Everyone has seen it. That viral footage of humanoid robots dominating the spectacle of the Lunar New Year show in China. It seems like China, as with many other things, is coming to dominate the nascent humanoid robot industry.

And if you had told most investors five years ago that a company selling humanoid robots to Chinese car factories would be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) with a market cap exceeding US$6 billion, they would have raised an eyebrow. Yet here we are, and the story has recently become much more fascinating.

UBTech Robotics (SGX: HUUD) is one of the world's first commercially serious humanoid robot companies. It doesn’t fit neatly into any existing investment category as it’s not a traditional manufacturer, nor a software company – maybe a good thing with heightened fear of obsolescence of software firms in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Yet UBTech is also not exactly a robotics supplier in the way most investors understand that term. It operates at the frontier of a technology that is still, no pun intended, finding its feet commercially. What changed in 2025 is that UBTech started translating that ambition and narrative into actual numbers. So, here’s what you need to know about one of the latest additions to SGX’s Hong Kong SDR stable.

UBTech was founded in 2012 in Shenzhen by James Zhou Jian, with a fairly modest ambition: building programmable robots for education and entertainment. Those early years produced STEM education kits, consumer robot toys, and a growing reputation for astute hardware engineering – something a lot of companies in China have become more known for. Yet UBTech was not yet thinking about replacing workers on automotive assembly lines.

The pivot towards humanoid robots came gradually. The Walker series, which debuted around 2016 and has been iteratively developed through the Walker S, Walker S1, and Walker S2 models, represents UBTech's serious attempt to build a full-size, two-legged robot capable of performing real industrial tasks. The Walker S2 stands roughly 1.7 metres tall, features 52 degrees of freedom, can handle loads of up to 15kg across a full spatial range, and is designed to operate in human-oriented environments built for people rather than machines.

And UBTech took that ambition to the public markets as it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2023, raising HK$914 million (US$117 million) and signalling its intent to compete at a global level. Its share price surged by over 130% in 2025, making it one of the best-performing stocks in Asia's automation and robotics space last year.

The headline numbers from UBTech's full-year 2025 results deserve poring over because they tell a meaningfully different story from what investors would have been pricing into the stock 12 months earlier.

Total revenue for the year came in at just over RMB 2 billion, up 53.3% from RMB 1.305 billion in FY2024. That top-line growth was solid but the much more significant shift was what drove that revenue. Humanoid robot products and services, which had contributed just RMB 35.6 million in FY2024, surged to RMB 820.6 million in FY2025, representing a 2,204% increase year-on-year. In the space of a single year, humanoid robots went from a rounding error in UBTech's accounts to its single largest revenue source.

Unit volumes tell the same story as the company sold 1,079 full-size humanoid robots in 2025, up from fewer than three units in FY2024. That is the clearest possible signal that the transition from pilot deployments to actual commercial sales has taken place.

Gross margin also improved sharply, rising nine percentage points to 37.7%, from 28.7% in FY2024. This matters because one of the central questions around UBTech's long-term model is whether it can build a profitable business on top of expensive, complex hardware. A gross margin of 37.7% on a business still burning cash on R&D and SG&A is at least pointing in the right direction.

The net loss narrowed to RMB 790 million in FY2025, down meaningfully from RMB 1.16 billion in FY2024. The company is still loss-making, and investors should be clear-eyed about that. But the trajectory, narrowing losses on accelerating revenue with expanding gross margins, is the profile of a business gaining commercial traction rather than simply spending without a clear path to profitability.

UBTech's business today spans three broad categories. Industrial deployment is the headline business: selling humanoid robots to manufacturers, primarily in the automotive sector, to perform tasks like loading, carrying, sorting, and quality inspection on production lines. 

Customers include some big names, such as BYD, Dongfeng Liuzhou Motor, Zeekr, Seres, Foxconn, and BAIC, among others. Its Walker series of humanoid robots accounted for 41% of overall revenue in FY2025 and this was likely mostly sold to industrial clients (the firm doesn’t break out revenue for various divisions/clients). 

The second category is data collection and government-backed projects. A meaningful portion of UBTech's revenue comes from government-funded initiatives to build AI model training datasets using real-world robot deployments. Cities including Guangxi, Huizhou, Zigong, Hohhot, and others have funded robots that collect operational data while performing tasks.

This serves a dual purpose: it generates revenue today and produces training data that makes the robots smarter over time. UBTech describes this as a data flywheel: more data leads to better models, which leads to wider applications, which leads to even more data.

The third category is research and development partnerships. The MAAS AI partnership signed in late 2025, which envisions delivering 10,000 units over five years under a multi-year framework, is the most ambitious example. Such agreements blend commercial delivery with co-development. The upshot is that the firm is creating a pipeline of both revenue and intellectual property.

