Unitree vs. Shein: How August’s big China IPOs show how AI hype is leaving e-commerce giants behind

Shein’s IPO dwarfs Unitree’s, with the fast fashion giant hoping to raise as much as $3 billion, roughly three times what Unitree is targeting. And yet Unitree’s IPO is getting most of the attention: Retail investors are scrambling to buy into the company, and secondary markets are predicting a massive jump in valuation after the startup’s debut. 

Unitree may be smaller and younger compared to Shein, which has a decade of global expansion under its belt. But in the eyes of investors, the robot maker is the more exciting bet, as appetites shift to AI and hardware, and away from e-commerce and internet platforms. 

A robotics boom

Unitree, founded by Wang Xingxing in 2016, has become a fixture in China’s pop culture, thanks to its robots’ dance routines at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, China’s most-watched television broadcast.

Unitree is raising 6.1 billion Chinese yuan ($904 million) in its IPO, at a market valuation of around $9 billion. The company claimed last week that the retail portion of its offering was more than 8,000 times oversubscribed. 

The company reported 1.7 billion yuan ($252 million) in revenue last year, a fourfold increase from its revenue in 2024. Almost 45% of the company’s revenue came from overseas sales. Unlike many of its peers, Unitree is also profitable, with net income of 600 million yuan ($89 million) in 2025.

Over 70% of Unitree’s humanoid robots go to academic and research institutions, though some Chinese state-owned enterprises and major manufacturers are dabbling with using robots from Unitree and other robotics startups.

Fellow robotics company UBTech, which is already listed in Hong Kong, posted a net loss of $104 million last year; U.S. labs like Boston Dynamics and Figure AI are also unprofitable.

Unitree is part of a broader wave of Chinese robotics manufacturers that are dominating the industry, not just in humanoid robots but also in quadrupeds, household robots, and industrial machines.

Smart Analytics Global, a Californian research firm, calculated that Chinese firms were responsible for 97% of all humanoid robots shipments in the first half of the year. That same report notes that Unitree isn’t even the market leader any more; that title goes to Agibot, a Shanghai-based rival that’s currently preparing for a Hong Kong listing later this year. 

That dominance is spurring concern in Washington. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission in late July banned imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots. “These devices could create supply chain vulnerabilities that could disrupt U.S. economic and national security,” the FCC said in its announcement. 

Shein’s long road to an IPO

Shein’s IPO is significantly larger than Unitree’s. Media reports from the Financial Times and Reuters suggest that Shein is targeting a valuation between $25 billion and $30 billion. That figure would mark a deep discount from the $64 billion valuation Shein fetched in 2024, let alone the $100 billion valuation it got in 2022.

According to its prospectus, Shein generated $41.2 billion in revenue last year, up from $38.8 billion in 2024. It earned about $2 billion in profit. Europe is now Shein’s largest market, making up 35.4% of its revenue, compared to 24.1% from the U.S.

Growing protectionism is squeezing Shein’s profits. Shein long benefited from “de minimis” rules, which exempted small packages from customs duties. The U.S. eliminated these exemptions last year, and Europe followed suit in July. 

“Although it remains too early to fully assess, it is possible that trends in the EU could be generally in line with or exceed the impact observed in the U.S. after the removal of the U.S. de minimis exemption,” Shein admitted in its IPO prospectus. 

Shein’s long path to an IPO might also have done damage to its valuation. The company first pursued a New York listing, following in the footsteps of other Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu. Yet U.S. officials raised concerns about allegations of forced labor in Shein’s supply chain and the platform’s handling of customer data.

Shein even moved its headquarters to Singapore in order to smooth its path to a U.S. listing—an attempt at “Singapore-washing”—to no avail. 

The company then considered a London IPO, yet Chinese regulators never gave approval for Shein’s overseas listing. That left Hong Kong as the last option.

It may also be that Shein’s time has passed. E-commerce boomed during the pandemic, when shoppers, flush with stimulus cash, splurged on new items. Now, rising protectionism and inflation have made growth harder for global e-commerce platforms. 

Investor attention is instead shifting to AI infrastructure and hardware. Last month, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) raised $8.6 billion in its own Shanghai STAR Market IPO. Shares surged by as much as 530% on their first day of trading; the chipmaker, the world’s No. 4 producer of dynamic random-access memory, is now the most valuable Chinese company, ahead of Tencent.

Several other AI companies are considering IPOs in either Shanghai or Hong Kong, including AI developers DeepSeek and Moonshot AI as well as chipmaker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp.