When a company goes public, it typically places itself in the hands of the secondary market. Stock price fluctuations are determined by buy and sell orders, while performance is judged by financial reports.
But Yushu's path to listing has reversed this logic entirely.
Even before the bell rings, primary market investors, secondary market institutions, peers, and strategic partners have already placed their expectations, valuations, and next-stage commercial chips squarely on Yushu.
On August 10th, the online subscription began. The issue price was set at 150.80 yuan, with a P/E ratio of 219 times. At that time, the average P/E ratio for listed companies in the same industry was around 38 times. During the offline inquiry process, the effective subscription multiple reached 2,618 times.
The online public offering was even more congested. The initial offering volume was only 6.47 million shares. Calculated at 500 shares per lot, the total winning lottery slots in the entire market were fewer than 13,000. The winning rate dropped to around 0.02%.
Major stock forums were flooded with posts saying "wish me luck on getting a lot."
The market did not seem to be waiting to test Yushu; everyone was doing their best to ensure it got off to a good start.
I. This Is Not an Ordinary IPO
It would be an oversimplification to categorize Yushu as just another ordinary "first humanoid robot stock."
Breaking down the financial data in Yushu's prospectus reveals that its business trajectory underwent a drastic shift over the past three years.
The prospectus shows that Yushu's revenue grew from 159 million yuan in 2023 to 16.99 billion yuan in 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 226%. Adjusted net profit attributable to the parent company swung from a loss of over 18 million yuan to a profit of 591 million yuan.
In 2025, net cash flow from operating activities was 670 million yuan, ending cash and cash equivalents were 1.419 billion yuan, and the asset-liability ratio remained at a low level.
The core change lies in its product revenue structure.
In 2025, Yushu's humanoid robot products (including models like H1 and G1) generated revenue of 868 million yuan, accounting for 51.78% of total revenue. Three years ago, this figure was less than 2%.
Over the past three years, by increasing the self-developed proportion of core components like joint motors, reducers, and controllers, Yushu significantly reduced the overall cost of humanoid robots, thereby completing the business shift from quadruped consumer hardware to humanoid general-purpose hardware.
Founder Wang Xingxing needs this listing.
He needs to prove to the market that a private robotics company can also achieve self-sufficiency and large-scale profitability solely by selling hardware.
II. Yushu's Valuation Is Not About Yushu Itself
Looking again at the paper returns for primary market investment institutions.
Based on market calculations using the issue price, Variable Capital's 2.09 million yuan investment in 2018 yields a paper return of over 174 times; Sequoia Capital China's cumulative investment of 102 million yuan translates to a shareholding value nearing 3 billion yuan; Meituan-affiliated funds hold 9.65% of shares, with paper gains exceeding 3.6 billion yuan.
But paper gains and losses are just the surface. The core impact of Yushu's listing lies in setting a pricing benchmark for the capital market.
Yushu is the first humanoid robot OEM enterprise to enter the A-share public market.
Robotics companies like Yuejiang and Yunchu are preparing for their own listings, while industry giants diversifying into embodied intelligence, such as Xpeng, Lenovo, and GAC, are closely watching this case.
For a long time, embodied intelligence OEM companies lacked a publicly traded secondary market valuation reference.
Yushu's 61 billion yuan issuance valuation becomes the first public market anchor point for China's humanoid robot industry.
If Yushu's stock price performs steadily after listing, the 61 billion yuan valuation could become a reference benchmark for subsequent companies. If it breaks issue price, other companies waiting in line will need to reassess their own pricing logic.
The market is finally about to answer a question that has remained unanswered until now: How much is a company that truly makes robots actually worth?
This is where the real interest of Yushu's IPO lies. It ushers in the first public pricing from the capital market for China's domestic humanoid robot industry.
III. Retail Investors Have No Choice
Retail investor sentiment was amplified to the maximum during the online subscription phase.
Guba and Xueqiu were flooded with posts about achieving financial freedom if they got a winning lot.
According to brokerage estimates, the average first-day gain for A-share IPOs since 2026 has reached 276%. If Yushu can match this average, the paper gain from winning one lot could potentially exceed 200,000 yuan; if it matches the average 466% first-day gain for STAR Market IPOs this year, potential profit per lot could even surge past 350,000 yuan.
