Tuesday Aug 25
FUNDINGOther

Unitree Falls 45% In Four Days

25AUG
+460%-45%

Humanoid robots just got a public price. Unitree closed up 460% on its Shanghai debut last Wednesday, then fell 45% in four sessions. The IPO was priced at 219 times earnings.

Valuation peaked near $66 billion, above Baidu and JD.com. About $30 billion came off after that. Only 7.44% of shares were freely floating, which made both moves easy.

The numbers underneath are thinner than the story. Adjusted net profit fell 53% to about $6 million in the first quarter of 2026. Industrial customers were 9% of humanoid revenue.

Most humanoid revenue came from research and education buyers, at 73.6%. That is a demo market, not a deployment market. The stock is now pricing that difference in.

full brief & sources

⚡ Why this matters

  • First listed humanoid maker in mainland China, so this is the first public price for the category.
  • The round trip happened in four sessions, which tells you how little of the price was fundamentals.
  • Every humanoid startup pitching a valuation now has this comp to argue with.

🔍 What happened

  • Unitree raised 6.1 billion yuan, about $904 million, in its Shanghai IPO.
  • Shares closed the debut up 460%, intraday up as much as 629% from a 150.8 yuan offer price.
  • Peak valuation reached roughly $66 billion before losing about $30 billion.
  • The offer priced at 219 times earnings with only 7.44% of shares freely floating.
  • The IPO drew 9.78 million valid subscription accounts, a STAR Market record.
  • 2025 revenue was 1.7 billion yuan with 600 million yuan of profit; first-quarter 2026 adjusted profit fell 53%.

💬 Smart takes

  • The float math: with 7.44% of shares trading, a small pool of retail buyers set both the peak and the fall.
  • The revenue mix: 73.6% of humanoid revenue came from research and education, 9.01% from industrial use.
  • Skeptic on the skeptics: a 45% drawdown off a 460% pop still leaves holders far above the offer price, so calling this a crash flatters the drama.

🧭 Where this goes

  1. Likelyother Chinese robotics names see their private marks questioned against this comp.
  2. LikelyUnitree publishes an industrial-customer number to answer the demo-market read.
  3. PossibleChinese regulators revisit float requirements after the retail losses.
  4. Wild Carda US humanoid maker pulls a planned listing rather than be priced against this.

🥄 The Spoon Take

The hype had a real kernel. Unitree ships, exports, and made money last year, which is more than most of the field. But a 219 times earnings price on a business selling mostly to labs and classrooms was always a bet on the next decade, not this one. The market took four days to notice.

🤔 Pushback

Buyers at the offer price are still up several hundred percent, so this looks less like a bust and more like a very fast price discovery.

·RTE - Post-listing slump·Bloomberg - 460% debut·Fortune - $66B valuation·Invezz - 45% crash