UBTECH’s revenue from full-size humanoid robots surged roughly 2,204 percent in 2025, reaching 821 million RMB and establishing the division as the company's primary growth engine amid a global race to commercialize the technology.
The explosive growth offers a rare commercial proof point in a sector grappling with intense hype. While some competitors focus on high-profile demonstrations, UBTECH’s results suggest a tangible demand for its products. Still, some industry pioneers remain skeptical. "Because of the thirst for novel stories that will drive clicks for digital advertising, everything gets loose really quickly,” Rodney Brooks, an MIT professor emeritus who founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, told Newsweek.
The humanoid division’s performance drove UBTECH’s total 2025 revenue to 2.001 billion RMB, a 53.3 percent increase from the previous year. The 821 million RMB from humanoids now represents the largest share of the company's revenue. The performance places UBTECH in direct comparison with rival Unitree Robotics, which was reported to have generated close to 2 billion RMB in full-year 2025 revenue, according to 36Kr.
The results land as investors pour billions into the robotics space, valuing pre-revenue startups like Figure AI at $39 billion while established industrial players push their own platforms into real-world pilots. UBTECH's numbers suggest that beyond the viral videos of dancing robots, a substantial market is beginning to form around practical applications, validating the focus on industrial use cases over public spectacle.
The 2,204% revenue jump signals that UBTECH's strategy of targeting specific commercial and industrial applications is gaining traction. While competitors like Unitree Robotics have gained significant public attention through events like China’s Spring Festival Gala — for which four robotics firms reportedly paid a combined 100 million yuan for placement in 2026 — UBTECH's earnings point to a different path to market.
The broader market is watching closely to distinguish between genuine industrial adoption and marketing-driven hype. Companies like Agility Robotics, backed by Amazon, and Humanoid, which is running pilots with Siemens and Schaeffler, are pursuing an industrial-first approach. These efforts focus on constrained, repeatable tasks in logistics and manufacturing, where the economic case for automation is clear. UBTECH's revenue figures indicate it is successfully converting its technology into sales within this more pragmatic segment.
Despite the bullish top-line number, the humanoid robotics sector remains characterized by a significant gap between capital investment and technological maturity. Global robotics startups raised $13.8 billion in 2025, according to Crunchbase, with Morgan Stanley estimating the humanoid robot market could reach $5 trillion by 2050.
However, many deployments remain in early-stage, heavily supervised trials. The challenge, as outlined by a Bain and Company technology report, is moving from choreographed demonstrations to reliable, autonomous operation in unstructured environments. The factory floor is not a dance floor, and the metrics that matter to industrial customers are uptime, reliability, and total cost of ownership — not viral video views. UBTECH’s ability to generate over 800 million RMB in revenue suggests it is beginning to answer those industrial-grade questions.
As hardware costs fall, the competitive frontier in robotics is increasingly shifting to software. The ability of a robot to perceive its environment, make decisions, and execute tasks without human intervention is driven by its underlying AI. This is where the most significant value is being created.
According to a peer-reviewed paper in SmartBot, embodied perception and decision-making are the least mature and most commercially decisive modules in modern robotics. Companies that build a proprietary AI stack from operational data collected in real industrial environments are developing a competitive moat that cannot be easily replicated. While UBTECH's report focused on revenue, its future growth will depend on the sophistication of its AI, a factor that will ultimately determine the upper limit of its market potential.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
