News · 2026-08-18

Unitree lists in Shanghai as the rare profitable humanoid robot maker

Unitree Robotics shares begin trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market on August 19 under stock code 688836, according to the listing notice the company published on August 18. The filing shows something unusual for a humanoid robot company: 2025 revenue of about 1.70 billion yuan and net profit attributable to the parent of about 278 million yuan. The prospectus explains that it uses a price-to-sales comparison rather than price-to-earnings because the listed companies whose business most resembles Unitree's are all unprofitable.

Key facts

• Listing date August 19, 2026, on the Shanghai STAR Market, stock code 688836, sponsored by CITIC Securities.
• 404,464,340 total shares post-offering; 40,446,434 shares offered, exactly 10.00 percent of post-offering capital, with no sale of existing shares.
• 2025 revenue of 1,699,269,300 yuan and net profit attributable to the parent of 278,210,500 yuan.
• Primary source: the company's listing announcement filed with the Shanghai Stock Exchange, published August 18, 2026.

Humanoid robotics has spent five years as a sector defined by demonstrations rather than income statements. Companies show a machine doing a backflip, raise on the strength of it, and defer the question of who is paying. Unitree is entering the public markets having quietly resolved that question, and its own filing makes the contrast explicit.

The prospectus states that because "the comparable listed companies whose main business and operating model resemble the issuer's are all unprofitable," it selected price-to-sales as the valuation metric for peer comparison. The named comparable is UBTech, listed in Hong Kong as 9880.HK, which the filing shows with about 2.0 billion yuan of 2025 revenue against a market capitalisation of roughly 38.8 billion yuan as of the pricing reference date. Unitree earns comparable revenue and, unlike its peer, keeps some of it. The filing also notes that as of August 5, the average trailing price-to-earnings ratio for its assigned industry classification, general equipment manufacturing, stood at 38.56 times.

The structure of the offering is worth understanding because it will shape the first week. Unitree is selling 40,446,434 shares, exactly 10.00 percent of its post-offering capital, with no existing shareholders cashing out. But the free float at listing is much smaller than that: only 7.44 percent of post-offering shares are unrestricted, because founder and original-shareholder stakes are locked for 36 months or at least 12, the sponsor's co-investment subsidiary is locked for 24 months, management and core-employee participation through a dedicated asset management plan is locked for 36 or 12 months, and 10 percent of institutional allocations are locked for 6 months.

Combine a thin float with the STAR Market rule the filing highlights, that newly listed shares face no daily price limit for their first five trading days before a 20 percent band applies, and the company's own risk section reads as an unusually candid warning about its own stock. It says so directly, flagging both the widened price limits and the liquidity risk from a small circulating share count.

Why it matters beyond the ticker: this is the first humanoid robot manufacturer to reach China's A-share market, and it arrives with the one credential the sector has consistently lacked. Whatever one thinks of humanoid robots as a product category, a company selling them at a profit is a different kind of evidence than a company demonstrating them at a loss. Every valuation argument in the sector now has a public comparable with real margins.

The honest caveat concerns the marketing, not the financials. A widely shared video package attributed to Unitree describes a machine called "Superman" with a two-metre standing vertical jump and a 12.66 metres per second top speed, released three days before the listing. We checked the filings, which are legally consequential documents that do not contain renders or demo-reel figures. No product called Superman appears in them, and neither do those numbers. The strongest performance claim we have been able to verify from Unitree itself remains H1 exceeding 10 metres per second in April 2026, which is below the pace of the human 100-metre record. Treat the Superman package as unverified until Unitree's own channel publishes it with a date.

That gap is itself the interesting part. The prospectus is a chronology of hardware and control maturity written for regulators and institutional buyers. The video is written for everyone else. Both went out in the same week, and only one of them carries legal liability for being wrong.

Context from our previous coverage: we reported on Beijing's robot 100-metre dash going fully autonomous and on the proposed US humanoid robot ban that never left committee. For the software side, our lesson on vision-language-action models covers how modern robots turn instructions into motion.

Primary source, verified: read the paper →

Ground Truth. (2026, August 18). Unitree lists in Shanghai as the rare profitable humanoid robot maker. Ground Truth. https://groundtruth.day/news/unitree-lists-tomorrow-as-the-rare-profitable-humanoid-maker.html

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  title  = {Unitree lists in Shanghai as the rare profitable humanoid robot maker},
  author = {{Ground Truth}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = {aug},
  url    = {https://groundtruth.day/news/unitree-lists-tomorrow-as-the-rare-profitable-humanoid-maker.html}
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Topics: robotics · humanoids · unitree · ipo · china · hardware · markets