Analysis
Unitree Robotics closed subscriptions on its Shanghai STAR Market IPO with retail demand oversubscribing the offering roughly 8,000 times over, according to Forbes and CNN. Pulse covered the subscription window opening days earlier; what's changed since is that the book is now closed, shares are priced, and trading is set to start Wednesday, August 19 -- the real test of whether retail enthusiasm survives an actual open.
The company priced shares at 150.80 yuan, implying a total valuation above 60 billion yuan (roughly $8.4 billion), and is offering about 40.45 million shares -- 10% of its post-offering share capital -- to raise roughly 6.10 billion yuan (about $900 million) in gross proceeds. That makes Unitree the first humanoid-robot maker to list on a mainland Chinese exchange, and the largest maker of humanoid robots globally by unit sales.
“That makes Unitree the first humanoid-robot maker to list on a mainland Chinese exchange, and the largest maker of humanoid robots globally by unit sales.”
Unlike most of the humanoid-robotics field -- including US rivals Figure AI and Tesla's Optimus program, neither of which is close to profitable -- Unitree is reporting real financials: 1.7 billion yuan in 2025 revenue with positive margins, and cumulative deliveries above 18,000 robots. That combination of profitability and a record-oversubscribed retail book stands in sharp contrast to the US IPO market's AI names, most of which are pricing on growth narratives rather than trailing profitability.
The bear case sits in the mechanics of the oversubscription number itself: an 8,000x retail subscription rate reflects allocation scarcity and STAR Market listing rules as much as it reflects durable demand, and China's retail-driven IPO pops have a well-documented history of fading sharply in the weeks after debut. Wednesday's open print, not Monday's subscription number, is the figure that will tell VCs whether the humanoid-robotics public-market thesis actually holds.
