Until June 30, a full-size humanoid had no price you could look up. You negotiated it project by project.
UBTech has changed that. Its U1 starts shipping on September 16. The Lite version costs around 14,500 euros, the Pro 20,500. At launch the order book stood at 13,361 units.
Put that next to the first half of this year, when UBTech sold 921 full-size robots in total.
Fourteen years of losses, and now a queue
UBTech is old by Chinese robotics standards. The founder started it in Shenzhen in 2012 and sold his own apartments to pay for it. Most of the companies I visit were founded in 2023 or later. In December 2023 UBTech listed in Hong Kong as the first listed humanoid company in the world.
It has lost money the whole way, more than 5 billion RMB across five years. In the first half of 2026, revenue from full-size humanoids reached 590 million RMB, up 1,455 percent. Gross margin rose to 44.7 percent, and the loss shrank by 23 percent to 339 million RMB.
The share price is still down about 35 percent this year. The market wants to see robots on a loading dock before it pays for another order book.
A humanoid now competes for capex
Around 14,500 euros is roughly what a mid-range forklift or a small CNC machine costs.
At that price the humanoid leaves the marketing budget. It competes against machines your plant manager already knows how to evaluate.
Unitree's founder asks for patience
Unitree listed in Shanghai on August 19 at 150.8 RMB a share. On day one it touched 1,100, and for a few hours the company was worth 66 billion dollars. Last Friday it closed at 530. Around 34 billion dollars gone. The stock closed lower on eight of the eleven trading days since August 21.
Only 30 million of Unitree's 404 million shares can trade right now. With 7 percent of the stock on the market, one big buyer or seller moves the price hard. The chart measures how thin the trading is.
I was at the World Robotics Conference in Beijing the day after the listing, when the founder went on stage. He put the big leap in robotics two to three years out at the earliest and five to ten at the latest. By leap he means a robot that handles around 80 percent of tasks on its own, in a place it has never seen, from spoken instructions.
The man with the most to gain from the hype told investors to be patient.
The revenue split backs him up. In 2025, 73.66 percent of Unitree's humanoid revenue came from universities and research labs. Industry was 9 percent. The company that shipped more than 5,500 humanoids last year, more than anyone, still sells mostly to researchers.
For a buyer that timeline is good news. It leaves enough time to run a pilot and choose suppliers calmly, and too little to wait it out. I tell my clients 24 months.
Built in Serbia, serviced from Serbia
On August 29, Europe's first mass production plant for humanoid robots started up in a town in western Serbia. It belongs to a Chinese car parts maker together with AgiBot from Shanghai. Phase one cost 20 million euros and targets more than 5,000 robots a year. A 200 million euro industrial park is planned for up to 20,000 humanoids and robot dogs a year.
Washington closed its market to these machines. A few weeks later they came off a line inside Europe. Serbia sits outside the EU and still has a free trade agreement with it.
The objection I hear in almost every client meeting is service. Who fixes the robot when it breaks on a Friday afternoon? Within a year or two, the humanoid you evaluate may arrive by truck from Serbia, with a European address for spare parts, where today it ships from Shenzhen with a 12-week lead time.
Batteries from Korea, cheques for carmakers
Korea picked a different position. LG Energy Solution supplies the batteries for Tesla, Figure and Boston Dynamics, and it is in talks with Chinese makers too. A humanoid has little space for a battery and needs a lot of power in short bursts, so energy density wins the deal.
That is a useful lens for sourcing. Look at the bill of materials under the robot. The logo on the chest can disappear in two or three years. The company that makes the battery or the actuator will still be there.
Then XPeng. Its robot unit raised more than 900 million dollars at a valuation above 6.3 billion, the largest private embodied AI round in Chinese history. IDG Capital led, and Alibaba and Tencent each put in about 100 million dollars. Those two rarely sit in the same round.
