Companies / UBTech (优必选)
Humanoid robot maker
UBTech (优必选)
State of play as of
The humanoid company that files real unit counts against real revenue, and the clearest case study in how much harder the consumer machine is than the factory one.
UBTech is the humanoid company that can be checked. It has been listed in Hong Kong since December 2023, which means the unit counts, the average selling price and the losses arrive in an exchange filing rather than in a launch video, and the numbers it filed for the first half of 2026 are genuinely large: 921 full-size embodied humanoids sold, up from 45 a year earlier, at about 641,000 yuan each. That is the industrial business, and it works. The consumer business is the more interesting half. UBTech took more than 13,000 deposits for the U1 household humanoid and now guides to delivering 1,500 to 2,000 of them this year, which is a manufacturing constraint stated in public by a company with every incentive not to state it. Read this page for the gap between those two halves, and read a third number on it with care: an industry alliance credits UBTech with 16,123 units for the same six months in which the filing books 921, and CAD has not been able to reconcile the two.
Fast facts
- What it is
- UBTech Robotics (优必选科技), 9880.HK, listed in Hong Kong in December 2023 and headquartered in Shenzhen. It builds full-size humanoid robots in two lines: the Walker S series, which goes into factories, and the U1 series launched in June 2026 under a consumer brand called UWorld. Its founder and chairman is Zhou Jian. It also sells education robots and other smart robot products, both of which shrank in the most recent half.CAD reporting on UBTech HKEX filings
- Latest results
- Revenue of 1,269.1 million yuan for the six months to June 2026, up 104.2 percent. Full-size embodied humanoids were 590.3 million of that, 46.5 percent of the company, against 38.2 million a year earlier. Gross margin went from 35.0 percent to 44.7. The loss for the period narrowed 23.0 percent to 338.8 million yuan and adjusted EBITDA improved from negative 321.8 million to negative 174.1 million, so the company is closer to breakeven and not at it.UBTech interim results, filed to HKEX 28 Aug 2026
- Units actually sold
- 921 full-size embodied humanoid robots in the first half of 2026, against 45 in the first half of 2025. Dividing the segment revenue by the units gives an average selling price of 640,933 yuan, about 95,600 dollars. For the full year 2025 the company sold 1,079 full-size humanoids, against three in 2024. These are the filed unit counts and they are the ones CAD uses.UBTech interim results, 28 Aug 2026; 36kr, 31 Mar 2026 for the 2025 figure
- The U1 order book, and the guidance under it
- Zhou Jian said at the 30 June 2026 launch that all-channel U1 orders had passed 11,000 units and that UBTech would work to deliver them inside the year. By the first shipments on 16 September the trade press was reporting 13,361. On the 28 August results call chief financial officer Zhang Ju guided to 1,500 to 2,000 U1 deliveries this year, which leaves 85.0 percent of a 13,361 order book unfilled at the top of that range and 88.8 percent at the bottom. The constraint is manufacturing: nineteen degrees of freedom in the head to drive the micro-expressions, on a silicone skin with no mature production process anywhere, and parts of the build still done by hand.Tencent News, 30 Jun 2026; jiemian, 16 Sep 2026; tmtpost, 23 Sep 2026
- Three unit counts, and none of them agree
- Ask how many humanoids UBTech shipped in the first half of 2026 and three published answers come back. Its own filing books 921 full-size embodied units. The Humanoid Robot Scenario Application Alliance’s league table of 29 August 2026 credits it with 16,123, ahead of AgiBot at 8,400 and Unitree at 5,900. Smart Analytics Global, modelling global shipments, puts UBTech near 700, below its own filed figure. The two outside sources agree with each other to the unit on AgiBot and Unitree and diverge on UBTech by a factor of twenty-three, which is where the definitions are doing the work: the alliance names both a full-size and a non-full-size category for UBTech and publishes no unit definition that holds across the ten companies it ranks, and UBTech books only 32.7 million yuan of non-full-size humanoid revenue, so the alliance’s residual 15,202 units would average 2,153 yuan each, about 321 dollars. CAD uses the filed count and carries the other two as unreconciled.UBTech interim results, 28 Aug 2026; Humanoid Robot Scenario Application Alliance via Tencent News, 1 Sep 2026, and jiemian; Smart Analytics Global via 南方都市报, Aug 2026
- Manufacturing capacity
- UBTech’s Liuzhou plant started production in September 2026, designed at one industrial humanoid off the line every ten minutes and an annual capacity above ten thousand units. The interim report states an annual production target of 10,000 units for full-size humanoid mass production, and in the same passage talks about overcoming quality and delivery challenges. The factory exists and the delivery guidance is still under two thousand U1 units this year.Sina Finance 7x24, 11 Sep 2026; UBTech interim results, 28 Aug 2026
- Market value
- The shares closed at 78.10 Hong Kong dollars on 24 September 2026, down 1.2 percent, against a 52-week high of 161.00 and a low of 74.40, which puts the stock at 48.5 percent of its high. On 503,401,373 issued shares that is a market capitalisation of 39.3 billion Hong Kong dollars, about 33.7 billion yuan or 5.0 billion dollars at the onshore rates of the day.Sina Finance quote for 9880.HK, pulled by CAD 24 Sep 2026
The state of play
UBTech asked the CSRC to let 17,581,288 unlisted domestic shares convert into H shares, about 3.49 percent of issued capital, in an announcement filed to the Hong Kong exchange on the evening of 23 September 2026. No shareholder vote is required under the company’s articles. The shares become tradeable in Hong Kong once the regulators are done.
