A remote-controlled robot by Unitree Robotics is displayed at the
A remote-controlled robot by Unitree Robotics is displayed at the Unitree Robotics Embodied Intelligence Experience Center in the Jing'an district in Shanghai on August 19, 2026. Shares in Chinese robotics pioneer Unitree soared more than 600 percent on its debut in Shanghai on August 19, after raising more than $900 million in its initial public offering.

Songyan Power launched its Bumi humanoid robot on October 22 last year at RMB9,998 (about HK$11,500), making it the first consumer humanoid robot in mainland China's market to be priced below RMB10,000. On June 24 this year, Unitree Robotics cut the starting price of its R1 humanoid robot from RMB39,900 (about HK$46,000) to RMB29,900 (about HK$35,000).

Industrial robot prices have moved in the opposite direction. Efector (A-share code: 688165) announced on January 29 that it would raise the prices of some complete industrial robot systems by 5% to 12% from February 1. According to a June report by CLS, many manufacturers have raised prices this year under pressure from higher costs.

Humanoid robots: average prices fall 70% in two years

According to Unitree Robotics' prospectus, the company's average selling price for humanoid robots fell from RMB593,400 (about HK$685,000) in 2023 to RMB166,400 (about HK$192,000) in 2025, a drop of about 72% in two years. The figures cover different models, and a shift in the product mix towards lower-priced models may also have been a factor. Unitree was listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in August this year.

Goldman Sachs forecast in a global physical AI report published in late August that the global average selling price of humanoid robots would fall from about US$41,800 in 2025 to about US$21,300 in 2035, a decline of nearly 49% over 10 years. Unitree's two-year decline is far greater than the forecast average annual fall of about 6%, but the two sets of figures are measured differently and should not be compared directly.

“Half of the price cuts in this round of humanoid robots are down to a maturing supply chain, while the other half comes from manufacturers subsidising prices themselves to win market share,” said an industry consultant familiar with core component suppliers. “Whoever captures the user base and data pool first will win a ticket to the next round.”

However, not every manufacturer can be said to be subsidising its products. Unitree recorded revenue of RMB1.699 billion (about HK$1.96 billion) and net profit of RMB278 million (about HK$320 million) in 2025, with a gross margin of about 60% for its main business. A review by Xiaguang She of 2025 annual reports found that several robot makers, including Siasun Robot & Automation, Efector and UBTECH, remained loss-making. Unitree was the only profitable company.

Bumi is about 94cm tall, weighs around 12kg and has at least 21 degrees of freedom. After national subsidies were applied on e-commerce platforms in June, its final price was about RMB9,400. Experts said models priced below RMB10,000 were “more of a motion demonstration platform”, capable of walking, jumping and interacting. Industrial-grade robots, by contrast, must operate continuously and reliably and handle complex tasks with generalisation capabilities; the two “are simply not in the same league”.

Industrial robots: costs push prices higher

Efector said in its announcement that copper prices had risen more than 38% and aluminium prices more than 25% since the beginning of last year, while memory chip prices had risen about 300% and were still climbing. Inovance Technology (A-share code: 300124) also issued a price increase notice early this year. This is not the first such episode: domestic industrial robot makers collectively raised prices in 2022 as well.

“Industrial robot prices are rising because business is simply too good for manufacturers to keep prices down,” said an industry consultant. Efector, however, attributed the increases to costs in its announcement. The company expects to report a loss of RMB450 million to RMB550 million in 2025 (about HK$520 million to HK$640 million). Its industrial robot sales rose nearly 20% year on year in the first half of 2025, but revenue from the robot business fell 7.44% amid factors including price competition across the industry. Data from the China Robot Industry Alliance's High-Tech Robot Research Institute (GGII) showed that overall industrial robot prices fell about 13% year on year in 2025, meaning this year's increases came after a year of declining prices.

Analysts said downstream customers in sectors such as vehicle manufacturing and electronics assembly have extremely high requirements for precision and stability. Their production lines cannot do without robots, making the risk of losing customers relatively low.

The remaining “tough nuts to crack”

Data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed that the overall domestic content rate of core humanoid robot components had exceeded 75% by the end of 2025. One view is that “manufacturers have already picked all the low-hanging fruit”. As room for cost reductions in standard electromechanical components narrows, attention is turning to dexterous hands, six-axis force sensors, high-end AI inference chips and high-precision torque sensors. High-precision torque sensors and tactile feedback arrays still rely mainly on imports.

Dexterous hands are the costliest individual component. A teardown of Tesla's Optimus by Morgan Stanley found that the dexterous hands accounted for about 17% of the complete robot's bill of materials. Another industry teardown estimated the mass-production cost of a single Tesla hand at about RMB31,600 (about HK$37,000), with the coreless motor accounting for about 38%. Goldman Sachs said there was still no unified technical route for dexterous hands, making them one of the most important hardware bottlenecks.

Funding: no retreat, but a shift upstream

Songyan Power completed two financing rounds totalling nearly RMB500 million (about HK$580 million) in the month between October 26 and November 26 last year. Unitree went public on the STAR Market in August, with an issue price of RMB150.80 and a post-listing market capitalisation of about RMB60.993 billion (about HK$70.5 billion). A June report by CLS said the proportion of primary-market funding flowing into upstream core components was rising, while robot makers were shifting from competing on order volumes to emphasising real-world deployment.

If enthusiasm for national guidance funds and valuation premiums in the secondary market gradually fades, companies without practical applications will face pressure to exit. Analysts said that for smart manufacturing investors and buyers of industrial automation equipment, the key is not which company offers the lowest price for a complete robot, but which can first overcome costly bottlenecks such as dexterous hands and high-precision sensors, and generate healthy cash flow in real commercial settings.