Author: Tanay Jaipuria , Partner at Wing

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Editor's Note: On May 25, the Shanghai Stock Exchange website showed that Unitree Robotics' IPO on the Science and Technology Innovation Board will be reviewed on June 1. The company plans to raise US$620 million and aims to become the first humanoid robot company to be listed on the A-share market.

Unitree Robotics' prospectus is attracting a lot of attention because it presents a good picture of the current state of the robotics market.

As the world's largest supplier of humanoid robots, Unitree Robotics has not only achieved profitability but also maintained rapid growth. This article will explore:

Unitree Technologies' products
Shift in revenue structure towards humanoid robots
Which companies are currently purchasing robots (and why)?
Vertically integrated business model
Financial Analysis
Model layer development goals

Unitree Technologies' products

Unitree Robotics was founded in Hangzhou in 2016 by Wang Xingxing, a self-taught robotics expert who is famous for creating the first quadruped robot in his apartment. The company currently has 480 employees, including approximately 175 R&D personnel.

The company mainly sells two products:

Quadruped robots (robot dogs): Go2 (consumer and research grade), B2 (industrial grade) and A2.

Humanoid robots: H1, H2, G1, and R1. You may have seen G1 in popular online videos; it is 1.32 meters tall and weighs 35 kilograms.

The company began its international operations in 2018. More than 35% of its revenue comes from outside China, including a large client base in the US academic community.

Transformation into humanoid robots

Two years ago, Unitree Robotics was essentially a robot dog company, primarily selling quadruped robots. In 2023, humanoid robots accounted for only 1.9% of its revenue.

However, by the first three quarters of 2025, humanoid robots already accounted for more than half of its revenue.

Driven by product-market fit and aggressive marketing strategies , the company's humanoid robots have appeared on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala for two consecutive years. In 2024, Jensen Huang also showcased a Unitree Robot at the GTC conference.

 Unitree Robots appeared on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala

This brand exposure has successfully translated into commercial and research needs, something most Chinese hardware companies have never truly achieved.

Compared to other companies, Unitree's humanoid robot shipments are particularly impressive. In 2025, Unitree sold approximately 5,500 humanoid robots, becoming the world's largest manufacturer of bipedal humanoid robots. Chinese company AGIBot follows closely behind. In contrast, well-known American companies such as Figure AI and Agility Robotics may have sold only a few hundred units (or even fewer).

The prospectus outlines a five-year target of producing 75,000 humanoid robots and 115,000 quadruped robots annually. This is approximately 14 times the humanoid robot production target for 2025. While ambitious, this goal highlights the industry's very early stage.

Who is buying robots?

The prospectus categorizes buyers into three groups: research and education, commerce and consumer, and industrial applications.

The harsh reality is that most of the current demand for humanoid robots is concentrated in scientific research and education.

1. Scientific research and education: accounting for 74% of humanoid robot revenue/sales. Since 2022, academic buyers have been Unitree's main customer group and remain the largest source of the company's total revenue.

2. Commercial and Consumer Sector: Accounting for 17% of humanoid robot sales. Non-academic consumers who purchase these robots mostly use them for "display": acting as eye-catching promoters in retail locations, tourist attractions, performances, and exhibitions. In the first nine months of 2025, consumer revenue nearly quadrupled year-over-year, which sounds astonishing, but its initial base was very small. Currently, the most realistic application of a $25,000 humanoid robot seems to be standing at the entrance of a shop in Shenzhen to attract customers.

3. Industrial Applications: Only 9% of humanoid robot sales. Unitree also acknowledges that industrial deployment is relatively limited due to the immaturity of the technology, reflecting the current state of the technology. Of this 9% of sales, approximately 50%-70% are used in scenarios such as corporate reception and tour guiding. Therefore, overall, the shipment volume of humanoid robots actually used for practical tasks such as corporate reception and inspection only accounts for 3%-4%.

The outlook for quadruped robots (robot dogs) is even brighter: only about one-third of sales come from research and development, over 40% from commercial applications, and the remainder from industrial uses. Production applications in this field are already quite mature. Customers include State Grid, China Southern Power Grid, China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec, Baowu Steel Group, and JD.com (JD.com is Unitree's largest customer). These companies use quadruped robots for routine inspections of chemical plants, substations, coal mines, pipelines, and more.