The gap between the U1 order book and the delivery guidance became legible. Orders passed 11,000 at the 30 June launch on Zhou Jian’s own account, the trade press was reporting 13,361 by the first shipments on 16 September, and chief financial officer Zhang Ju told the 28 August results call the company will deliver 1,500 to 2,000 U1 units this year. That is 85.0 to 88.8 percent of the order book unfilled. UBTech held its single-quarter breakeven target at the fourth quarter of 2027 and said it would try to pull adjusted EBITDA positive into the fourth quarter of 2026.
The Liuzhou plant started production, designed at one industrial humanoid off the line every ten minutes and an annual capacity above ten thousand units. A humanoid factory running to a fixed takt time is a different kind of claim from a demonstration, and it is the capacity line the interim report’s 10,000-unit annual target sits against.
The Humanoid Robot Scenario Application Alliance published the industry’s first half-year sales league table, crediting UBTech with 16,123 units against AgiBot at 8,400 and Unitree at 5,900. UBTech’s own filing for the same six months books 921 full-size units and 32.7 million yuan of non-full-size humanoid revenue, which would put the residual 15,202 units at about 2,153 yuan each. The alliance names both categories for UBTech and publishes no unit definition that holds across the ten companies it ranks, so the two counts may be measuring different things and both be correct. Most English write-ups of Chinese humanoid volumes trace back to a table like this one.
Reading the same filing against Unitree’s showed the headline overtake did not happen. About 139 million yuan of UBTech’s first-half revenue, roughly 11 percent, came from garden machinery, automotive and hydraulic components consolidated in April with its 43.01 percent purchase of Fenglong. Back that out and the robot business did roughly 1,130 million yuan, below Unitree’s 1,152 million. UBTech’s inventory rose 71 percent from year-end to 985 million yuan and receivables from 1,302 million to 1,680 million, and one customer accounted for 309 million of revenue, 24 percent of the total.
Interim results filed to the Hong Kong exchange showed revenue of 1,269.1 million yuan for the six months to June, up 104.2 percent, with full-size embodied humanoids at 590.3 million against 38.2 million a year earlier and 921 units sold against 45. Gross margin went from 35.0 percent to 44.7, the period loss narrowed 23.0 percent to 338.8 million yuan, and adjusted EBITDA improved from negative 321.8 million to negative 174.1 million. Education revenue fell 49.1 percent to 122.0 million and other smart robot products fell 18.8 percent to 245.8 million, so the humanoid line is not adding to a growing base, it is replacing a shrinking one.
UBTech unveiled the U1 series under a new consumer brand called UWorld, its first full-size humanoid aimed at households rather than factories, with 88 joints, an emotional-interaction model, and user data encrypted and kept on the device by default. Prices run from 119,800 yuan for the U1 Lite through 169,800 for the U1 Pro to 990,000 for the male U1 Ultra and 880,000 for the female. Pre-orders opened on JD’s platform on 2 June and Zhou Jian said they had passed 11,000 units by the 30 June launch, ahead of first shipments on 16 September. A priced full-size humanoid in front of real buyers is a different test from a demonstration, and it is the test this company chose to run in public.
UBTech conceded that full-size humanoids today run for only two to four hours on a charge. The control loop has to run on the robot rather than in the cloud, roughly 10 hertz for the planner and 100 for the low-level controller, which caps how large the onboard model can be. That constraint is why the scaling law that worked for language models does not transfer directly to machines that move.
Our reporting on UBTech (优必选)
- UBTech Took 13,000 Robot Orders and Now Expects to Fill 2,000 of Them
UBTech founder Zhou Jian said on 30 June that all-channel orders for the new U1 consumer humanoid had passed 11,000 units and that the company would work to deliver all of them inside the year; by the first shipments on 16 September the Chinese trade press was reporting 13,361. On the 28 August results call chief financial officer Zhang Ju gave the number the company is actually working to, and it is 1,500 to 2,000 U1 deliveries this year, which leaves 85 to 88.8 percent of the order book unfilled. The rest of the business is doing well. Interim results filed to the Hong Kong exchange on 28 August show revenue of 1,269.1 million yuan for the six months to June, up 104.2 percent, with full-size embodied humanoids at 590.3 million of that against 38.2 million a year earlier, gross margin up from 35.0 to 44.7 percent, and the period loss narrowed 23 percent to 338.8 million yuan. The same filing books 921 full-size humanoid units sold, up from 45, an average selling price of 640,933 yuan. The constraint on U1 is manufacturing rather than demand: nineteen degrees of freedom in the head to drive thirty-odd micro-expressions, on a silicone skin with no mature production process anywhere, and parts of the build still done by hand. One number does not reconcile and is published unreconciled. The Humanoid Robot Scenario Application Alliance credits UBTech with 16,123 units for the first half against the filing’s 921 full-size units, and the alliance publishes no unit definition that holds across the ten companies it ranks.
- China's Only 2.5D Packager Runs at 60 Percent With a Full Order Book
SJSemi (盛合晶微, 688820.SH) is the only company in China doing 2.5D advanced packaging at mass-production scale and holds about 85 percent of that domestic market, and it is running its 2.5D lines at roughly 60 percent utilisation with an order book it describes as full. Its own prospectus puts 2.5D capacity utilisation at 63.42 percent in the first half of 2025, and revenue has been flat enough since to imply about the same now. The reason is that a 2.5D package is a logic die sitting beside stacks of HBM on a silicon interposer, and SJSemi makes neither input: HBM comes from SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron, and the large low-warpage through-silicon-via interposers come from TSMC, Samsung and Intel. LatePost puts industry expectations for HBM tightness at 2028 and for high-end interposers later still. The prospectus line that carries the argument is that customer-supplied interposer material went from 3 percent in 2023 to about 25 percent in the first half of 2025, which is what happens when customers stop trusting a supplier to source a component. The filed numbers underneath the story are worse than the headline: half-year net profit of 449.4 million yuan minus a first quarter of 191.3 million leaves 258.0 million for the second quarter against 308.6 million a year earlier, a fall of 16.4 percent on revenue up 1.9 percent, while the half-year reads plus 7.2 and plus 3.3 percent. The market is paying about 245.25 billion yuan, roughly 36.5 billion dollars at Friday’s 6.7114 onshore rate, or 262 times the 935.0 million yuan earned in the twelve months to June. Customer A is 74.40 percent of sales, up from 40.56 percent in 2022; the filing never names it and LatePost reads it as China’s leading chip designer, adding that SJSemi is the core 2.5D supplier for Huawei’s Ascend accelerators. In the Briefing: Nikkei, citing internal company data, put CXMT’s second-quarter EBIT margin at 82 percent against SK Hynix at 76 and Samsung’s semiconductor arm at 70, while CXMT’s filed half-year report shows 150.3 billion yuan of revenue and 77.6 billion of net profit against a 2.3 billion yuan loss a year earlier; China Mobile Cloud showed a hybrid inference system splitting DeepSeek V4 across a domestic GPU and a Lynxi neuromorphic chip for a claimed doubling of price-performance; Shanghai launched the Pearl Constellation orbital-compute programme; and Zhipu closed about 5 billion dollars in placement and convertible bonds.
- Unitree Earned Half as Much in Q1 on 68% More Revenue
Unitree booked 50,013,826.62 yuan of net profit attributable to shareholders in the first quarter of 2026, against 95,602,511.45 yuan a year earlier, on 68.49 percent more revenue. The half-year headline runs the other way, a 274 million yuan profit against a 32 million yuan loss, but Chinese listing rules make a company print earnings both with and without non-recurring items, and the 0.67 against 0.75 yuan ratio puts underlying first-half profit down 19.34 percent while revenue grew 48.54 percent. The gap is a 349 million yuan share-based payment charge that hit the first half of 2025 and did not recur. Research spending went from 6.9 to 11.8 percent of revenue and selling expense from 6.0 to 14.2 percent.
