Sprint to IPO and dismantle the growth and hidden concerns in Yushu Technology's prospectus
author:Tanay Jaipuria, Wing Partner
Compiled by Felix, PANews
Original title: The countdown to Yushu Technology's IPO! Dismantling the ice and fire in the “first stock of humanoid robots” prospectus
Editor's note: On May 25, the Shanghai Stock Exchange website shows that the Unitree Robotics (Unitree Robotics) Science and Technology Innovation Board IPO will be reviewed on June 1. It plans to raise 620 million US dollars to sprint to the first A-share humanoid robot.
The reason why Yushu Technology's prospectus is very interesting is that it shows the real state of the current development of the robot market.
As the company with the highest shipment volume of humanoid robots in the world, Uki has not only achieved profits, but also maintained rapid growth. This article will explore:
Yushu Technology's products
The transformation of revenue structures to humanoid robots
Which companies are buying robots right now (and why)
Vertically integrated business model
financial analysis
Model layer development goals
Yushu Technology's products
Yushu Technology was founded in 2016 in Hangzhou. The founder, Wang Xingxing, is a self-taught robotics expert known for making the first four-legged robot in his apartment. The company currently has 480 employees, including approximately 175 R&D personnel.
The company mainly sells two major products:
Four-legged robots (robot dogs): Go2 (consumer and research grade), B2 (industrial grade), and A2.
Humanoid robots: H1, H2, G1, and R1. You've probably seen G1 in trending videos on the internet. It's 1.32 meters tall and weighs 35 kg.
The company has been operating internationally since 2018. More than 35% of revenue comes from outside of China, including a large American academic customer base.
Transformational humanoid robot
Two years ago, Yushu Technology was essentially still a robot dog company, mainly selling four-legged robots. In 2023, humanoid robots accounted for only 1.9% of its revenue.
However, by the first three quarters of 2025, humanoid robots already accounted for more than half of its revenue.
What is driving this transformation is product-market fit and aggressive marketing strategies. The company's humanoid robot appeared on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala for the second year in a row. In 2024, Hwang In-hoon also showcased a YuShu robot at the GTC conference.
宇树机器人亮相央视春晚
This brand exposure was successfully transformed into commercial and scientific research needs, something most Chinese hardware companies have never actually done.
Compared to other companies, Yuuki's humanoid robot shipments are particularly impressive. Uki sold approximately 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, making it the world's largest manufacturer of biped humanoid robots. China's domestic AgiBot (AgiBot) followed. In contrast, well-known American companies such as Figure AI and Agility Robotics may only sell a few hundred units (or even less).
The 5-year target in the prospectus is to produce 75,000 humanoid robots and 115,000 quadruped robots per year. This is roughly 14 times the production of humanoid robots in 2025. This goal is ambitious, but it also highlights that the industry is still in the very early stages.
Who is buying robots
The prospectus divides buyers into three categories: research and education, business and consumer, and industrial applications.
The harsh reality is that most current demand for humanoid robots is focused on scientific research and education scenarios.
1. Research and education: It accounts for 74% of the revenue/sales volume of humanoid robots. Academic buyers have been Yushu's main customer base since 2022, and are still the company's largest source of total revenue.
2. Commerce and consumption: accounting for 17% of humanoid robot sales. Non-academic consumers who buy these robots mostly use them for “displays”: as eye-catching promoters at retail locations, tourist attractions, shows, and exhibitions. In the first nine months of 2025, consumer-grade revenue nearly quadrupled year over year. That sounds amazing, but its initial base was very small. Today, the most realistic application of a $25,000 humanoid robot seems to be standing in front of a store in Shenzhen to attract customers.
3. Industrial applications: Only 9% of humanoid robot sales. Yuuki also acknowledged that due to the immaturity of technology, industrial deployment is relatively limited, which also reflects the current state of technology. Of this 9% of sales, about 50%-70% are used in scenarios such as corporate reception and tour guides, so when taken together, only 3% to 4% of humanoid robots actually used in actual operations such as corporate reception and inspection are shipped.
In terms of four-legged robots (robot dogs), the outlook is brighter: only about one-third of sales come from scientific research, over 40% from commercial use, and the rest from industrial use. In this field, production application scenarios have become more mature. Its customers include China National Grid, China Southern Power Grid, CNPC, Sinopec, Baowu Group, and JD (JD is Yushu's largest customer). These companies use four-legged robots to carry out real daily inspections of chemical plants, substations, coal mines, pipelines, etc.
