Nearly 9.8 million retail accounts competed for shares in Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai STAR Market IPO on Monday, with valid online subscriptions reaching 53.64 billion shares – 8,289 times the 6.47 million shares initially reserved for online investors. The final online allocation rate was 0.018%, meaning roughly one winning lot for every 5,500 applications. Winners will be announced on Wednesday.
The odds are markedly slimmer than in other recent high-profile Chinese technology listings. Memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies posted a final online allocation rate of approximately 0.47% in its July IPO, which attracted more than 9.4 million accounts. GPU makers Moore Threads Technology and MetaX Integrated Circuits recorded rates of approximately 0.036% and 0.033% respectively in their contested listings late last year. Unitree’s rate is the lowest of the group.
The IPO Structure
Of the 40.45 million shares on offer, 20% went to strategic investors – including the recently disclosed DeepSeek placement of approximately 2.31% – leaving a relatively small pool for retail and professional investors. After a clawback mechanism triggered by the retail oversubscription, approximately 24% of the total offering was allocated online to retail investors and roughly 56% went to offline professional investors.
Unitree will raise approximately 6.1 billion yuan – roughly $904 million – from the IPO, valuing the company at 60.99 billion yuan. At the offer price of 150.80 yuan per share, Unitree is valued at 219.23 times earnings and 35.89 times sales – well above the price-to-sales multiples of listed robot makers including UBTECH and Dobot.
What the Valuation Reflects
The 219x earnings multiple is not a conventional industrial company valuation – it reflects investor pricing of Unitree as a growth option on the physical AI sector rather than a current earnings story. Unitree posted net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025 on revenue of 1.70 billion yuan, with first-half 2026 revenue of approximately 1.1 billion yuan representing 35-45% year-on-year growth. The multiple prices in the expectation that humanoid robot commercialization will significantly expand revenue over the next several years.
The listing provides the first liquid domestic benchmark valuation for China’s humanoid robot sector – a reference point that will influence how investors price the IPO pipeline of Leju Robotics, Deep Robotics, and others now advancing through the same regulatory process. Whether Unitree’s post-listing trading performance validates or corrects that benchmark will determine the conditions under which subsequent humanoid robot listings are priced and received.
The selection process runs Tuesday with winning accounts announced Wednesday, ahead of the formal listing on the STAR Market.
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