By the end of 2025, UBTech had achieved an annualised production capacity of over 6,000 full-size humanoid robots per year, and the company claims to lead the global humanoid robot industry in terms of order volume. The 1,000-unit milestone delivered in 2025 (for the Walker S2) is described in the annual report as marking the “maturity and stability of our manufacturing process” – an important milestone beyond the unit number itself.

Source: RBTX, Walker S2 specs

It is worth going beyond marketing language to understand what the Walker S2 is genuinely capable of, because this underpins everything else.

The Walker S2's most practically significant feature for industrial use is its hot-swappable autonomous battery system. The robot can swap its own battery in approximately three minutes, enabling 24-hour continuous operation without human intervention. For factory deployment, where shift patterns and downtime costs are carefully managed, this is a real operational advantage. In other words, it can technically keep “working” forever.

In terms of task performance, UBTech has developed what it describes as three core workstation capabilities: handling (including bin depalletising and palletising across multiple heights), sorting (including the grasping of stacked materials in constrained environments), and quality inspection (vision-based and operation-based checks integrated with production systems).

The company has also achieved multi-robot collaborative deployments, where fleets of Walker S2 units work together across linked workstations. The Walker S3, expected in 2026, will incorporate weight reductions, improved heat dissipation, and advanced chip installation.

Furthermore, the software stack underlying the hardware is equally important. UBTech has developed its Thinker foundation model for embodied intelligence, which it has open-sourced, along with BrainNet 2.0 and a world model called Thinker-WM designed for multi-robot collaborative environments. 

The company holds 2,985 granted patents as of December 2025, including 508 overseas, an 11.4% increase from the prior year. It is also deeply embedded in China's national standards process for humanoid robots, serving as deputy head of the Humanoid Robot Standards Working Group, which gives it influence over the rules of engagement for the entire industry.

One of the most strategically significant moves UBTech made in late 2025 was its decision to acquire a controlling stake in Zhejiang Fenglong Electric, a Shenzhen-listed manufacturer of engines for garden tools, automotive components, and machine pressure-control systems. 

The deal, announced in December 2025, was structured in two stages. In the first phase, UBTech agreed to acquire a 29.99% stake from existing shareholders for approximately RMB 1.16 billion.

Why does this deal matter? Humanoid robots are mechanically complex products with dozens of precision components, including servo motors, actuators, gearboxes, and structural parts, that currently require sourcing from a fragmented external supply chain. As UBTech scales toward thousands of units per year, its ability to control cost, quality, and delivery timelines on critical components becomes a significant operational lever. The Fenglong acquisition also gives UBTech its first A-share listed subsidiary, a foothold in China's domestic capital markets that opens additional financing options. 

Beyond Fenglong, UBTech has been assembling a set of strategic relationships with broader implications. A collaboration with Texas Instruments, a large US semiconductor firm, which reportedly deployed Walker S2 robots on its own production lines (while UBTech sources key components from TI in return), signals that large/global corporates consider the technology credible enough to deploy internally. UBTech has also struck a deal with Airbus, announced in January 2026, to supply the aerospace giant with its Walker S2 robots.

The geopolitical backdrop has become increasingly favourable to Chinese robotics investment. The Trump administration has been weighing executive action to elevate robotics to a national strategic priority, recognising that most American humanoid robot companies remain in early concept stages and rely heavily on overseas suppliers for hardware. That US policy push is expected to prompt a reciprocal intensification of Chinese government support, reinforcing the policy-driven tailwind behind companies like UBTech.

Within China, government support is already visible in the order tracker. Government-led data collection projects represent a substantial portion of current revenue, and local governments are funding deployment centres specifically to help UBTech and peers accumulate real-world training data. This is state-backed ecosystem building at a scale that most Western robotics startups cannot access.

Since listing in 2023, UBTech has completed six equity placements, raising approximately HK$7 billion in total. That capital has funded capacity expansion, M&A activity, and R&D. While we should note that the financing has been dilutive to existing shareholders, it has also funded a level of investment that smaller competitors cannot match. For a growth company in a nascent industry, it’s probably the type of fundraising and capital deployment strategy you want to see as it grabs market share. 

Valuing UBTech requires accepting upfront that traditional metrics do not yet apply. The company has no positive earnings, pays no dividend, and is not expected to reach breakeven until FY2027 at the earliest. What analysts use instead is price-to-sales (PS), which at least anchors the valuation to something tangible.

With FY2025 revenue now confirmed at RMB 2 billion and analyst projections pointing toward RMB 3.2 billion for FY2026 and RMB 5.9 billion for FY2027, the PS multiple de-rates quickly as revenue scales. UBTech currently trades at roughly 28x its FY2025 revenue, falling to around 18x and 10x on FY2026 and FY2027 projections respectively.

