Photo/UBTECH website

Humanoid Robot maker UBTECH, which performed 4 times during the Spring Festival Gala, filed for an HK IPO on Jan 31, 2023.

UBTECH ranked first in the Chinese intelligent education service robot solution providers in 2021 by revenue, with a market share of about 20.1%.

According to the Frost & Sullivan report, UBTECH Walker robot is the first commercialized bipedal humanoid robot in China, the first company in the world to reduce the cost of bipedal humanoid robots to below $100,000, and the first company in China to achieve commercialization of small humanoid robots on a large scale.

Since 2012, UBTECH has completed many rounds of financing, with investors including Tencent, ICBC, IFlytek, etc.

It is noticed that Tencent is UBTECH's largest institutional investor. BYD co-founder Xia Zuoquan was an angel investor of the company in 2013 and remained the largest individual shareholder (5.78% of shares) except UBTECH's founder Zhou Jian.

Humanoid robots have developed to the fourth stage. Different from Boston Dynamics' focus on laboratory technology demonstration, Ubtech insists on letting its humanoid robot Walker go out of the laboratory, showing and interacting with people in real scenes.

In 2022, shortly after Tesla AI Day launched the humanoid robot, Ubtech (as one of the few humanoid robots that can be mass-produced and delivered in the world) successfully exported Walker to Saudi Arabia's Future City Project, attracting worldwide attention. 

The prospectus shows that in the 2020 fiscal year, the 2021 fiscal year, the first nine months of 2021 and the first nine months of 2022, UBTECH's R&D expenditure was 429 million yuan, 517 million yuan, 346 million yuan and 325 million yuan respectively, accounting for 57.9%, 63.3%, 68.6% and 61.4% of the total revenue of the same year or period, with an average annual R&D investment of more than 60%.