Humanoid Robots ⑧ — China: Chasing Every Chokepoint with Volume and Price
Unitree, UBTech, Fourier, AgiBot. China floods the market with finished robots at shocking prices and drives even the reducer toward domestic production. A look at the final-stage challenger backed by state support and a vast home market.
The Latest to Arrive, the Fastest to Close In
Across the previous seven parts we traced the line that runs from clockwork automata through ASIMO and HUBO into the present, where Optimus and Atlas contend; we looked under the skin at the engineering of bipedal walking, reducers, and artificial intelligence, and we watched the United States, Japan, and Korea each try, in their own way, to seize a chokepoint. The country that now takes the final stage is the one that joined all of those currents last, yet is closing the gap faster than anyone, namely China.
China's strategy differs in grain from every nation that came before. Where the United States moves the board with capital and artificial intelligence, Japan guards a chokepoint through the precision of its components, and Korea wagers on the vertical integration of its conglomerates, the weapon China has drawn is the very logic we brushed against in Part 2, that of overwhelming volume and the destructive force on price that it produces. The ability to pour out robots of comparable capability at a fraction of a rival's price can itself become a strategic weapon, and China is proving that proposition more vividly than anyone else in this market.
A War of Volume in Finished Robots: Unitree and Its Peers
The company that most symbolizes China's pursuit is Unitree, which already appeared once in Part 2. Having made its name with quadruped robot dogs, the firm released the humanoid G1 at a price that, while rival products in the United States and Europe were quoted in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, was set in the tens of thousands and lower for some configurations, sending a shock through the entire industry. It was not merely cheap; by demonstrating dynamic movements close to a somersault in its videos, Unitree pressed on price and performance at the same time and drew the market's attention in a single stroke.
This is not Unitree's story alone. From UBTech, which has mass-produced educational and service humanoids since early on, to Fourier, which began in rehabilitation and research and has widened into general-purpose humanoids, to AgiBot (智元), which is rapidly amassing capital and proclaiming mass production, China is seeing not one or two star firms but dozens of companies plunge into the finished-product race at once, and that very structure, in which many companies push volume upward simultaneously, works as a distinctly Chinese engine of pursuit that drives unit costs down and the pace of improvement up.
Localizing the Parts: Even the Reducer, Made at Home
Behind the ability to drop the price of a finished robot to a fraction of a rival's lies a dogged drive to localize, within the country's own borders, even the precision reducer that Part 3 identified as the most expensive component. The harmonic reducer was once effectively monopolized by a Japanese firm, and the RV reducer by another Japanese maker, yet Chinese companies such as Leader Harmonious Drive (绿的谐波) and Shuanghuan Driveline (双环传动) have rapidly narrowed the technology gap and begun supplying parts to domestic robot firms, and this current has become a central link in a strategy that seeks to enclose the entire supply chain within China, beyond mere cost reduction.
Added to this, the foundation China holds in motors and batteries is already world-class. The battery capability accumulated through the era of electric vehicles is condensed into giants like CATL and BYD, and the production base for the various motors and parts used in actuation is likewise thick, so China has become one of the few countries able to source most of the components needed to build the new body that is a humanoid robot from within its own industry, standing precisely opposite the configuration in which the United States depends on Asia for core parts.
A Vast Home Market and the Hand of the State
Another pillar supporting China's pursuit is a pair of assets few other nations can imitate, namely a vast home market and concentrated support at the national level. Because the scale of the sites a robot might enter, from factories and logistics warehouses to housework and care, is overwhelmingly large, Chinese firms can design from the outset on the premise of mass production and accumulate data in real environments, and the data gathered in this way flows back into the training of artificial intelligence, creating a virtuous circle that improves products quickly.
The hand of the state is added here in the form of subsidies and policy. As central and local governments designate the humanoid robot as a core next-generation industry and pour funds into research, development, and mass production, the initial cost and risk an individual firm must bear shrink sharply, and the result is soil in which many companies can lower prices aggressively at the same time; as the diagram above shows, this structure, in which a vast home market and state support press down the unit cost of every layer from finished product to component, is the very body of the Chinese style of pursuit.
China's Blank Space: the Brain at the Very Top
Yet just as the top box of the diagram above stands empty, China too has one blank space that is hard to fill, and that is the high-end artificial-intelligence computation at the very top, which corresponds to the robot's brain. As we saw in Part 5, the center of the large AI models that train today's robots, and of the cutting-edge graphics chips that run them, still lies in the United States, and with the United States restricting exports of NVIDIA-class high-performance chips to China, China sits one step behind on the highest tier of the AI brain that must run above its hardware, however cheaply and well it makes finished products and components.
Precision and reliability remain another assignment. In the process of rapidly driving prices down, the completeness of durability and precise control is sometimes judged to fall short of the very top competing products; that said, recalling the precedent in which China was at first judged low-cost and low-quality in electric vehicles, solar power, and batteries, only to seize quality and price together in the end and come to dominate the world market, it is hard to take lightly the possibility that this blank, too, will narrow with time.
Coming Down from Five Stages
And so we have followed the long story of the humanoid robot all the way through, from its history into the present and the engineering, past the chokepoints of the stock market, and on to the competition among four countries: the United States, Japan, Korea, and China. The United States holds the brain at the very top, capital and artificial intelligence; Japan, having set down its luster, guards the chokepoint of component precision; Korea has taken a peculiar seat between parts and finished products through the vertical integration of its conglomerates; and China is chasing all of those chokepoints from below with volume and price.
It is too early to declare now who will be the victor of this competition. What is clear, however, is that the humanoid robot is no longer a rare curiosity of the laboratory but has become the vast industrial battlefield on which capital, technology, components, and markets clash at the level of nations, and the question of who seizes the most expensive chokepoint on that battlefield will be the central variable deciding where this market goes from here. To the readers who have stayed with this long story to the end, I hope this journey has helped you watch that change with a slightly clearer eye.
- Part 1 · History — from clockwork automata to ASIMO and HUBO
- Part 2 · Today's Giants — Atlas · Optimus · Figure · Unitree
- Part 3 · Engineering — bipedal walking · actuators · reducers · AI · battery
- Part 4 · The Stock Value Chain — the chokepoints where robots turn into money
- Part 5 · United States — the giant that moves the board with capital and AI
- Part 6 · Japan — the quiet power that set down its luster and holds the parts
- Part 7 · Korea — between parts and finished products, two conglomerates' bet
- Part 8 · China — chasing every chokepoint with volume and price
References · Sources
- Announcements and reporting on the price and specifications of Unitree's G1 and robot dogs, and materials on the mass production and investment of UBTech, Fourier, and AgiBot (智元).
- Materials on China's localization of precision reducers, including Leader Harmonious Drive (绿的谐波) and Shuanghuan Driveline (双环传动).
- General materials on China's battery industry such as CATL and BYD, and reporting on U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors to China.
- General materials on the industrial-promotion policy for humanoid robots by China's central and local governments.
Image credits
- Unitree G1 — Unitree Robotics, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.