London, 12 August 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Katie Winearls
Chinese retail investors submitted 9.8 million orders worth roughly 8.1 trillion yuan — about $1.2trn — for the retail tranche of Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai listing. The company was selling around $900m of stock. The retail portion was oversubscribed 5,526 times.
To put the figure in proportion: individual investors in one country bid an amount close to half of Britain’s annual economic output for a stake in a company that shipped 5,500 humanoid robots last year.
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SubscribeUnitree sold 40.4 million shares at 150.8 yuan, raising about 6.1bn yuan and valuing the Hangzhou firm at roughly 61bn yuan, or $9bn. It is mainland China’s first publicly traded humanoid robot maker and is expected to debut on the STAR Market this month.
What Is Actually Being Bought
The company is real and the products work. Founded in 2016 by the engineer Wang Xingxing, Unitree began with quadruped robots — robot dogs — and has sold more than 33,000 of them. Its humanoid models are sold internationally, and its H1 won a 1,500-metre race at the World Humanoid Robot Games in 6 minutes 35 seconds, quicker than a good many humans.
Around 20% of the offering went to institutional buyers including DeepSeek, which took 2.31%, a Tencent-affiliated vehicle, and investment arms connected to CNPC, China Southern Power Grid and China Telecom.
The valuation is where the story is. Reporting puts the listing at 219 times 2025 earnings and 36 times sales. Goldman Sachs estimates the global humanoid robot market could reach $38bn by 2035, from around $3bn in 2023. Unitree alone is being valued at $9bn against a market that does not yet exist at scale.
The European Absence
Here is the part that should concern readers on this side of the world.
Europe has no equivalent listing, because it has no equivalent company at that stage. Leju Robotics has filed for Shenzhen, AgiBot is preparing a Hong Kong offering, Deep Robotics is expected to follow. An entire sector is being capitalised in a matter of months.
Whatever one thinks of the price, that capital gets spent — on manufacturing capacity, on embodied-AI research, on hiring. European robotics firms competing for the same customers in five years will be doing so against companies that raised nine-figure sums in 2026 while they were writing grant applications.
It is the same pattern visible in Europe’s technology funding and in the Chips Act’s focus on fabrication rather than financing. Europe is not short of engineers. It is short of the machinery that turns engineers into scaled companies.
The Verdict
My view is that the valuation is indefensible and the strategic point stands anyway.
Two hundred and nineteen times earnings for a hardware manufacturer still scaling production is a bubble price. Retail allocation at 5,526 times subscription is effectively a lottery, and lotteries attract people who are not valuing anything. When the stock lists this month, the hype and the first day of trading are two different events, and the second is the one that counts.
But the argument that this is simply mania misses something. Somebody has to build the machinery of physical AI, and the capital is currently being raised in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong rather than Munich, Paris or Cambridge. Overpaying for a strategic industry and underinvesting in it are both errors — they are just not equally recoverable. China will end up with too many robot companies and some spectacular losses. Europe will end up buying robots.
That has been the pattern from electric vehicles to solar to batteries, and the mechanism each time was not superior technology. It was cheaper, faster, more abundant capital arriving earlier.
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