Unitree made nearly 32,000 robots last year with $50 of machinery per robot

Unitree makes the humanoid robots the internet loves to watch: the ones that box, dance and throw kung fu kicks on stage. The factory behind them looks far less futuristic. In the building that produces the motors driving every robot joint, most of the floor is staffed by workers running old-fashioned coil-winding machines, with only one or two new automated lines among them.

That is what investor Josef Chen saw when he toured Unitree’s plant in Hangzhou, and the company’s own IPO prospectus backs him up. If you picture Chinese robot makers as dark factories where machines build machines around the clock, this is a correction worth having. One of the world’s biggest robot makers still depends on human hands, and the reasons say a lot about how far humanoids are from doing real work in your home or office.

The numbers are stark. According to the prospectus, all of Unitree’s machinery was worth about $1.7 million on its books at the end of 2025, at a company that made almost 32,000 robots that year. That works out to roughly $50 of equipment per robot, about what you would pay for a toaster. Around 26,000 of those machines were robot dogs, more than the roughly 20,000 quadrupeds research firm IDC estimates the whole world shipped the year before.

Automation hasn’t arrived because people are not the expensive part. Labour, outsourced assemblers included, made up about 8% of what it cost Unitree to build its robots in 2025, and most of the rest was parts. In its filings, the company says its new automated motor line will cut the labour in each motor by more than half but lower the cost of one robot model by only 1.7%. Unitree also redesigns its products every year, so a custom machine built for this year’s robot can be scrap by the next. It is automating the joint modules first because they are the parts its robots share most.

Even the company’s best-known factory video tells a softer story on paper. Unitree’s clip of a G1 humanoid assembling parts on its own production line drew about 28 million views and was billed as an actual deployment. The prospectus calls that work a pilot and describes assembly as currently mainly manual.

The filings also show who buys humanoids today. Three quarters of Unitree’s humanoid revenue in the first nine months of 2025 came from research and education, and under 5% came from factories or other industrial customers. Chen adds that half or more of what Unitree files as industry is robots giving guided tours at companies. He is not a neutral witness: he founded Kaikaku, a company built on the bet that Western factory machines will make tomorrow’s robots, and his essay argues exactly that. He was not allowed to take photos inside, and he says he doesn’t know what share of motors comes off the automated lines.

Cheap hands are a big reason Unitree robots are cheap, and that advantage does not travel. Chen estimates an hour of factory work costs about 7.5 times more in the US than in China, which would push labour to around 40% of Unitree’s costs on American soil and make the same motor line save about 9% instead of 1.7%. Unitree sells internationally, but the US Federal Communications Commission stopped approving new foreign-made humanoids and robot dogs in July unless they are built in the US with more than 65% American parts by cost, rising to 75% from 2029.

Unitree itself is looking past the body. On the day of Chen’s visit, chief executive Wang Xingxing told a conference in Wuzhen that after ten years spent on the robot’s body, the company would now put its weight on the brain. In the showroom, Chen’s host described Wang asking a G1 running GPT-6 to fetch him a bottle of water from another room. It did, slowly.

A Unitree slide shown to visitors puts robots’ ChatGPT moment, the point when they can handle 80% of tasks they have never seen 80% of the time, two to three years out. The slide dates from last year, which makes next year the earliest date on the company’s own clock. Until then, the copper in Unitree’s motors will keep getting wound by people.

Tags: robotics, humanoid robots, Hangzhou, robot factories, Unitree, Unitree G1