Why did 53.6 billion share orders pile into Unitree's IPO?

In Unitree's Shanghai IPO, 9.78 million retail accounts submitted orders for 53.6 billion shares. The online allotment came out at one filled order for every 5,525 submitted. Out of ten thousand applicants, two are filled. The institutional tranche was reported to have been covered more than 2,600 times. Unitree makes four-legged robots and human-shaped ones, and this is the first time a company in that field gets a price set in a public market.

Unitree IPO frenzy leaves Chinese retail investors with 1-in-5,500 odds (South China Morning Post, 2026-08-11)

출처: scmp.com

How large is 8,289 times

A month earlier the Chinese memory maker CXMT listed on the same exchange. Its retail subscription ratio of 212 times was reported at the time as the number that startled the market.

Where the two numbers part

Two figures travelled together for the same book: 8,288.82 times and 5,526 times. The numerator is the same in both. It is the 53.6 billion shares applied for. What changed is the denominator, the number of shares set aside for retail buyers. Chinese offerings have a step that moves part of the institutional tranche to retail when institutional demand falls far short of retail demand. Caixin reported that 3.236 million shares moved that way this time. A larger retail tranche pulls the ratio down even when the orders are unchanged. The confirmed allotment worked out at one in 5,525. That is what you get when you invert 5,526. So the 8,289 in the headlines appears to be measured before the clawback, and the odds retail buyers actually faced sit with the 5,526 figure.

The price already set on 6 August

The offer price was 150.80 yuan, 40,446,434 shares were sold, and the raise came to about 6.1 billion yuan. That put the company at roughly 61 billion yuan, about $9.0 billion. Against earnings it is 219 times. Unitree's 2025 revenue was 1.71 billion yuan, up 335% on the year, with adjusted net profit of about 591 million yuan. In the first nine months of 2025 human-shaped robots made up 51.5% of core revenue, having been 1.9% in 2023. Over the same stretch the average price of one human-shaped robot fell from 593,400 yuan to 167,600 yuan. The price per unit became a third of what it was while units shipped grew faster still. Serenity, citing pre-listing grey-market prices, suggested the shares could open above a $30 billion valuation. As of 11 August Unitree had not begun trading, and no public document supporting that figure could be found. For comparison, the private US company Figure AI was valued at $39 billion in a September 2025 round, more than four times the $9 billion attached to Unitree, which has disclosed revenue and profit.

Unitree Robotics prices Shanghai IPO at 61 billion yuan valuation (Caixin Global, 2026-08-07)

출처: caixinglobal.com

So what this book tells us is not a price but the length of a queue. If the market capitalisation at the first close clears $30 billion, the grey-market price was right; if it falls short, the subscription ratio and the price were telling different stories. A subscription ratio counts how many people wanted to buy, and a share price counts how much of that wanting they were willing to pay.