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Common questions
How many humanoid robots does UBTech actually sell?
Its interim results filed to the Hong Kong exchange on 28 August 2026 book 921 full-size embodied humanoid robots sold in the six months to June, against 45 in the same period of 2025, for 590.3 million yuan of revenue at an average selling price of 640,933 yuan, about 95,600 dollars. For the full year 2025 the figure was 1,079 units, against three in 2024. Two other counts circulate for that same half-year and neither reconciles with the filing. The Humanoid Robot Scenario Application Alliance credits UBTech with 16,123 units; it publishes no unit definition that holds across the companies it ranks, and UBTech books only 32.7 million yuan of non-full-size humanoid revenue, so the residual 15,202 units would have to average about 2,153 yuan each. Smart Analytics Global, modelling global shipments, puts UBTech near 700, below the filed number. The two outside sources agree to the unit on AgiBot at 8,400 and Unitree at 5,900 and differ on UBTech by a factor of twenty-three, which says the disagreement is about what counts as a humanoid rather than about UBTech. CAD uses the filed unit count and carries the other two as unreconciled.
What happened to the 13,000 U1 orders?
They are still orders. Zhou Jian said at the 30 June 2026 launch that all-channel orders for the U1 consumer humanoid had passed 11,000 units and that UBTech would work to deliver them within the year, and by the first shipments on 16 September the Chinese trade press was reporting 13,361. On the 28 August results call chief financial officer Zhang Ju guided to 1,500 to 2,000 U1 deliveries this year, which leaves 85.0 percent of the order book unfilled at the top of that range and 88.8 percent at the bottom. The limit is manufacturing rather than demand. The U1 head packs nineteen degrees of freedom to drive around thirty micro-expressions, on a silicone skin for which no mature production process exists anywhere, and parts of the build are still done by hand.
Is UBTech profitable?
No, and it is getting closer. The loss for the six months to June 2026 was 338.8 million yuan, narrowed 23.0 percent year on year, and adjusted EBITDA improved from negative 321.8 million to negative 174.1 million. For the full year 2025 revenue was 2,001.0 million yuan, up 53.3 percent, with a loss attributable to shareholders of 703.2 million against 1,123.6 million in 2024. The company held its single-quarter breakeven target at the fourth quarter of 2027 and said it would try to pull adjusted EBITDA positive into the fourth quarter of 2026.
Did UBTech overtake Unitree?
Not on a like-for-like read. UBTech’s first-half 2026 revenue of 1,269.1 million yuan is above Unitree’s 1,152 million, and that is what the headlines said. But about 139 million of UBTech’s figure, roughly 11 percent, came from garden machinery, automotive and hydraulic components that arrived in April 2026 with the consolidation of its 43.01 percent purchase of Fenglong. Back that out and the robot business did roughly 1,130 million yuan, below Unitree. The two also sit at very different valuations on different boards, so the comparison does not extend much further than the revenue line.
What is the difference between the Walker S2 and the U1?
Customer and price. The Walker S series is the industrial machine, sold into factories including Fortune Global 500 clients, and it is what the 921 filed units and the 640,933-yuan average selling price are made of. The U1, launched on 30 June 2026 under a consumer brand called UWorld, is the household machine: 88 joints, an emotional-interaction model, on-device encrypted user data, and prices from 119,800 yuan for the Lite through 169,800 for the Pro to 990,000 for the male Ultra and 880,000 for the female. The industrial line ships to schedule. The consumer line is the one with 13,000 deposits behind it and delivery guidance under 2,000 units.
What is UBTech worth?
The shares closed at 78.10 Hong Kong dollars on 24 September 2026, down 1.2 percent on the day, against a 52-week high of 161.00 and a low of 74.40, which puts the stock at 48.5 percent of its high and 5 percent above its low. On 503,401,373 issued shares that is a market capitalisation of about 39.3 billion Hong Kong dollars, 33.7 billion yuan or 5.0 billion dollars. On 23 September 2026 the company filed to let 17,581,288 unlisted domestic shares, about 3.49 percent of issued capital, convert into tradeable H shares, subject to the CSRC and with no shareholder vote required under its articles.
Every dated fact above traces to a named source, and where it comes from our reporting, to the dated issue that carried it. Where a claim is self-reported or disputed, we say so.