Unitree Robotics’ initial public offering has reportedly been oversubscribed more than 5,000 times as investors scramble for shares in one of China’s best-known humanoid robot manufacturers.
The Hangzhou-based company priced its IPO at 150.8 yuan ($22.4) per share, raising approximately $900 million and giving Unitree a valuation of around $9 billion, according to CNBC.
Demand for the online retail tranche of the Shanghai STAR Market offering exceeded the number of available shares by more than 5,000 times, resulting in an allocation rate of just 0.018 percent.
CNBC reports that strategic investors in the IPO include Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek.
Unitree is expected to begin trading later this month, becoming the first humanoid robotics company to list on mainland China.
The extraordinary demand reflects growing investor interest in humanoid robotics, a sector that has attracted billions of dollars of investment as manufacturers race to develop machines capable of performing human tasks in factories and other workplaces.
Unitree has become one of the industry’s most recognizable companies through its G1 and H-series humanoids, as well as its established range of quadruped robots. Its machines have attracted widespread attention for increasingly sophisticated demonstrations involving running, dancing, fighting and recovering from falls.
But questions remain over how quickly such capabilities can translate into commercially useful work.
Unitree itself acknowledged in its prospectus that large-scale commercial adoption could develop more slowly than expected, with robotic hands still lacking the precision and durability required for sustained operation.
Nevertheless, the company enters the public market with rapidly expanding sales. CNBC reports that Unitree’s revenue more than quadrupled last year, although first-quarter adjusted profit fell by more than 52 percent as research and development and marketing expenditure increased.
The listing could also be followed by several more Chinese robotics IPOs. Unitree competitors AgiBot and Leju Robotics are pursuing listings in Hong Kong and Shenzhen respectively.
For now, however, investor demand for Unitree suggests that enthusiasm for humanoid robotics is running considerably ahead of the number of robotics companies available to public-market investors.
