Unitree goes public: opens 629 percent above offer price, briefly worth about 66 billion dollars

Unitree Robotics staged one of the year's most dramatic trading debuts in Shanghai on Wednesday. The stock opened at eleven hundred yuan, six hundred twenty-nine percent above its offer price of one hundred fifty point eight yuan. At that moment the company was notionally worth about four hundred forty-five billion yuan, roughly sixty-six billion dollars.

The premium did not survive the session. The shares closed the first day at eight hundred forty-five yuan – still up around four hundred sixty percent, but at a valuation of about three hundred forty-two billion yuan. The gap between the open and the close is itself the story: it shows how little the initial price discovery held.

The offering raised six point one billion yuan, around nine hundred four million dollars. That makes Unitree the first maker of humanoid robots to list on a mainland Chinese exchange. The company built its name on comparatively affordable quadruped robots and on videos of its humanoids performing backflips.

Demand was extraordinary: the offering was oversubscribed more than eight thousand times, which the exchange describes as a record for the Star Market. Founder Wang Xingxing, aged thirty-six, holds about one hundred twenty-one point four million shares, worth roughly one hundred three billion yuan at the closing price.

For the sector the debut is a mood reading, not a proof point. Humanoid robots still generate very little of the revenue such valuations would imply. Observers note that a debut of this size prices expectations for an entire product category rather than the current business of any single manufacturer.