 Unitree quadruped robots are used for inspection operations.

Vertically integrated business model

One of Unitree Robotics' unique strengths lies in its ability to independently design and manufacture most of its core components: high-torque motors, precision reducers, encoders, joint modules, intelligent controllers, high-precision sensors, dexterous hands, LiDAR, and cameras. According to McKinsey data, actuators (i.e., the motors, reducers, and joint systems that drive the robot's movement) typically account for 40%-60% of the total bill of materials (BOM) cost of a humanoid robot.

Most companies in this field rely on external procurement, but Unitree manufactures its own components. Outsourced parts account for only about 14%-18% of its total cost. It only outsources general-purpose components such as battery cells and flash memory, as well as differentiated components such as the core computing board.

As a result, the manufacturing cost of a single quadruped robot decreased by 46%, from approximately $3,300 in 2022 to approximately $1,800 by mid-2025. During the same period, the cost of humanoid robots also decreased from approximately $10,800 to $9,200.

Interestingly, as shown in the figure below, although the average selling price of quadruped and humanoid robots has declined year by year, their gross profit margin has increased over the entire period due to their highly vertically integrated strategy: soaring from around 45% in 2022-2023 to nearly 60% in 2025.

 Note: In 2023, Unitree only sold 5 humanoid robots, so the average selling price that year is not representative.

Financial Overview

Driven by strong growth in its humanoid robot business, the company's revenue surged from $58 million in 2024 to approximately $252 million in 2025, a staggering increase of 335%. For most of the company's history, international sales accounted for over 55% of its revenue. In 2025, revenue from the Chinese domestic market surpassed exports for the first time; however, overseas export revenue still more than doubled year-on-year.

The gross profit margin is close to 60% and has been growing in recent years, as detailed below.

In a horizontal comparison: most hardware companies have a gross profit margin between 30% and 40%, while software companies typically reach 70% to 80%. For a company that sells physical robots, Unitree's gross profit margin is at a rather high level, which is entirely due to their vertical integration model and the strong differentiation of their current products.

The company turned a profit in 2024 (according to U.S. GAAP), with a profit margin of approximately 18%, which was close to 35% on an adjusted basis.

Unitree Robotics' target valuation in this IPO is approximately $6 billion to $7 billion.

Model layer vision

Unitree plans to invest nearly half of its IPO proceeds in software development. Of the $620 million raised, approximately $300 million has been designated for AI model training over the next three years, equivalent to an annual investment of about $100 million in developing “embodied large models.”

The prospectus describes two parallel model architectures:

The first type is the VLA (Vision-Language-Motion) model: This model directly maps visual and language inputs into motion commands, enabling robots to generalize and handle unfamiliar tasks without manually writing code instructions.
The second type is the WMA (World Model + Action) model: Yushu considers this a more reliable solution. The WMA model can construct an internal simulation of physical reality. The robot predicts what will happen before it acts, rather than learning purely through trial and error.

Unitree has released initial versions of both models. In September 2025, Unitree open-sourced UnifoLM-WMA-0; in January 2026, UnifoLM-VLA-0 was open-sourced.

Yushu also provided a detailed breakdown of the model's approximate expenditures, as shown below:

Unitree Robotics' current leading advantage in hardware is undeniable, but the company understands that to maintain a lasting competitive edge in the robotics field, it may be necessary to simultaneously control the model layer: the "brain" system that determines what the robot does and how it moves. Furthermore, its ambitions in software are also a hedge against hardware commoditization (low-price competition). Unitree has built a moat in hardware manufacturing.

However, if actuators and joint modules eventually become standardized parts like batteries in electric vehicles, then the industry's defenses and competitive barriers will inevitably shift to the model layer.

Conclusion

Unitree Robotics boasts a profitable hardware business, a strong manufacturing moat, and more humanoid robots than any other company, all at highly competitive prices. However, as reflected in the practical applications of its humanoid robots, widespread commercialization is still in its early stages. "Demonstration" applications dominate consumer demand, while industrial deployments are relatively limited.

Unitree Robotics has given us a glimpse into the current state of the robotics market, and we can look forward to more breakthroughs in models, hardware, and application scenarios in the future.

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