Shares in Unitree rose as much as 460% on their Shanghai trading debut on 19 August, turning a company priced at $9 billion less than two weeks earlier into one worth roughly $66 billion by the close. The listing on the STAR Market coincided with the opening of Beijing’s World Robot Conference, where more than 300 companies spent five days showing humanoid, industrial and service robots to a record crowd.
The demand behind the price was real before trading opened. Unitree’s retail offering was covered more than 5,526 times over, a record for a market built to be China’s answer to the Nasdaq, and the debut made Unitree worth more than established Chinese tech names including Baidu and JD.com. It is the first mainland listing of a dedicated humanoid robot maker, and investors treated it as a proxy for the whole sector.
That enthusiasm ran into a rougher demonstration hall nearby. Two humanoid robots suffered visible failures at the same conference, one losing its remote connection and thrashing on the floor before staff intervened, another crashing into a wall while training for a race ahead of the World Humanoid Robot Games starting 22 August. Neither belonged to Unitree, but both were shown at the event its listing was riding on.
HSBC analysts flagged the gap directly, warning the reported jump in humanoid shipments could be illusory without a marked improvement in the AI models that actually run the robots, and that the current upcycle is unlikely to hold over the next year or two. Unitree’s own capabilities were not what moved on 19 August, its valuation was. Whether the robots on the show floor can do enough to justify that is a question the subscription number does not answer.
