China can build humanoids at scale. The hard part is finding enough buyers - Greenwich Time
Subscribe News # China can build humanoids at scale. The hard part is finding enough buyers By CHAN HO-HIM, AP Business Writer HONG KONG (AP) — Chinese-made humanoid robots are making waves with their ability to do backflips, direct traffic, and even make c...
Key takeaways
- The most recent developments show a rapid shift from prototype demonstrations toward large‑scale manufacturing and commercial deployment of humanoid robots. In China, Lingyi iTech’s new Beijing factory has already built 300 units and is targeting 10,000 this year, with a long‑term goal of 500,000 annually by 2030, a scale that could cut the typical $30,000 price tag dramatically. Meanwhile, the Chinese market shipped more than 13,000 humanoids in 2025, and analysts expect sales to more than double to around 28,000 units in 2026, with a possible million‑unit annual volume by the early 2030s, although demand still trails production capacity.
- Outside China, Standard Bots secured a $200 million Series C round that lifted its valuation to $1 billion, underscoring investor confidence in mass‑producing humanoids. Figure AI announced an accelerated manufacturing line and a logistics partnership with Catalyst Brands to field its humanoid platforms in distribution centers.
- On the technology front, Sharpa integrated its Wave tactile robot hands into Unitree’s H2 Plus humanoid reference design, creating the first dexterous humanoid built on Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T framework. This move highlights a broader industry emphasis on manipulation and tactile sensing rather than just locomotion.
- In Europe, the UK‑based company Humanoid sealed a proof‑of‑concept partnership with Bosch, positioning the venture for scaled production, while Agile Robots unveiled its AgileONE humanoid and a suite of force‑control systems at the Robot Technology Japan event, demonstrating advanced embodied AI and collaborative capabilities.
- Academic research is also progressing: MIT researchers introduced a wearable ultrasound wristband that captures fine hand‑muscle movements in real time, providing a new source of training data that could help future humanoids achieve human‑level dexterity.
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China can build humanoids at scale. The hard part is finding enough buyers
By CHAN HO-HIM, AP Business Writer
HONG KONG (AP) — Chinese-made humanoid robots are making waves with their ability to do backflips, direct traffic, and even make coffee as the companies developing them seek ways to expand and dominate the market.
Robot makers in China say they have thousands of orders from both the government and private businesses for humanoids that can do such things as sort parcels at postal centers, as the country finds ways to cope with an aging population and rising labor costs. However, some experts believe demand for humanoids lags the capacity to build them.
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China had more than 140 humanoid robot manufacturers and more than 330 models in 2025, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Last year, the Chinese government even publicly warned about the risk of a bubble in the industry given the lagging state of commercialization and applications.
Corporate and academic labs are buying humanoid robots for research. And in China, many of the more than 2 billion yuan ($295 million) worth of orders in 2025 came from state-owned enterprises for use in places such as power plants, data centers or for entertainment, Morgan Stanley said.
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Humanoid robots also can fill in gaps where work is dangerous or repetitive, Matrix's Zhang said. There's also a “very large household market” for handling chores in hundreds of millions of homes in China, he believes.
In Beijing, freelance social media content creator Yang Ning recently tried out a cleaning service with a helper robot with mechanical arms and hands. It can do simple tasks like organizing shoes, folding clothes and changing garbage bags, but it's accompanied by a human cleaner.
Watching the robot sort shoes at her doorway was “amazing,” she said. Still, she thought the helper robot was not that efficient and was “a bit too big and difficult to move around in a small house.”
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