What Unitree's Listing Reveals About China's Robot Industry Today and Tomorrow: The Race for the 'Brain' Beyond Hardware Begins

It closed up 460%, and its market capitalization jumped from about 12 trillion won to about 70 trillion won in a single day.

This reflects investors' high expectations and intense interest in Unitree.

China introduced a pre-review system to speed up tech company listings. The system aims to protect tech companies' trade secrets and streamline the listing process, with the exchange reviewing documents confidentially in advance. Unitree completed its listing 103 days from application to approval, a record for the shortest listing period in China.

Unitree recorded 2025 revenue of 1.699 billion yuan (about 350 billion won), up four times from the previous year, with net profit of roughly 57 billion won. However, 73% of current revenue comes from research and education humanoid robots, while industrial and production-line deployments account for less than 10%. This shows the market is investing more in the potential for future industrial applications than in Unitree's current revenue.

Unitree CEO Wang Xing said the 'ChatGPT moment' for embodied intelligence, meaning physical AI, has not yet arrived. He pointed to the gap between controlled environments and real industrial sites, and gave a candid forecast that completing embodied intelligence could take up to 10 years.

Analysts expect a full-fledged brain race between China and the United States to follow.

The World Robot Conference was held in Yizhuang, Beijing, from August 19 to 23. About 300 companies took part in an exhibition hall of 55,000 square meters, displaying 2,000 to 3,000 exhibits, and the number of participating companies rose 36% from last year. The event was dominated by Chinese companies, with some Korean firms participating, while American companies were almost absent.

Forty-eight Chinese state-owned enterprises jointly exhibited general-purpose robots for industrial sites, making the shift even more visible.

Leading American robot companies such as Tesla with Optimus and Figure tend not to take part in external exhibitions. In particular, the U.S. Department of Defense placed Unitree's parent company on a list of China-linked firms and banned procurement from it, and US-China relations and trade sanctions are deepening the separation between the two countries' robot markets. These factors have combined to keep American companies away from the Chinese exhibition.

Watching graduate students operate the robots and trying the controls myself, I could feel how technically polished they are, with impressive balance. In particular, their ability to move without falling was remarkable.

Humanoid robots that once cost hundreds of millions of won have become far cheaper. The robot displayed tremendous power, so much that seeing it up close made one think 'a single hit would break bones.' A 15-minute demonstration cost about 60,000 won.

666 teams from 16 countries took part in the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. The most notable change was that remote control was completely banned in the flat-ground running event, requiring robots to move autonomously. This shows the growing importance of embodied intelligence, in which robots judge and move on their own beyond controlled environments.

That is faster than Usain Bolt's 2009 world record of 9.58 seconds. Last year's best time was 21.50 seconds, so the robot cut its time by more than half in just one year, showing the enormous speed of robot technology development.

This robot was developed by a smartphone maker, and each joint produces 400 N of force. According to Chinese media, that is equivalent to packing the torque of an Audi SUV engine into a single joint. The fact that a company known for smartphone battery and cooling technology has extended those capabilities into robot hardware and is advancing at great speed also offers important lessons for Korean industry.

In Shenzhen, Pony AI operates autonomous robotaxis that can be summoned through an app. To identify driverless cabs, the service offers customizable roof colors and license plate display text. In February, the company announced that each vehicle had reached break-even in Shenzhen, and it says running 100 robotaxis requires only three staff, maximizing efficiency.

China's delivery platform Meituan has developed and commercialized drone delivery since 2017. It has installed drone stations slightly larger than a phone booth in the middle of parks and downtown areas such as Yeouido, and drones continuously bring goods to them. Customers can order coffee or bread on the way to work and pick it up directly from the drone station, establishing a standardized service deeply woven into daily life.

Hotels have also built robot infrastructure, so guests need not go get their deliveries: when a courier arrives, a robot carries the item. After scanning a QR code, the robot rides the elevator up and delivers the item to the door, and multiple robots work together to provide a standardized service. This is emerging as a promising model that improves hotel service efficiency and guest convenience.

Korea should hurry to apply robotics in practice by leveraging the rich data from its manufacturing plants. Even if China lacks data, it is moving quickly with an attitude of 'we will start even if we fail,' and that needs close attention. For the next year, this is the time to try everything with that data.

The second recommendation is bold investment in core components. As with the HBM case, Korea should focus on developing core components that could become bottlenecks in physical AI and build on its strengths.

Finally, the future of the robot industry ultimately depends on people. Actively investing in training robot engineers and operators to secure talent is essential for the survival and growth of Korea's robot industry.