China robot stocks extended their rally on October 28 with Unitree's first post-listing earnings in focus5. Unitree reported third-quarter revenue of 665 million yuan ($99.7 million), a 70% year-over-year increase, in its first earnings release since listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange2,3. Net profit attributable to shareholders fell 17.4% to 112.7 million yuan, missing analysts' forecast of 224 million yuan, as the company more than doubled research and development expenses.
R&D spending jumped 249.6% in the quarter to 127.0 million yuan, representing 19.1% of revenue. Unitree said the increase reflected investment in embodied-intelligence large models, computing capacity, and its research team.
For the first nine months of 2026, revenue climbed 55.7% to 1.82 billion yuan and net profit rose 270.5% to 386.7 million yuan, according to the Shanghai Stock Exchange filing. Unitree attributed the January-September profit surge to higher gross profit and to a large one-time share-based payment expense booked in the prior-year period.
Unitree is one of the few profitable domestic robot firms as the sector searches for viable commercial applications. The results arrive amid cooling investor sentiment and a broader China tech market rout. Vector Wire previously covered a capital rotation out of China's AI and semiconductor stocks — the STAR50 index had fallen roughly 40% in under four months — while Unitree itself surged 65% on its October 26 trading session[1].
ANALYSIS The quarter crystallizes a tension in Unitree's positioning: top-line growth and sector-rare profitability coexist with a deliberate margin squeeze driven by a near-tripling of R&D costs. The miss against the 224 million yuan consensus underscores how quickly the embodied-intelligence spending ramp is compressing earnings even as revenue scales.