But these most vocal participants are precisely not the core players in Yushu's IPO.
Of the total 40.44 million shares in this public offering, the initial quota allocated to online retail investors was only 16%.
The remainder mostly went to strategic placement and offline inquiry.
Three portfolios under the National Social Security Fund collectively subscribed for approximately 141 million yuan,
DeepSeek also received an allocation of about 141 million yuan, signing the longest lock-up period of 36 months.
The shares truly available for trading on the first day amount to only about 29.77 million, roughly 7.36% of the total shares.
Over 90% of the shares remain locked up on the day of the bell ringing.
This creates a very interesting contrast.
The people in the entire market most eager to buy Yushu cannot get much supply, while those holding a large number of shares did not acquire them through a lottery.
Therefore, this is not a truly public pricing event.
Retail investors will certainly participate, but they resemble the most enthusiastic spectators of this IPO, not the most important decision-makers.
The scarcity of supply and highly concentrated market expectations also make the stock price performance on the first day particularly sensitive.
IV. Buying the Story, Not the Performance
Thus, Yushu's IPO presents a very peculiar scene.
A high issue price leads to a high valuation, high attention leads to high discussion, and scarce tradable shares amplify trading sentiment.
But the most crucial point is that the market did not back off despite the 219-times P/E ratio.
The offline subscription multiple was 2,618 times.
Why?
The essence is that the market is not buying the 591 million yuan profit from 2025 at all.
It is buying a future story. There exist two Yushus here.
One is the Yushu in the prospectus. With 2025 revenue of 16.99 billion yuan, but with adjusted net profit for the first half of 2026 expected to decline by 6% to 22%, indicating intensifying industry competition.
Then there is the Yushu in the market's valuation model.
Mass production, industrial scenario deployment, embodied intelligence entering production systems, global shipments, ultimately becoming a representative enterprise of China's robotics industry.
The 219-times P/E ratio represents the market prepaying a premium for this long-term expectation.
But the problem lies precisely here.
The more alluring the future, the easier it is for today's price to overdraw it.
V. A Growth Problem
The online investor exchange on August 7th lasted three hours. Someone directly asked Wang Xingxing: Isn't a P/E ratio over two hundred times too high? Is it detached from fundamentals?
Wang Xingxing's answer was quite candid: While most peers are still struggling in the mire of losses, Yushu has already achieved profitability.
That's true.
But within Yushu's fundamentals, there are also several questions not so easily answered.
The first is customer structure.
The prospectus discloses that in the first three quarters of 2025, revenue from humanoid robots consisted of: Scientific Research & Education 73.60%, Commercial & Consumer 17.39%, and Industry Application only 9.01%. Within that 9% of industry application, lightweight scenarios like enterprise exhibition hall guides accounted for the majority.
Revenue truly landing in hardcore scenarios like intelligent manufacturing and industrial inspection comprised less than 30% of the industry application segment.
This indicates Yushu has proven that people are willing to buy robots. But it has not yet fully proven that industrial enterprises cannot do without robots.
There is a significant chasm between these two stages.
The second issue is more subtle.
The price of humanoid robots is falling rapidly. The average price was around 590,000 yuan in 2023, dropped to about 160,000 yuan in 2025, and by Q1 2026, the industry average price was approaching 100,000 yuan**.
But cost reduction has not kept pace.
From 2023 to the first three quarters of 2025, Yushu's unit cost only decreased from 73,200 yuan to 62,200 yuan, a reduction of about 15%.
The speed of price decline has clearly outpaced cost reduction.
This means the real future test for Yushu is not whether sales volume can continue to grow. Rather, after achieving scale, whether the current gross margin of around 60% can be maintained.
Industrial robotics is, in the end, a manufacturing business. When customers shift from research institutes to factories, they will care more about price. When more competitors emerge, price wars are also hard to avoid.
VI. Strong Body, Weak Brain
There is another detail more worthy of attention than the 200-plus times P/E ratio.
Yushu clearly states in its prospectus: The company has not yet deployed its self-developed general-purpose embodied large-scale model on a large scale to robot terminals.
