Unitree closed its first trading day worth 201 times last year's sales — its own filing puts growth at 36%, not 333%

On 19 August 2026 Unitree Robotics became the first humanoid robot maker to trade on a mainland Chinese exchange. It priced its offering on Shanghai's STAR Market at 150.80 yuan a share, sold 40.45 million shares — a tenth of its enlarged capital — for about 6.1 billion yuan, and entered the session valued at roughly 61 billion yuan. The market disagreed with that price immediately. The stock opened at 1,100 yuan, 629% above the offer, briefly worth about 445 billion yuan (US$66 billion). It closed at 845 yuan, still up 460%, at about 342 billion yuan. Around 23.2 billion yuan of shares changed hands in a single day, while the STAR Market Composite fell 7.2% and the Shanghai Composite 2.4%. What the buyers were paying for is set out in the prospectus. Revenue reached 1.70 billion yuan in 2025, against 392.77 million yuan the year before — a 333% jump. Net profit was 278.21 million yuan. At the closing price, the company was therefore worth roughly 201 times its annual sales and about 1,230 times its annual profit. The same filings describe a business that is already slowing. Unitree guides for first-half 2026 revenue of about 1.1 billion yuan, growth of 35.6% to 45.4% year on year — roughly a tenth of the rate that produced the debut. First-quarter profit excluding one-off items fell 52.6% as spending on research and marketing rose. 2025 was also the year the robot dog stopped being the main product. Humanoid sales of 867.8 million yuan overtook the quadrupeds, which slipped to about 42% of revenue. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoids, more than any other maker in the world, on top of more than 33,000 quadrupeds sold to date. Divide the humanoid line by the units and the average machine brought in about 158,000 yuan — roughly the price of one G1 with options, not of an industrial platform. The risk the prospectus names is American. Overseas customers provided 43.65% of main-business revenue, 731.66 million yuan, and the United States alone 13.3% — in the same season that US regulators moved to bar new equipment approvals for foreign-built humanoid and quadruped robots. Unitree says the products it already sells there keep their authorisation. The sharpest number of the day was not the share price. Meituan, the food delivery company whose own delivery drones we described yesterday, held 8.7% of Unitree after the listing: close to 30 billion yuan at the closing bell, about 70 times what it originally paid. Founder Wang Xingxing, 36, held 121.4 million shares worth roughly 103 billion yuan.