Unitree's $900M IPO outshines Shein's $3B listing as AI hype grips China
What's the deal? Unitree Robotics, China's best-known humanoid robotics maker, is set to begin trading on Shanghai's STAR Market on August 19, raising 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million) at a valuation near $9 billion. Days later, fast-fashion platform Shein is expected to launch its own Hong Kong IPO, potentially debuting as soon as August 28 and hoping to raise as much as $3 billion — roughly three times Unitree's target.
Why the smaller deal is winning: Despite Shein's scale, Unitree is drawing the frenzy. Retail investors oversubscribed its offer more than 8,000 times — a STAR Market record — leaving an allocation rate of roughly 0.018%. Grey-market pricing points to first-day gains of three to four times the offer price.
The numbers: Unitree, founded by Wang XingxingDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → in 2016, reported 1.7 billion yuan ($252 million) in revenue last year, a fourfold jump from 2024. Almost 45% came from overseas sales, and — unusually for the sector — it earned net income of 600 million yuan ($89 million) in 2025.
Rival UBTECH Robotics posted a net loss of $104 million last year, while US labs Boston Dynamics and FigureDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → remain unprofitable. Backers include Tencent, Alibaba, and AI upstart DeepSeek; Wang holds about a third of the company.
The other side: Shein generated roughly $41 billion in revenue last year and earned about $2 billion in profit. TechNode reports that the company is targeting a valuation of $35 billion to $40 billion in Hong Kong, while other reports cited by Fortune put the range lower. Europe accounted for 35.4% of revenue and the US for 24.1%. Protectionism is squeezing margins after the US ended de minimis exemptions and Europe followed.
Shein first pursued a New York listing, then London, before concerns over forced labour, customer data, and Chinese regulatory approval pushed it to Hong Kong — its remaining route to a public offering.
What could go wrong? Unitree's first-quarter net profit fell sharply as research and marketing spending climbed. More than 70% of its humanoid robots still go to academic and research institutions rather than commercial buyers, and competition is thickening: market leader AgiBot is preparing its own Hong Kong listing.
The signal: Investor appetite is shifting toward AI and hardware and away from e-commerce and internet platforms. That trend showed in CXMT's $8.6 billion Shanghai IPO, whose shares surged on debut — and now separates two of August's biggest Chinese listings, where size counts for less than the story investors want to buy.
Read more: The Next Web · TechNode · Fortune
Image credit: Unitree Robotics
