unitree is telling investors it views technological differentiation and defensibility as coming from AI intelligence, not just hardware.
For China’s broader robotics ecosystem in 2026, Unitree’s IPO process will act as a stress test: it will show whether capital markets reward a hardware-first company for using high-margin “spectacle” deployments to buy time while investing in full autonomy, and whether competitors without comparable in-house component integration can match Unitree’s profit margins as the market moves from single-customer pilots to large-scale rollouts.
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