XPeng wants to build 1,000 IRON humanoids a month by the end of this year. The first units go into its own stores and industrial parks, with commercial sales from 2027. A carmaker already has the factory, the supply chain, the quality process and a service network. If you are building a supplier list, put the carmakers on it.
What still has to happen
An order book is a press release until the units leave the dock. UBTech does not say who the 13,361 buyers are or where they sit, and it promises every robot reaches its customer by December 31.
I will come back to that number in January.
[00:00] 13,361 humanoid robots have been ordered from UBC. They start shipping on the 16th of September. [music] That is next week. And here is the crazy part. In the whole first half of this year, UB sold 921 full-size robots. The cheapest model costs about 14,500. So, who is UB? What are they actually doing? And why [music] is everybody suddenly ordering their robots? That is where we start today. Then we go to Unitry, the company with the robots doing kung fu and dancing. Unitry lost around $34 billion in 2 weeks. The founder himself says the real breakthrough in robotics is 2 to 3 years away. So he does not sound very nervous
[00:49] about it at all. After that, we fly to my home country. EA Berlin, Europe's biggest electronics show is running right now. And 932 of the exhibitors are Chinese, which is nearly half of the show. And for the first time in the history of the fair, they put humanoid robots on a catwalk. Then we go to Serbia. Europe's first humanoid robot factory opened there on the 29th of August, and it is Chineseowned. They want to build 20,000 [music] robots a year once it's finished. And remember the US ban on Chinese robots we talked about here? America shuts the door, so they built inside Europe [music] instead. And South Korea is in this episode, too. The batteries inside
[01:36] Tesla's Optimus, inside Figure, inside Boston Dynamics, they all come from LG in Korea. [music] Now, the Chinese are calling them as well. Korea's parts makers gained $68 billion in market value on this. And then, Xpang, the car makers robot unit, raised over $900 million. Tencent and Alibaba both put money into the same round. It is the biggest private robotics round China has ever seen. At the end, I will show you another cute robot as always. So, be sure to stay till the end. I make these videos because I want you to see the moves before your competitors do. And why me? I live in Shanghai. I speak Chinese. I read the filings in the original language. and I have taken more
[02:23] than 100 VCs, board members and founders into robotics companies here in China. So be sure to subscribe and like this video. So if you want to understand these companies, if you want to come here and meet them, [music] if you want to buy robots or partner with the robotics companies, just write me as base. >> Let's start with who Ubek actually is. The company was founded in 2012 in Shenzhen by Joen. He sold his own apartments to fund the company. That makes them one of the older robotics companies in China. Most of the companies I visit were founded in 2023, 2024. Some of them even in 2025 or 2026. Ubitech has been doing this for 14 years. And this is a big part of why
[03:11] everybody knows the name. Their first product came out in late 2012. It was called Alpha. It was a small toy size robot with 16 joints that [music] danced and boxed. It was a star at every trade show and nobody was going to put that thing in a factory. But in December 2023, they listed [music] in Hong Kong and became the world's first listed humanoid company. The issue price was was 90 Hong Kong dollars. On Friday, the stock closed at 85. It is down about 35% this year. The high was 161. They have been burning money the whole way. They lost [music] more than 3.1 billion R&B in the 42 months up to mid 2023 and more
[04:00] than 5 billion across 5 years. Their real business today is factories. [music] Walker S robots are training inside BYD, Foxcon, Gi, Audi, Fox and SF Express. That is more car maker floats than any other humanoid on this planet. Intent orders from car makers are already above 500 [music] uni units. Now to what is actually happening. Ubisex starts delivering its U1 humanoid [music] on the 16th of September. Order book at launch on the 30th of June stood at 13,361 [music] units online and offline channels combined. And here is the part you are waiting for, the prices. [music] The U1 light is around €14,500. The Pro version is €20,500. [music]
[04:50] The Ultra, the male version, is about €120,000. The female version about €16,000. The company calls it the first full-size humanoid built for real mass production. I am very curious who these buyers are. There's no information about the location or who they are, but all of them are supposed to have their robot by the end of [music] the year. This is China speed again. In the first half of 2026, Ubitech sold 921 full-size humanoids. Revenue from those was 590 million R&B, up 1,455%. And the gross margin is at 44.7%. Up almost 10 points. But they are still