宇树四足机器人用于巡检作业
Vertically integrated business model
One of the unique features of Yushu Technology is that it can independently design and manufacture most of the core components: high-torque motors, precision speed reducers, encoders, joint modules, intelligent controllers, high-precision sensors, dexterous hands, lidar (LiDAR), and cameras. According to McKinsey data, the actuator (i.e. the motor, reducer, and joint system that drives the robot's motion) usually accounts for 40% to 60% of the total bill of materials (BOM) cost for humanoid robots.
Most companies in this field rely on external procurement, while Uki makes its own. Outsourced parts only account for about 14%-18% of the total cost. It outsources only general components such as battery cells and flash memory, as well as differentiated parts such as core computing boards.
Thanks to this, the manufacturing cost of a single four-legged robot fell 46% from around $3,300 in 2022 to around $1,800 in mid-2025. The cost of humanoid robots also dropped from around $10,800 to $9200 over the same period.
Interestingly, as shown in the chart below, although the average sales price of four-legged and humanoid robots declined year by year, their gross margin did not decline but increased throughout the period due to their highly vertically integrated strategy: soaring from around 45% in 2023-2023 to nearly 60% in 2025.
注：2023年宇树仅售出5台人形机器人，因此该年的平均售价不具代表性。
Financial Overview
Driven by strong growth in the humanoid robot business, the company's revenue soared from $58 million in 2024 to around $252 million in 2025, an increase of 335%. For most of the company's development history, international sales accounted for more than 55% of revenue. In 2025, the revenue of China's domestic market surpassed exports for the first time, but the absolute value of overseas export revenue still doubled year-on-year.
The gross margin is close to 60% and has continued to grow in recent years, as detailed below.
Looking at the horizontal comparison: Most hardware companies have gross margins between 30% and 40%, and software companies can usually reach 70%-80%. For a company that sells physical robots, Yuki's gross margin is at a very high level. This is entirely due to their vertical integration model and strong differentiation of current products.
The company was profitable in 2024 (based on US GAAP), with a profit margin of approximately 18%, and close to 35% after adjustments.
Yushu Technology's target valuation in this IPO is about $6 billion to $7 billion.
Model layer vision
Yuki plans to invest nearly half of the capital raised in the IPO into software development. Of the $6.2 billion raised, about $300 million was earmarked for AI model training over the next three years, which is equivalent to investing around $100 million a year to develop “full-sized models.”
The prospectus describes two parallel model architectures:
The first is the VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model: This model directly maps visual and language input as motion instructions, enabling robots to generalize and handle unfamiliar tasks without manual coding instructions.
The second type is the WMA (World Model+Action) model: Uki sees it as a more reliable solution. The WMA model is capable of constructing internal simulations of physical reality. Bots predict what will happen before they act, rather than learn by pure trial and error.
Uki has released the initial versions of these two models. In September 2025, Uki open-sourced Unifolm-WMA-0; in January 2026, Unifolm-vLA-0 was open-sourced.
Yuki also detailed the model's approximate expenditure details, as follows:
YuShu Technology's current leading edge in hardware is unquestionable, but the company knows that to maintain a long-lasting moat in the field of robotics, it may be necessary to simultaneously control the model layer: the “brain” system that determines what the robot does and how it moves. Furthermore, software ambitions are a hedge against hardware commercialization (low price competition). Yuuki built a moat in hardware manufacturing.
However, if actuators and joint modules eventually become standardized parts like batteries in electric vehicles, then the industry's defenses and competitive barriers will surely shift to the model layer.
epilogue
Yushu Technology has a profitable hardware business, a solid manufacturing moat, and more humanoid robots than any other company, and the prices are also extremely competitive. However, as reflected in the actual use of humanoid robots, widespread commercialization is still in its infancy. “Showcase” applications dominate consumer demand, while industrial deployments are relatively limited.
Yushu Technology gave us a glimpse into the current state of the robot market, and it is worth looking forward to more breakthroughs in models, hardware, and application scenarios in the future.
Twitter:https://twitter.com/BitpushNewsCN
Compare the TG exchange group:https://t.me/BitPushCommunity
Compare TG subscriptions:https://t.me/bitpush
