The King of Unitree

Caijing’s profile of Wang Xingxing paints Unitree as a company built on two things: ruthless cost control and unusually tight control over everything the public sees. Employees say even reimbursement over 100 yuan needs Wang’s approval. He is the founder, chairman, general manager and CTO, and people inside the company describe him as blunt, severe, and obsessed with details as small as a screw length.

That style has helped Unitree become one of the most closely watched names in embodied AI. The company listed on the STAR Market on August 19, 2026, and its market value briefly hit 440 billion yuan. By August 28, Caijing put its market cap at about 248.8 billion yuan, far above UBTech’s and far above Unitree’s own last private valuation. It has also stayed profitable for several years, which is still rare in this sector.

The centerpiece of the story is not the IPO, though. It is how Unitree treats cost as almost a design religion. Wang has publicly argued that lowering price starts with engineering choices, not just scale, and he told one interviewer, “Don’t try to beat us on cost — we can still go a lot lower.” The numbers back up the claim: Unitree’s quadruped gross margin rose from 43.71% in 2023 to 56.72% in 2025, while bipedal humanoids stayed above 60%, reaching 63.18%.

But the same pressure that keeps costs low also pushes hard on the people around Wang. Employees queue outside his office for approvals, get cut off if they talk too long, and compare who gets criticized less. Quality control can suffer. One employee said early return-for-repair rates were extremely high, though the company can now at least keep products alive through the warranty period.

The Spring Festival Gala becomes the weirdest window into all of this. Unitree’s 2025 appearance, which cost nothing, helped turn humanoid robots into a public obsession and triggered a burst of demand that forced overtime, a plant move, and more outsourcing. For the 2026 Gala, the company stationed nearly 50 engineers on site for more than two months of tuning. Wang was there too, checking every machine himself. For Unitree, even a television spectacle is really just another place to squeeze out technical problems without spending money it doesn’t have to.