Chinese robot maker Unitree assembled nearly 32,000 units in 2025 despite carrying only about $1.7 million in machinery assets on its balance sheet. Manual assembly dominates the production process because labor accounted for merely 8% of total manufacturing costs that year. Rapid shifts in hardware design and an experimental customer base make expensive automation equipment an unnecessary financial risk. Currently, the company restricts its automated manufacturing lines to standardized components like actuators and motor joints.
Key points
Low domestic labor expenses remove the immediate financial incentive for robotics manufac…: Low domestic labor expenses remove the immediate financial incentive for robotics manufacturers to automate their assembly lines.
Frequent redesigns of experimental humanoid hardware create significant risks of custom a…: Frequent redesigns of experimental humanoid hardware create significant risks of custom automation machinery becoming quickly obsolete.
Unitree is shifting resources toward software development, projecting a breakthrough in n…: Unitree is shifting resources toward software development, projecting a breakthrough in novel task performance remains a few years away.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
· 14 min read
I Toured Unitree's Factory. I'm More Bullish on the West Than Ever.
Everyone thinks China's robot factories are automated. They aren't. The robots are Chinese; the robots that make robots will be Western.
On Wednesday I toured Unitree's factory in Hangzhou, and I wasn't allowed to take pictures. In the building that makes the actuators, the motors that drive every joint, there were one or two new automated lines. The rest of the floor was filled with humans operating old-school winding machines. (Winding means wrapping copper wire around a motor's core.) I don't know what percentage of the motors are made on the automated lines. But staffing the floor with humans made sense.
Unitree has a viral video (28 million views) of a humanoid doing assembly in its own factory, which it calls "an actual deployment". Its IPO prospectus calls it a pilot, and says assembly is "currently mainly manual". At the end of 2025 all of Unitree's machinery was worth about $1.7 million on its books, at a company that made almost 32,000 robots that…
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