Humanoid robots made in China are making waves with the ability to make back turns, direct traffic and make coffee as the companies that make them look for ways to expand and dominate the market.
Robot makers in China say they have thousands of orders for humanoids that can do things like sort parcels at post offices as the country finds ways to deal with an aging population and rising labor costs. However, some experts believe that the demand for humanoids is reducing the ability to create them.
China and the US dominate the research, which Morgan Stanley estimates is a US$5 trillion (NZ$8 trillion) market for humanoid robots.
By some measures, the United States is leading the way in developing artificial intelligence for the high-level computing power, or “brains,” of such robots. But as the world’s factory base, China leads in mass production capacity, hardware supply and data harvesting for training robots.
Robot makers say real-life demand is growing
Shanghai-based startup Matrix Robotics develops humanoid robots that use AI. Its flagship humanoid robot, “MATRIX-3”, is nearly 1.7m tall and has well-controlled arms. They cost around US$99,000 (NZ$170,881) per unit.
Customers for the roughly 1,000 orders it has received include coffee chains and hotels, its founder and CEO Alan Zhang, who previously worked at Tesla, said at a recent robotics expo in Macau.
So far, Matrix has only built a few hundred robots, although depending on the number of orders it will be capable of delivering 5000 units by this year.
EngineAI, a startup in Shenzhen, southern China, says its fully humanoid robots could be used as security guards and museum guides. They also perform with dance and boxing.
The base version of its humanoid is priced at 180,000 yuan (NZ$45,894). “The next step is to move into more real-life scenarios,” said Issac Li, EngineAI’s head of brand and marketing.
Demand for robots may lag
Most humanoid robots are still reactive, failing to work in chaotic, unpredictable environments, said Sam Sachs, a senior fellow at the New America think tank, which focuses on Chinese technology.
“The use cases for these robots are still limited,” says Chibo Tang of Gobi Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in technology startups including robotics companies.
“Without demand and without that volume from the market, these companies can’t really go into mass production.”
By 2025, China will have more than 140 humanoid robot manufacturers and more than 330 models, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Last year, the Chinese government publicly warned of the risk of a bubble in the industry due to lagging commercialization and applications.
Corporate and academia buy humanoid robots for research. In China, many of the orders, worth 2 billion yuan (NZ$509 million) by 2025, are from state-owned enterprises for use in places such as power plants, data centers or entertainment, Morgan Stanley said.
“The economics are tough: humanoid robots are expensive to manufacture, fragile in operation and depend on highly structured environments to operate,” Sacks explained.
“There is a long way to go to a level of activity where people feel comfortable providing care for the elderly or children in their homes,” she said.
Still, compared to other countries, China is obsessed with human figures
Sachs said the most viable business route would be through industrial and logistics systems. But many factories in China and elsewhere already have non-humanoid robot arms that perform repetitive single tasks and don’t need many humanoid robots.
In Japan and the US, humanoid robot startups are struggling to find buyers in industrial and other work settings.
In the past year, however, real-world deployment of humanoid robots has accelerated in China.
Chinese people are relatively “used to this rapid change in terms of technology,” said Ye Tian, a former Apple engineer and founder and CEO of Chinese startup Robot Science, which focuses on building the systems behind AI-powered robots.
As the technology matures, humanoids will be able to perform heavy lifting and menial tasks in warehouses, factories and ports, said Lian Jye Su with the Omdia Technology Research Group.
Matrix’s Zhang said humanoid robots could also fill gaps where work is dangerous or repetitive. He believes China has a “very large housing market” to handle jobs in hundreds of millions of households.
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 perform simple tasks like organizing shoes, folding clothes and changing garbage bags, but it is accompanied by a human cleaner.
Watching the robot sort the shoes on her doorstep was “amazing,” she said. However, she thought the helper robot was not that efficient and was “a bit big and difficult to move around in a small house”.
China is leading the global humanoid robots market
According to a recent research report by Barclays, last year, Chinese humanoid robots accounted for about 85% of the world.
In line with the ruling Communist Party’s 2026-2030 five-year plan, startups in China have received massive state support to target the frontiers of technology, including advances in humanoid robots.
Of the more than 13,000 humanoid robots shipped by 2025, AGIBOT and Unitree, China’s two leading robotics companies, shipped more than 5000 each, while US competitors such as Figure AI and Tesla each shipped a few hundred or less, according to Omtia.
Morgan Stanley expects China’s humanoid sales to more than double this year to about 28,000 units. Omdia predicts that annual shipments of advanced robots will exceed 1 million units by the early 2030s.
Some robot makers say they are already profitable. Unitree reported revenue of 1.7 billion yuan (NZ$433 million) last year with a profit of 278 million yuan (NZ$70.8 million).
Robot makers argue that as production of humanoid robots increases, costs will decrease. Using domestically made components has helped make Chinese robots 20% or more cheaper than foreign models on average, Morgan Stanley said. It estimates that the average price will drop to US$21,000 (NZ$32,000) by 2050, from US$46,000 (NZ$79,000) last year.
Some humanoid robots in China cost less than US$6,000 (NZ$10,000).
However, cost remains an obstacle
A report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies said that while China’s human figures were already cheaper than those produced elsewhere, they were still “too expensive for widespread deployment”.
Another challenge for manufacturers is accumulating enough good data to train more robots.
Wang Xiaogang, co-founder of Chinese AI software company SenseTime and president of ACE Robotics, said his company is collecting a lot of human-centric data from factories, retail and office settings.
Eric Guo, founder and CEO of Shenzhen-based AI² Robotics, said that for humanoid robots to learn more than single tasks, they need data from a wide variety of scenes in public and private settings with a fair degree of difficulty. But it may take many years to increase in size.
“(The) mass production capability in the robotics area is still in its infancy,” Guo said.
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