Unitree's first post-listing earnings: revenue jumps 70%, profit falls 17% as R&D triples

Unitree's first earnings since its August listing show revenue up 70% to 665 million yuan, while profit fell 17% as spending more than tripled.

Unitree Robotics has reported its first quarterly results since listing in August, and the numbers split in two directions. Third-quarter revenue rose 70 percent from a year earlier to 665 million yuan, about 100 million dollars, while net profit attributable to shareholders fell 17.4 percent to 112.7 million yuan, well below the 224 million yuan analysts had expected.

Research spending explains most of the gap. Unitree spent 127 million yuan on research and development in the quarter, up 249.6 percent from a year earlier and equal to 19.1 percent of revenue, as it invested in embodied-intelligence large models, computing capacity, and a larger research team. The company is spending to turn robots that can run, dance, and perform martial-arts routines into machines that can do useful work repeatedly, and that software and engineering bill is arriving before large-scale commercial revenue does.

Over the first nine months of the year, revenue climbed 55.7 percent to 1.82 billion yuan and net profit rose 270.5 percent to 386.7 million yuan. The nine-month profit jump reflects higher gross profit and a comparison against a prior-year period that carried a large one-time share-based payment expense. The filing did not say how Unitree plans to use the roughly 6 billion yuan raised in its initial public offering.

The results arrive in a volatile market. Unitree shares have risen more than 65 percent in the past two weeks after falling almost 55 percent from their August debut, and the company warned investors on October 21 about valuation risks after an abnormal trading announcement. JPMorgan raised its stock rating on Monday, and a demonstration video of the new H2-X humanoid last week added to the rally. Broader Chinese technology shares have sold off at the same time, with the STAR50 index down 40 percent since July.

For the wider humanoid industry, the filing is a first public test. Unitree is one of the few profitable domestic robot makers, and its results will be read as a bellwether for other Chinese humanoid companies hoping to list, at a time when regulators are scrutinizing whether high valuations and state-linked revenue reflect real commercial demand. Revenue growth of 70 percent shows demand for its robots is expanding; a profit miss driven by research spending shows how expensive it remains to close the gap between a capable demo and a commercial product.