- Unitree’s stock takes investors on a 100-billion-yuan roller coaster in just two days
- Its valuation is now betting on a robotics future that may still be years away
From an opening price of 1,100 yuan ($163) a share and a market cap of 444.9 billion yuan ($66 billion) to a low of 685 yuan and a market cap below 280 billion yuan, Unitree has gone through what is jokingly referred to as a “100-billion-yuan roller-coaster ride” in just two trading days.
Investors who declared during the pre-market auction that anything below 1,000 yuan was “free money” were sitting on paper losses of more than 30% two days later.
Scarcity cuts both ways
The trigger for the wild swings was not complicated. Unitree has about 400 million shares outstanding after its IPO, but only 7.44% were freely tradable when the stock debuted.
At the opening price, that put the freely tradable market cap at only a few tens of billions of yuan.
On one side were 9.78 million investors scrambling for shares, with a winning rate of just 0.018%. On the other was an extremely limited supply of stock.
Scarcity and liquidity premiums were amplified during the first five trading sessions, when the stock was not subject to the usual daily price limits.
That helped push the opening price to 1,100 yuan and the peak market cap to 444.9 billion yuan.
But when supply is so inelastic, sentiment can reverse just as violently.
Unitree’s turnover exceeded 85% on its first trading day, suggesting that many successful IPO applicants chose to cash out.
The rapid shift between buying and selling pressure produced a 27% intraday swing and sent the stock down another 18.7% the following day.
What is the market really pricing?
The more important question is what a 440-billion-yuan valuation actually represents.
Based on Unitree’s 2025 adjusted net profit of 591 million yuan, the IPO price already implied a price-to-earnings ratio of 219 times, compared with an industry average of 38.56 times.
When its market cap briefly topped 440 billion yuan on the first day, investors were valuing a company with annual revenue of about 1.7 billion yuan and adjusted net profit of roughly 600 million yuan at nearly 50 times sales and more than 700 times forward earnings.
The market is clearly not pricing Unitree on what it earns today. It is betting that the company can grow at extraordinary speed over the coming years and eventually grow into its valuation.
Betting on the future
The problem is that this assumption remains highly uncertain.
The generalization capabilities of embodied AI have yet to reach a real breakthrough, while robots still struggle to perform reliably when confronted with unfamiliar objects and environments.
On the second day of Unitree’s trading debut, founder Wang Xingxing told the 2026 World Robot Conference that the industry’s biggest bottleneck remains the lack of generalization.
Robots can achieve close to 100% success rates in fixed scenarios, he said, but performance drops sharply when the objects or environment change.
His estimate for the industry’s tipping point was equally sobering: two to three years in the best case, five to 10 years in the worst case.
Time vs. money
That statement is worth considering.
When a founder tells investors on the very day his stock plunges that the industry may still need two to three years — or even five to 10 years — to reach its inflection point, the market is left with a more difficult question: How long are investors willing to wait, and how much are they willing to pay for that wait?
Entrepreneurs are asking for time. Capital markets are asking how much money and how many years it will take.
Unitree’s first two trading sessions are merely the opening round of that conversation.
The stock could remain highly volatile in the days ahead. Whether it recovers some of its losses or continues to slide remains to be seen.
But whatever happens to the share price in the short term, Unitree now carries a significance beyond its own business.
As the first major Chinese humanoid robotics company to enter the A-share market, it has become the first important public-market benchmark for valuing embodied AI.
For robotics companies seeking IPOs or exits in the years ahead, Unitree’s valuation and stock performance will inevitably become a reference point.
How the market ultimately prices China’s first humanoid robotics stock could influence whether venture investors continue to pour capital into embodied AI — and at what price.
