The profitable humanoid

Hangzhou's Unitree Robotics passed its listing-committee review on June 1, clearing the way to raise about 4.2 billion yuan (~$610M) on Shanghai's STAR Market at a valuation near $6 billion. It will be the first pure-play embodied-AI company on China's A-share market — and the first humanoid maker anywhere to go public as a real business rather than a bet.

Humanoids were 1.9% of Unitree's core revenue in 2023. In 2025 they were 51.5% — they overtook the robot dogs that made the company famous.

That is the part worth sitting with. The Western humanoid field is almost entirely pre-revenue: Figure raises enormous rounds against demos, Tesla's Optimus is an internal project, and both shipped on the order of 150 units in 2025. Unitree shipped roughly 5,500 — about a third of the world's humanoids — at close to 60% gross margin, on revenue that jumped from 392M yuan to 1.71B yuan ($250M) in a year. Humanoids now outsell the company's famous robot dogs.

It did this while cutting price hard: the average humanoid sold for about $85,000 in 2023 and roughly $25,000 by 2025, a ~70% drop in two years. Volume leadership plus a collapsing price plus a fat margin is the combination the West hasn't shown it can reach.

The profit deserves an asterisk. The headline 674% jump to ~$90M is the adjusted number; statutory net profit is closer to $40M, the gap mostly share-based pay. And in the first quarter of 2026, adjusted profit fell 52% even as revenue rose 68%, as the company poured money into R&D and sales. So the milestone is real but narrow: a humanoid maker can be profitable and listed — and stay that way only as long as it doesn't have to spend to grow.