Unitree IPO Draws 5,526x Retail Demand in Shanghai's First Humanoid Robot Listing
Unitree's IPO opened its A-share subscription on Shanghai's STAR Market this week, and the demand figures read like a lottery: retail investors subscribed 5,526 times the shares on offer when books opened on Aug. 10. The listing is the first IPO by a Chinese humanoid robot manufacturer, and it prices the company, formally Yushu Technology Co., at roughly 60.99 billion yuan ($9 billion).
That valuation is where my skepticism and my respect for the business collide, and both deserve a hearing. With a small public float, the online allotment rate is expected to land between 0.02% and 0.03%, meaning nearly all of the retail money chasing the stock will simply be returned. Trading is scheduled to begin between Aug. 17 and 21, after China's securities regulator approved Unitree's registration in a decision dated July 1.
What the Unitree IPO Numbers Actually Say
The subscription frenzy would matter less if the underlying business were weak. It is not. Unitree's revenue grew from 159 million yuan in 2023 to 1.699 billion yuan in 2025, a roughly tenfold expansion in two years, and the company swung to an adjusted profit of 591 million yuan last year. Q1 2026 revenue rose 68.49% year on year, international markets contribute more than 40% of sales, and the company reports a 32.4% global humanoid market share at a 60.13% gross margin. DeepSeek has also joined as a strategic placement investor, linking the robot maker to China's frontier-AI ecosystem.
Here is my stance: the oversubscription says more about the market than about the company. A 60.99 billion yuan valuation against 1.699 billion yuan in 2025 revenue implies a price-to-sales multiple near 36x, a rich price for any hardware maker, humanoid or not. Real revenue, a profit transition, and gross margins above 60% are rare in robotics, so the fundamentals justify attention. But a 5,526x subscription rate is chiefly a measure of how few shares are in the float.
The strongest counter-argument is that scarcity is the point: China has no other publicly traded pure-play humanoid robot maker, so this stock becomes the only liquid way to bet on the category. That argument carries real force, and it explains why the allotment rate will sit near zero. It also means the first weeks of STAR Market trading, with daily price limits in place, will be driven by supply and demand rather than earnings.
Why this matters
For decision-makers, the lesson is to separate the subscription mania from the operating story. Unitree is a profitable, fast-growing robot maker entering public markets at a premium multiple, and the 5,526x retail demand reflects a thin float rather than intrinsic value. Watch the first days of trading and the allocation data, and let the fundamentals set your view.
AI-generated image.
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