Unitree's first day: a $9 billion IPO closes worth about $53 billion — the humanoid sector's first public price.

Unitree began trading on Shanghai's STAR Market on August 19 under the ticker 688836, and the reception was extraordinary even by the standards of a hyped Chinese listing. The stock opened at 1,100 yuan, up 629.44% from its IPO price of 150.80 yuan, before retreating to close up 487% at 845 yuan — valuing the Hangzhou maker at roughly 358 billion yuan, or about $53 billion, per exchange data compiled by Forbes (Fortune put the surge-driven figure nearer $66 billion). Either way, it is roughly six times the approximately $9 billion the deal priced at just two weeks earlier, when Unitree sold about 40.45 million shares — around 10% of the company — to raise near 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million). The retail tranche had been oversubscribed more than 5,500 times, with about 9.8 million accounts chasing 9.7 million available shares for an allocation rate of 0.018%. This is the first pure-play humanoid robot maker to trade on a mainland Chinese exchange.

The valuation is the story, because it is the first one the market has actually set. At the close, Unitree traded at nearly 1,300 times its 2025 earnings and roughly 210 times sales; the IPO price alone was an aggressive 219 times earnings, and the market multiplied it by six. Unitree reported about 1.7 billion yuan ($252 million) of 2025 revenue and 278 million yuan (about $41 million) of net profit — a genuine outlier in a field where most makers are pre-profit — and it shipped more than 5,500 humanoids in 2025 and around 18,000 units across its full range by July. That profitability, plus its status as China's first listed humanoid champion, is what drove the pop: founder Wang Xingxing's roughly 30% stake is now worth north of 100 billion yuan, and strategic investors read like a who's who of Chinese tech, including DeepSeek, Tencent, PetroChina and China Telecom, with early backers Meituan, Alibaba, Ant Group and Xiaomi. On paper, Unitree is now worth more than Figure AI's $39 billion private mark and dwarfs Agility Robotics, whose Churchill Capital SPAC implies roughly $4 billion.

Skepticism is warranted, and not only because a triple-digit first-day pop is routine for Chinese IPOs that regulators deliberately price low. In a mid-July report, HSBC analysts warned that 'the surge in shipments for robot makers could be illusionary' and that, without a significant improvement in the AI models that run the machines, the current shipment upcycle is 'unlikely to be sustained over the next 1-2 years.' Most of Unitree's sales still go to research and education rather than commercial deployment. And the debut's timing was pointed: it coincided with the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing, where Unitree's booth drew crowds with robots that boxed, danced and played ping-pong — performances, not paid work. Nomura issued a 'buy' rating on the stock, but even bullish analysts frame the listing as a benchmark that Unitree must now grow into.

For a buyer, the listing changes the financing picture, not the shopping list. The upside is real: a cash-rich, publicly traded Unitree can keep pushing prices down — the G1 sits around $13,500 and the R1 around $4,900 — and volume up, which helps the research and education buyers who make up most of its base, and once it files quarterly reports the industry will finally get an audited-style window into what a high-volume humanoid business actually earns. Watch those margins and the share of revenue from real industrial deployment far more closely than the first-day surge. The caveats are just as concrete for Western procurement teams: the FCC added foreign-made humanoids to its Covered List on July 28, blocking new Chinese models from US authorization; Washington has placed Unitree on its list of 'Chinese military companies'; the US supplied about 18% of Unitree's 2025 revenue; and STAR Market A-shares are gated from most foreign investors, so US exposure runs through ETFs rather than the stock. A market price is not a product roadmap — this one prices in years of flawless execution the shipped robots have yet to demonstrate.