[05:37] producing at a loss. They lost 339 [music] million R&B in the house which is 23% less than a year ago. So the pattern is revenue climbing, margin climbing, losses shrinking, and the share price is down 35% anyway. The market wants to see delivery before it pays for another order book. And that is why this is the lead story [music] today. For the first time, the price of a full-size humanoid is public and [music] fixed instead of negotiated project by project. That is roughly the price of a mid-range forklift or a small CNC machine. It moves the humanoid out of the marketing budget and into capex where it competes against [music] machines your plant
[06:24] manager already knows how to evaluate. The number to watch is the delivery report at the end of the year and I will come back to it then [music] in December. Orders are a press release. We all know this. But units on a loading dock are business and they are worth to watch. Now let's go to unitry. 2 weeks ago unitry was the hottest stock in China. They listed in Shanghai on the 19th of August. We talked about this at 150.8 8 yen a share and raised around 900 million US. On the first trading day, the share went up to 1,100 yen [music] and it was a raise of 460%. For a few hours, this company was worth $66 [music] billion, more than by due more than JD.
[07:12] On Friday, the share closed at 530 yen that [music] wiped out around $34 billion. But there was no dramatic crash day since the 21st of August. The stock closed lower on eight out of 11 trading days. It just quietly [music] bled out. Now, before anyone reads too much into that price, here is the mechanic behind it. Unitry has 404 million shares. Only 30 million of them can actually be traded right now. That is 7%. Everything else sits with the founders, with early investors, and with people who are not allowed to sell yet. [music] When that few shares are in the market, one big buyer moves the price up violently, and one big seller moves it
[08:00] down just as hard. So, this chart tells you how thin the trading is. [music] It tells you very little about how good the robots are. What I find much more interesting is what the founder said himself [music] last week. One day after the listing, Wanging was on stage at the World Robotics Conference [music] in Beijing where I also was. He said, "The big leap in robotics comes in two to three years at the earliest and 5 to 10 years at the latest latest." And he was specific about what he means by that leap. a robot that handles around 80% of the tasks on its own in a [music] place it has had never been before working from spoken instructions alone. Somebody asked him why his robots are still not
[08:48] in factories and homes. He answered that they work slower than people, but this is right now. So, think about that for a second. The man with the most to gain from the hype just told [music] a room full of investors to be patient. Now look at what they company actually earns. [music] Revenue in 2025 was 1.7 billion R&B around €218 million. Of the humanoid revenue 73.66% came from universities and research labs. Industry was 9% and in the first quarter of this year profit fell by half. They shipped more than 5,500 humanoids [music] last year, more than anyone else on the planet. So, this is the world leader and its main customer
[09:37] is still the research lab. Even after losing a third of its value, the exchange [music] prices unitry at 27.5 billion. For comparison, Mida bought the German robot maker Kuka in 2016 for €4.5 billion and Kuka was doing €3 billion of revenue a year. And the queue is not getting shorter. Agibot from Shanghai here is preparing its Hong Kong listing at right now, aiming at 40 to 50 billion Hong Kong dollars valuation. Here's what this means for you. The share price is actually noise. The timeline from the founder is the signal and it says you have two to three years before these machines get genuinely useful in a place they do not know. That is enough time
[10:26] for you to [music] run a pilot, learn the technology and pick your suppliers calmly. But it's not enough time to sit it out. I tell this all my customers 24 months. So now let us go to my home country. The EPA in Berlin is the [music] biggest consumer electronic show in Europe and 932 of the exhibitors are Chinese. That is close to half the show and it is the highest number in the history of the fair. Two things happened this week that tell you where this is going. The first one is that Samsung skipped the main hall for the first time since 1991 and Xiaomi took the space. 35 years the [music] Korean stood there and now a Chinese phone maker who's a car
[11:13] maker also now has the floor. The second one is that on Friday at lunchtime humanoid robots walked a catwalk in Berlin. They moved like actual models on an actual runway posing, [music] dancing and navigating around obstacles. That has never happened in the history of the fair. And in hall 25, you now find Unitry, Agibbot, Deep Robotics, Engine AI, and Dobot standing next to each other. Agibot brought their A373 cm 55 kilos and had it right Chinese calligraphy in front of the crowd. 2 years ago, that hall did not exist in this form. Here's my read on it. This is the same move I watched the car industry make. Chinese car makers came to [music]
