Unitree founder calls 2027 robotics’ tipping point, moving on from profit miss

Unitree (SSE: 688836) founder Wang Xingxing said on Wednesday that 2027 will likely be a turning point for the robotics industry. 

His comment was made a week after Unitree’s first earnings report as a public company showed net profit falling 17.4%.

Will 2027 be the year of robotics? 

Wang Xingxing, founder of the Chinese humanoid maker, Unitree (SSE: 688836), spoke at the internet entrepreneurs’ forum of the 2026 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen. He stated that there was “a high probability” that next year would be the tipping point for the whole embodied-intelligence field and for robot models. 

He also argued that a person’s biggest value now has become grading AI models and setting the goals they are told to reach. 

Wang stated that while factory robots already hit very high success rates on single-step jobs, they fall down on precise work such as fine assembly, because their sense of the physical world through touch is still too thin. Model inputs and outputs, he said, remain slightly out of step with reality. 

Unitree’s response will be to let its physical AI models evolve on their own, gathering their own data and running their own training cycles.

Despite Wang’s optimism about the robotics industry, Unitree booked third-quarter revenue of 665 million yuan (about $99.7 million), up roughly 70% from a year earlier, however its net profit fell by 17.4% to 112.7 million yuan, far below the 224 million yuan analysts had estimated. 

Spending did the damage. Unitree’s Research and development costs climbed 249.6% to 127 million yuan, which is around 19% of revenue, due to the company pouring money into embodied-AI models and computing power. 

Over the first nine months, revenue reached 1.82 billion yuan, up 55.7%, and headline net profit rose 270.5% to 386.7 million yuan. Inventory swelled to 1.02 billion yuan by the end of September, up from 367 million yuan at the close of 2025.

How is Unitree’s stock performing?

Unitree went public in August at 150.80 yuan per share. On the first day, it jumped to 1,100 yuan, then dropped to 404.03 yuan by mid-October. After its latest earnings report, it fell another 4.8% to close at 662.39 yuan.

Unitree’s price-to-earnings ratio once hit 465.22, far above the industry average of about 38.5.

Some of China’s biggest companies back it, including Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, HSG and Citic Securities. Still, its rival AgiBot shipped more humanoid robots than Unitree in the first half of the year.

Founder Wang Xingxing has been guessing at a timeline for a big breakthrough. In mid-October, he said OpenAI’s GPT-6 could spark a robotics leap “within one or two years.” A few days later, he said robots with AI could have their “ChatGPT moment” as early as 2027.

The industry is still young, though. Over 18,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025, mostly from Chinese makers, but more than 85% were used for shows, education, collecting data, or guided tours, not factory work.

 Unitree itself has warned that if big companies are slow to adopt humanoid robots, its valuation could be at real risk.