Subscription for Unitree Robotics opens today on Shanghai’s STAR Market, with payment due on 12 August. The company is selling 40,446,434 shares, or 10% of its post-issue capital, at 150.80 yuan — a price set on 6 August and disclosed in the offering announcement published on 7 August. If the sale completes, it expects gross proceeds of 6.099bn yuan and, after 182m yuan in fees, net proceeds of 5.917bn. That values the company at about 60.99bn yuan on listing.
The prospectus, filed on 31 July, commits 4.202bn yuan to four projects, each a fixed sum. The difference on a like-for-like basis — net proceeds against the amount the projects will draw — is 1.715bn yuan. Caijing has put the overshoot at 1.9bn, a figure widely repeated since, which compares gross proceeds to the same plan and so counts the 182m yuan in underwriting fees twice.
Where the plan does spend, it spends on software. The largest line is a robot model programme at 2.022bn yuan, 48.13% of the total, aimed at what Unitree calls the robot’s brain and cerebellum. Robot body R&D takes 1.110bn, new product development 445m, and a manufacturing base 624m over a two-year build. The prospectus addresses only the downside case: if proceeds fall short, the board is to prioritise among the projects and the company will make up the gap with its own funds. Across 381 pages it sets out no corresponding arrangement for proceeds that exceed the plan.
Demand, not the plan, set the price. Ahead of pricing, 367 institutional investors managing 12,161 placement accounts submitted quotes ranging from 15.20 to 154.88 yuan. After exclusions, 313 investors managing 11,052 accounts held valid bids, equal to 2,618.3 times the offering available to them. The resulting price carries a price-earnings ratio of 219.23 against an industry average of 38.56 — a figure that uses the lower of Unitree’s two 2025 profit measures, the unadjusted 278m yuan rather than the 591m reported after stripping out one-off items.
The strategic placement runs to 8.09 million shares, a fifth of the deal, and the lock-ups are not uniform. Three national social security fund portfolios, CNPC’s Kunlun Capital, China Southern Power Grid’s investment arm and Tianyi Capital are locked for 12 months. DeepSeek took 933,399 shares — 2.31% of the offering, 140.8m yuan — and is locked for 36 months, the longest term in the table alongside one of the two employee plans. A model developer has taken a three-year position in the hardware company that is spending half its raise on models.
For scale: that 2.022bn yuan model programme is 7.6 times what Unitree spent on R&D across 2023, 2024 and 2025 combined, which came to 265m yuan. What the extra 1.7bn buys has not been set out — and on a STAR Market listing, that decision comes after the money arrives.