[12:03] Europe through the motor show years before they had a single dealership there. You stand on the European stage. You let people touch the product. You collect the distributors who walk past. Then [music] the orders come and Europe is shocked. Robotics is now doing exactly the [music] same playbook 3 years faster. For you, this is good news. And I actually mean that. You no longer need a plane ticket to Shenzhen to see this hardware in [music] person if you're in Europe or Germany. But I still think you should come. The board members, CTO's and investors I take to the [music] smaller companies here, the ones that cannot afford a booth in Berlin. Those are the people who walk out mind-b blown. The next unitary is
[12:50] probably sitting in a lab in Shenzhen right now with no stand at Epha at all. and I can take you there. Now, let's move to Serbia to Eastern Europe. This is one I [music] did not expect. On the 29th of August, Europe's first mass production plant for humanoid robots started up. It is not in Germany and is not in France. [music] It stands in Shabbach, a town in Western Serbia. The plant belongs to Mint Group, a Chinese car parts maker, together with Agibbot from Shanghai. They put €20 million euros [music] into the first phase. The target is more than 5,000 robots a year assembled there now and fully built there later. And they are not [music] stopping with that plant. Mint is
[13:39] building a whole robotics industrial park in [music] Inija for €200 million. And the work starts in the middle of this month. Once everything runs, the site is planned for up to 20,000 humanoid robots and robot dogs a year. At the opening, they showed a two-legged robot playing football and a four-legged one carrying a person across the hall. In the back of the building, workers [music] were assembling robot dogs for police units and for search and rescue. Now remember the episode where we talked about America banning Chinese or all foreign made robots? Washington closed its market over security concerns and a few weeks later the same machines started [music] rolling off a line
[14:26] inside Europe. That is the whole story in one sentence. When you cannot ship into a [music] market, you just build inside it. And Serbia is a clever place to [music] do exactly that. The country sits outside of the European Union. So Brussels has very little say over what gets built [music] there. It still has a free trade agreement with the EU. So the goods travel anyway. Labor costs uh a fraction of what it costs in Germany and the government rolls out the red carpet. Here is what it means for you. Within a year or two, the humanoid you evaluate will not come by ship from Shenzhen with a 12week lead time. It comes on a truck from Serbia with a European address for
[15:14] service and spare parts. That removes the [music] biggest objection I hear in almost every meeting. Who fixes the thing when it breaks on a Friday afternoon? Now let's come back to Asia to South Korea because the Koreans are pl playing a completely different game here. Their playbook is very interesting. On the 4th of September, Hyundai and the steel maker Posco [music] broke ground on a $5.8 billion steel mill in Donaldsonville in Louisiana. It is the first integrated electric arc furnace mill in the United States built purely for automotive sheet steel. From 2029, it should produce 2.7 million tons a year with around 1,300 employees on an average salary of
[16:04] $95,000. The reason is simple because American steel terrors of up to 50% make imported sheet expensive. The interesting part came at the ceremony. Somebody asked chairman Chong whether that steel could go into Atlas, the humanoid robot built by Hyundai subsidiary Boston Dynamics. His answer was that it certainly should. He then added that he hopes to supply steel for rockets to companies like Space X2. So a car maker builds a steel [music] mill in America and talks about robots and rockets before he talks about car. And this is the pattern across the whole country. LG Energy Solution now supplies the batteries for the three
[16:52] biggest American humanoid programs which are Tesla, Boston Dynamics [music] and Figure. Boston Dynamics Atlas runs on an NLG cell. They have said that publicly that they serve more than six customers in robotics and they are in talks [music] with Chinese makers including unitary we just talked about. The reason they win those deals is boring but very important. The humanoid has very little space for a battery and needs a lot of power for a short time. LG builds high energy density cells while most Chinese factories work with a cheaper lithium iron phosphate chemistry that is heavier for the same energy. The Korean stock market has understood this and Koreans love to trade their stocks.