This sentence is actually very important.
Over the past few years, the greatest imagination for humanoid robots has always come from two things: the body, and the brain.
Yushu's body has been moving fast, but its brain is still catching up.
Of the approximately 6.1 billion yuan raised in this offering, over 2 billion yuan is explicitly earmarked for intelligent robot model R&D, focusing on conquering the brain and cerebellum of embodied intelligence.
DeepSeek appears as a strategic investor at this time.
The picture suddenly becomes complete: robotics companies need stronger brains, and large model companies need more tangible bodies.
But Yushu has not yet proven that the two have truly achieved integration.
Wang Xingxing's insistence on retaining the remote control design during the roadshow is also interesting.
Faced with investor questions about whether it's a remote-control toy, his explanation was that it is the highest level of safety redundancy, providing the last line of physical defense when the AI model makes a misjudgment.
This is, of course, engineering prudence.
But from another perspective, it also means today's Yushu still has some way to go before robots make their own decisions.
VII. The Unaffordable Failure of a Model Project
Before listing, Wang Xingxing could gamble. Failure would merely mean the failure of a startup company.
But after listing, Yushu can no longer be responsible only for itself.
It is the first humanoid robot stock on the STAR Market, a benchmark for primary capital exit, and a target for strategic capital allocation. Its market performance will directly influence the pricing space for a batch of robotics companies awaiting listing.
This explains the very peculiar collective sentiment that emerged around this IPO.
Almost no major participant wants Yushu to become a failure case.
Wang Xingxing certainly doesn't. Primary investors definitely don't. Strategic capital with three-year lock-up periods certainly doesn't.
Even AI companies like DeepSeek have already placed their chips on it.
The more stable Yushu's performance, the easier it becomes for subsequent industrial capital and supply chain resources to concentrate in this industry; conversely, if performance falls short of expectations, the entire sector's valuation logic may face a reshaping.
This IPO has collectively raised the sunk cost for the embodied intelligent industry chain.
VIII. After the Euphoria, the Real Exam
Everyone wanting it to win does not mean the stock price won't correct.
If earnings growth fails to keep pace, or if industrial scenario deployment lags behind market imagination, a correction under high valuation is almost inevitable.
The price action of humanoid robot concept stocks around the Spring Festival this year—soaring high and then falling back—has already provided a preview.
Overseas markets are also a variable.
The U.S. FCC recently placed China's advanced robotics on a restricted list, and Yushu relies on overseas markets for over 43% of its revenue.
Capital can give high expectations to a robotics company, but it cannot solve order fulfillment, costs, technology, or geopolitics for it.
The first-day performance is merely short-term speculation. What truly determines whether Yushu can sustain the 61 billion yuan valuation depends on whether subsequent financial reports can deliver on three commercial checkpoints.
The first thing to watch is the switch in the main business line. Having over half of revenue come from humanoid robots is just a starting point; this number must continue to rise to prove Yushu has truly transformed from a quadruped hardware specialist into a humanoid robotics platform company.
Next is the expansion of customer profile. Yushu needs to extend its robot sales reach from research institutions buying for experiments and exhibition halls using them for gimmicks, into factory assembly lines, warehousing logistics, and high-risk inspection scenarios—transitioning from incidental purchases to industrial enterprises relying on them.
Finally, the gross margin scissors difference behind scaling up. A declining industry average price is not terrifying; what's terrifying is cost reduction failing to keep pace with price reduction. Yushu must prove that the cost reduction brought by supply chain localization and economies of scale can outrun the downward pressure of price wars.
If it can navigate these three hurdles, 61 billion yuan might just be the starting point for the industry's takeoff; if not, all the funds scrambling for winning lots today will have merely bought an extremely expensive discounted ticket.
Words from [Beyond the Layout]:
Every wave of industrial and technological innovation eventually requires one company to step forward and face the test of the public capital market.
Yushu has taken on this role.
After August 10th, humanoid robots, for the first time, have a price that the market recalculates every day.
From now on, Chinese robotics is no longer just an industry story.
It now has a stock ticker.
The industry narrative has concluded. From here on out, it's all about the financial reports.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Beyond the Layout," author: Huahua
