Xiaomi (MiMo)

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.

Yan Wentao (严文韬) joined DeepSeek on 21 September as its first chief financial officer, closing a vacancy that had run the full three years since the company was founded and had been advertised on and off in public since February 2025. The hire was the fourth-hottest topic on Baidu the next morning at 5,413,293 heat, a large number for a personnel announcement at a private company, and no English-language item in the day’s collection carried it. The profile does not match the job as posted. DeepSeek’s own advertisement asked for mastery of accounting standards and tax policy, listed a CPA as preferred and wanted a compliance and risk-control system built across the whole business; Yan was born in 1991, studied at Fudan, spent 2013 to 2020 at Tencent Investment and H Capital, joined Hillhouse Venture in 2020 and was newly made partner there, and has never run a finance function. The account in 36Kr, republished from 字母榜, lists his public deals as ByteDance, Zhipu, MiniMax, Xiaohongshu, J&T Express and Webull, two of which are DeepSeek’s direct competitors, and notes that Hillhouse has never held a share in DeepSeek, so this is not an investor converting a board seat into an operating job. Partners at Wuyuan, Sequoia China and Longzhu were reported to have talked to Liang Wenfeng about the role, and Liang wanted someone born in the 1990s. The reason a primary-market investor fits sits in the cap table. Before the first outside round the company was 66 percent Ningbo Cheng’en and 34 percent Liang Wenfeng personally; after it closed, Ningbo Cheng’en held 60.19 percent, Liang 31.01 percent, a new vehicle called Hangzhou Chengli 8.52 percent and the state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund 0.28 percent. The outside money came in stripped of what outside money usually buys: economic rights, a five-year lockup and no vote, with the exception our own company file has carried since the round closed, which is that the state fund holds the only outside vote. Look through the structure and Liang controls about 84 percent. The round itself was 50 billion yuan in June 2026 at a post-money above 350 billion yuan, about 52.2 billion dollars at 6.7004, which reconciles to the 52 to 59 billion dollar range the entity page already carries, and a second round is reported at a 500 billion yuan pre-money. CITIC Securities has been engaged for a STAR Market listing that 36Kr puts in 2027, against Reuters reporting a process starting in 2026 with no tutoring agreement signed and DeepSeek confirming nothing. On compute, 36Kr describes a roughly 1 gigawatt centre at Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia and at least 160,000 domestic parts, adding an order value of about 2.56 billion dollars, or 16,000 dollars a part.

OpenRouter’s weekly leaderboard, computed from the token bucket ending 16 September, puts Tencent’s Hy4 preview second in the world at 12 trillion tokens, behind OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna at 17.3 trillion and ahead of every DeepSeek build. Eight of the top ten models are Chinese: GLM 5.3 Flash from Z.ai at 11.3 trillion, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 at 11.2, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 10.3, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5 at 7.83, Tencent’s older Hy3 at 4.47, an April build of DeepSeek V4 Flash at 4.24, Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra at 3.49 and GLM 5.3 at 2.46. The Chinese entries carry 63.8 trillion tokens against 20.79 trillion for the two American ones, a ratio of 3.07, which was recomputed from OpenRouter’s own published figures rather than taken from the Sina piece that ran the same claim that morning. Pricing pulled from OpenRouter’s models API in the same session changes how the table reads: Hy4 preview costs 83.4 cents per million prompt tokens and 2 dollars 50 per million completion tokens, while the Nvidia entry at ninth is the variant published at zero, so one of the two American models in the world’s top ten by usage is free. The second half of the issue runs the other way. Leiphone reported as an exclusive, citing people it did not name, that Yao Xingcheng, who ran pre-training for Tencent’s Hunyuan large language model and left in July, has joined Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, and put the Tencent package in the tens of millions of yuan a year. That is one outlet’s sourcing on an unannounced move and is unconfirmed elsewhere, so the salary figure is loose and only the direction of travel is firm. The same outlet published a second piece arguing that Chinese platforms hiring pre-training researchers out of Google’s Gemini team have mostly bought seniority rather than the undocumented judgement calls that decide whether a training run works. In the Briefing: Insta360 grew first-half revenue 50.29 percent to 5.517 billion yuan while net profit fell 94.15 percent, and subtracting its filed first quarter from the half leaves a second-quarter net loss of 54.2 million yuan that no outlet printed; Huawei announced the Ascend 960 SuperPoD at Huawei Connect, up to 4,096 NPU cards and 8 exaflops of FP8, on the claim that chip-to-chip communication eats more than 40 percent of training time in a 100,000-card cluster; and Zhipu disclosed that a GLM-5.3-driven Infra Agent did much of the engineering on its own inference stack, which chief scientist Tang Jie calls an early form of recursive self-improvement.

Counterpoint has Chinese phone vendors shipping 1 percent fewer units in the second quarter than a year earlier, while sell-through, the count of handsets a person actually paid for, fell by double digits over the same three months. A person working in the sector told the Chinese outlet Dingjiao One that manufacturers expected memory to keep getting more expensive, bought components ahead of need and pushed more finished phones into the channel than the channel was moving, so part of the shipment figure measures warehouse space. Omdia put global second-quarter shipments down 6 percent, with Xiaomi down 26 percent, vivo 18 and OPPO 17. Counterpoint also has more than 40 percent of smartphone models worldwide taking a price increase during 2026 and global retail prices up about 15 percent on average, spread unevenly: India 21 percent, the Middle East and Africa 18, China 10, Europe 7, the United States 5. TrendForce tracked CPU, DRAM and SSD going from about 45 percent of a 900 dollar notebook bill of materials in the first quarter of 2025 to a projected 68 percent in the third quarter of 2026. Chinese memory makers are on the other side of the same trade: Counterpoint puts CXMT at 10 percent of global DRAM revenue in the second quarter, up from 4 percent a year ago, and YMTC at 14 percent of NAND revenue.

The Cyberspace Administration published a phase-two note on its Qinglang campaign against chaos in AI applications on 2 September, and it places obligations at three points in the pipeline rather than one. Platforms including Douyin, Weibo, Tencent and Xiaohongshu are named for expanding face, voiceprint and violation sample libraries, with 46 governance announcements published between them. Four model products, Doubao, Yuanbao, Qwen and ERNIE, are told to guard the content review pass on original training corpora and to label AI-generated synthetic content so as to prevent illegal information at source, which is an obligation on the pre-training set rather than on a feed. The third layer is distribution: Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo are named as setting developer admission standards for AI applications and spot re-testing apps already listed, so four handset makers become the admission gate. The note landed one year and one day after the labelling Measures took effect on 1 September 2025. No published standard, audit or methodology sits behind the corpus clause, so what changed this week is scope rather than enforcement capability.

Unitree listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August at 150.80 yuan a share and opened at 1,100. Four sessions later it closed at 602.80, taking about 200 billion yuan off the peak valuation. Only 7.44 percent of its shares were free to trade on listing day, and roughly 85 percent of that float changed hands in a single session. The mark matters most to companies with no ticker: eight domestic embodied-AI firms were valued at 20 billion yuan or more as of June, and those private marks were set against Unitree’s screen price. Its own filed half-year numbers are good, with revenue up 48.5 percent and a 274.0 million yuan profit against a loss.