Unitree Robot IPO Pops 542% in Shanghai Debut
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- Unitree Robotics shares jumped 542% in early trading Wednesday on their Shanghai STAR Market debut, reaching 968.1 yuan after touching as high as 1,100 yuan, and raising about 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) in the IPO.
- DeepSeek invested roughly 140.8 million yuan in the offering, while Tencent was among Unitree's existing investors, per the company's prospectus.
- Unitree unveiled a new humanoid robot called "Superman" two days before listing, claiming it can jump two meters from a standstill and run at speeds up to 12.66 meters per second.
- Morgan Stanley raised its 2025 forecast for China's humanoid robot shipments to 50,000 units — nearly double its prior 28,000 projection — and pegged the market at $2 billion this year growing to $15 billion by 2030.
- The debut comes one month after memory chipmaker CXMT soared 466% on its own STAR Market listing, the most recent high-profile Chinese tech name to follow that pattern.
- Morgan Stanley expects pilot projects in China to transition to broader deployments in the second half of 2025, with full-size humanoids forecast to reach about 30% of shipments and rise to 70% by 2028.
Why it matters: Morgan Stanley just nearly doubled its 2025 shipment forecast to 50,000 units and sees China's humanoid robot market expanding sevenfold to $15 billion by 2030, and Unitree's 542% debut — coming right on the heels of CXMT's 466% pop last month — shows Shanghai's STAR Market is pricing Chinese AI-adjacent hardware companies at breakout premiums while institutional confidence in the sector accelerates.
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