Unitree's $66bn Was the Intraday Peak, Not the Close: What Shanghai Actually Paid

The figure circulating with Unitree Robotics' Shanghai debut, more than US$60 billion, belongs to the top of the first session rather than the end of it. The South China Morning Post's US$66 billion valuation is pegged to a 629 per cent intraday surge ^[1]; by the close the stock had pulled back to 845 yuan, a 460 per cent gain on the 150.80 yuan IPO price, leaving a market value of about 342 billion yuan ^[2], which NBC News put at roughly US$50 billion ^[3]. The intraday high of 1,100 yuan was about 30 per cent above where the shares finished ^[4].

What the number turns on is supply. Some 9.8 million retail investment accounts competed for 9.7 million shares ^[5], under one share per account ^[6], and about 23.2 billion yuan of stock traded on the day ^[7]. Against 2025 revenue of about 1.7 billion yuan ^[8], the closing valuation is roughly 200 times trailing sales ^[9]. Unitree is profitable, unusually for the sector, but NBC News reports its products go mainly to universities and research institutions rather than commercial users ^[10]. The United States, about 13 per cent of revenue last year ^[11], banned imports of new foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots in July ^[12]; existing models can still be sold, and the company has warned the restrictions could widen ^[13].

The re-rating did not spread. The STAR Market Composite fell 7.2 per cent and the Shanghai Composite 2.4 per cent on the day ^[14], and Hong Kong-listed UBTech dropped more than 10 per cent ^[15].

Watch the pipeline that now prices off this mark: AgiBot has hired Citic, CICC and Morgan Stanley for a Hong Kong listing ^[16], having targeted HK$40 billion to HK$50 billion according to a 2025 Reuters report ^[17], while LimX Dynamics has filed confidentially in Hong Kong after a July round valued it at 15 billion yuan ^[18][19]. Omdia's Lian Jye Su calls the IPO a bellwether for the industry and says his first question is how real the demand is ^[20]; Morningstar's Kangyuxiao Li frames the test as reliable performance and attractive returns in large-scale industrial and commercial deployments ^[21].