[17:42] According to the Korea Economic Daily, Korean car and [music] electronic suppliers that turn towards robotics have added around $68 [music] billion in market value. Here's my read. In China, dozens of companies are fighting over who builds the winning humanoid, and most of them will [music] lose that fight. Korea decided to sell the parts that go into [music] every humanoid, no matter whose logo is on the chest. And that [music] is a useful lens for your own sourcing. When you look at a robot, look at the bill of materials underneath it. The brand on the outside can disappear in two or three years, but the company that makes the actuator, the battery or the sensor will still be there. Last story today is about money
[18:31] and it is the biggest number of its kind China has ever seen. Xpang is a Chinese electric car maker. We talked about their humanoid iron here in July when the first small series came off the line. In the last days of August, Expense Robert unit closed its first outside funding round. They raised more than $900 million, which values the robot business at over $6.3 billion. That is the largest private funding round for embodied AI in Chinese history, and it beats the record unitary held before. Look at who is on [music] this list. IDG Capital led the round. Gaong Ventures came in and then both Alibaba and Tencent put in about $100
[19:21] million each. Those last two matter in my opinion. Alibaba and Tencent compete with each other in almost every market they touch and they rarely sit in the same round. Here they did on the same day in the same company. Xping itself keeps around 82% of the robot business. So, this is not a spinoff and they have a clear plan for the money. [music] By the end of this year, they want to build 1,000 iron units per month. The first ones goes into Xpang's own retail stores and industrial parks, which means the company is its own first customer. Commercial sales in China and abroad are planned from 2027. Here is my read on
[20:09] it. For two years, the story in this industry was the robotic startup. The small team out of a university lab with a viral video. The largest check ever written in this field just went to a car company. And when you think about it, that absolutely [music] makes sense. A car maker already has the factory, the supply chain, the quality process, and a service network that fixes things when they break. A humanoid and a car share a large part of their parts lists anyway. So if you [music] are watching this markets to buy, add the car makers to your list. Xpang, BYD, Xiaomi, and Jile are all in this industry now. They will not be the loudest name in a demo video and they [music] are the ones most
[20:56] likely to still be shipping robots in 5 years. So let us put this week together. a company that has been losing money for 14 years and is about to ship 13,000 humanoid robots. The most valuable robot company in the world lost $34 billion while its founder told everyone to be patient. Half of Europe's biggest electronics show is now Chinese. Europe's first humanoid factory is Chinese-owned and stands in Serbia. Korea is quietly selling the batteries into every robot on both sides of this race and the biggest check in the history [music] of Chinese robotics went to a car maker. That is one single week. Now I want to hear from you. UB says all
[21:47] 13,361 robots will be with their customers by the 31st of December. Do you think they make it? write yes or no in the comments and I will come back to this in January and we will see who was right. If you want the details behind these stories, I write them up every week in our newsletter. It goes out every Monday. It is free and the link is in the description. And if you want to see this for yourself, write me a message. I put the route together. I open the doors at the robotics and I companies and I sit in the room with you. We don't do group tours. We do tailormade tours for your company. The link is down in [music] the description. Now stay with me for one more clip because this is one that made
[22:37] me laugh. See you next week. >> [clears throat]
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