For a sector where competitors like Horizon Robotics trade at 36x and 22x on the same metrics, UBTech's multiples are neither absurdly expensive nor clearly that cheap. They are pricing in execution of a growth plan that is now showing early evidence of delivery.

UBTech's risks are substantial and deserve honest reflection. The first is that the industry itself is genuinely nascent and whether this takes off is still very much up in the air. Humanoid robots at commercial scale are not a proven concept anywhere in the world. While UBTech is ahead of most peers in actual deployment numbers, its 1,079 units sold globally is a very small number. The transition from proof-of-concept to mass adoption has not yet happened, and it is not guaranteed to happen on the timelines that current valuations seem to imply.

The second risk is the reliability and sustainability of orders. A significant portion of UBTech's revenue currently comes from government-backed data collection projects, which are funded to build AI training datasets rather than to deploy robots at commercial rates indefinitely.

The shift to genuine, sticky private-sector industrial demand, where customers pay because the economics work rather than because a government programme covers the cost, has started but is not yet the majority of the story. In that sense, the Chinese government’s push for robotics could artificially support demand for UBTech in the short to medium term. It’s really the commercial and industrial client base that will have to grow meaningfully.

And finally, competition is intensifying. Chinese industrial conglomerates, global tech companies, and a growing roster of specialist robotics startups are all moving into humanoid robots simultaneously. Competition in the humanoid robot space is still nascent but it is moving fast, and several well-resourced players are closing the gap on UBTech, with its closest direct peer in China being Unitree Robotics.

Unitree has gained significant global attention for its agile, lower-cost robots and is reportedly preparing for a domestic A-share listing. AgiBot (also known as Zhiyuan Robotics), backed by Tencent and reportedly planning a Hong Kong listing later this year, has also been aggressively scaling industrial robot deployments and recently took a controlling stake in a listed A-share manufacturer, mirroring UBTech's own Fenglong acquisition.

In the US, Tesla's Optimus programme is the most closely-watched Western contender, with Elon Musk targeting production of tens of thousands of units in 2025 and far greater volumes beyond that (although there are understandable doubts given Mr Musk’s track record of outlandish promises). So, while UBTech's lead is real, it’s not insurmountable, and investors should not assume that being a “first mover” automatically guarantees being the dominant player at scale.

One more thing to be cognisant of is that UBTech has raised capital six times since listing, and the growth plan laid out will likely require continued investment. Shareholders need to weigh the benefit of a better-funded business against the cost of continued equity issuance.

Buying UBTech’s Hong Kong-listed shares directly can be a hassle for everyday investors in Singapore. You’d need access to the Hong Kong market and be prepared to purchase them in standard board lots of 50 shares — which works out to roughly HK$5,360, or around S$875 per lot at current prices. 

But thanks to SGX’s Singapore Depository Receipts (SDRs) for Hong Kong-listed stocks, that barrier to entry becomes much more manageable. For UBTech’s SDRs listed under the ticker HUUD — the underlying share ratio is 10 to 1, meaning every 10 SDRs represents 1 UBTech underlying share in Hong Kong.

And because the minimum lot size for SDRs in Singapore is just 100 units, you can get started with as little as S$190, giving you exposure to UBTech without needing to invest a large lump sum upfront.

These SDRs give investors a beneficial interest in the actual Hong Kong-listed shares, which are held by a custodian on behalf of the SDR issuer, who in turn holds them for you, the investor. That means no foreign brokerage accounts, no additional FX spreads, and no worries about navigating the complexities of overseas markets.

Another practical advantage? Any dividends from companies are paid out in Singapore dollars. For investors who are used to dealing with foreign holdings, this simplifies things by eliminating currency conversion fees or cross-border tax questions on small amounts.

Finally, the SGX HK SDRs are fully fungible. That means you can convert your SDRs into the actual Hong Kong-listed UBTech shares at any time through your broker.

For Singapore-based investors looking to tap into a high-growth China story with a lot of potential, and get exposure to a nascent industry in humanoid robots, then UBTech SDRs could be a useful way to do it.

Tim has spent over 15 years in the finance industry with the likes of Schroders, The Motley Fool, and CGS International. 

He’s passionate about helping people take control of their finances by building wealth through long-term investing and thinking more coherently on all things "money".

Tim hopes to share the experience he’s garnered having worked in asset management, securities, and private wealth. He loves breaking down complex financial topics into content that’s easy to understand and, most importantly, engaging. 

Give him a follow on Instagram and TikTok at @timtalksmoneysg or subscribe to his free weekly newsletter at TimTalksMoney.com for more money and investing insights.

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