It was a fitting split screen. On Wednesday in Shanghai, shares in Unitree, China’s best-known humanoid robot maker, opened up more than 600% on their trading debut, an IPO so hyped it was oversubscribed by retail investors thousands of times over. Two hundred kilometres away in Beijing, the World Robot Conference opened with a very different message: enough with the backflips, show us the work.
That is the tension running through China’s robot boom right now. The demos are spectacular. Whether the machines can do anything useful, at a price that makes sense, is the question the industry is finally being forced to answer.
Signs of real deployment
To be fair, some of that shift is already underway. At the conference, Robotera showed a wheeled humanoid sorting parcels, and a representative said the company has more than 100 of them working across 15 warehouses, including China Post sites, since last year. DexForce demonstrated robots boxing up mobile phones and said they have been running since early this year at a Lens Technology plant, a supplier to Apple and Huawei. Leju said European factories and Chinese carmakers are using its robots to move crates and load parts.
The pitch is less about replacing people than about the jobs people would rather not do. As one DexForce official put it, humans are the most dexterous workers around, but plenty of them do not want to spend their days packing phones into boxes. Logistics, sorting, repetitive assembly: dull, high-volume tasks are where these robots are landing first.
The reality behind the froth
Now the caveats, because they matter. Analysts have been openly skeptical of the shipment numbers. HSBC warned in July that the surge could be “illusionary” and hard to sustain without real gains in the AI that gives these robots a brain. For most makers, humanoids are still used mainly for demonstrations, performances, and research rather than paying jobs. Even Unitree, unusually profitable for the sector, drew under a tenth of its sales from industrial deployments through much of last year.
The stock pop deserves a similar squint. Enormous first-day jumps are routine on China’s STAR Market, where regulators deliberately price IPOs low, so a sixfold surge reflects structural quirks as much as raw conviction. One venture investor described the listing as a “primary school graduation,” with the hard exams still ahead.
A national project, and a contested one
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Beijing has made robotics a national priority, aiming for a world-class industry by 2027 to offset a shrinking workforce, and Chinese firms already account for roughly three-quarters of the global humanoid market. That success has drawn a response: the Trump administration banned imports of Chinese-made humanoids last month on security grounds. Even so, foreign suppliers are leaning in, with Nvidia’s Madison Huang making a surprise appearance and US vision-systems maker RealSense calling China the center of humanoid technology, noting its product cycles now run six to eight months rather than years.
So has China’s humanoid industry truly grown up, or just thrown a very expensive graduation party? The honest answer is that the demos have never looked better and the deployments are real but small. The next year, once the glow of investor enthusiasm fades and the report cards come due, is when we find out which robots can hold down a job.
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