Unitree (SSE: 688836) founder Wang Xingxing said on Wednesday that 2027 will likely prove a turning point for the robotics industry, speaking one week after the company's first earnings report as a listed firm showed net profit falling 17.4%.

Will 2027 be the year of robotics?

Speaking at the internet entrepreneurs' forum of the 2026 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China's annual internet-industry gathering, Wang, founder of the Chinese humanoid robot maker, said there was "a high probability" that next year would mark the tipping point for the entire embodied-intelligence field and for robot models.

He also argued that a person's biggest value has now become grading AI models and setting the goals they are told to reach.

Wang stated that while factory robots already achieve very high success rates on single-step tasks, they fall short on precision work such as fine assembly, because their sense of the physical world through touch is still too thin. Model inputs and outputs, he said, remain slightly out of step with reality.

Unitree's response, he indicated, will be to let its physical AI models evolve on their own, gathering their own data and running their own training cycles.

Profit slides despite surging revenue

Despite Wang's optimism about the robotics industry, Unitree booked third-quarter revenue of 665 million yuan (about $99.7 million), up roughly 70% from a year earlier. Its net profit, however, fell 17.4% to 112.7 million yuan, far below the 224 million yuan analysts had estimated.

Spending did the damage. Research and development costs climbed 249.6% to 127 million yuan, around 19% of revenue, as the company poured money into embodied-AI models and computing power.

Over the first nine months, revenue reached 1.82 billion yuan, up 55.7%, and headline net profit rose 270.5% to 386.7 million yuan. Inventory swelled to 1.02 billion yuan by the end of September, up from 367 million yuan at the close of 2025.

How is Unitree's stock performing?

Unitree went public in August at 150.80 yuan per share. On its first trading day, the stock jumped to 1,100 yuan, then dropped to 404.03 yuan by mid-October. After its latest earnings report, it fell another 4.8% to close at 662.39 yuan.

The company's price-to-earnings ratio once hit 465.22, far above the industry average of about 38.5.

Some of China's biggest companies back Unitree, including Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, HSG and Citic Securities. Still, its rival AgiBot shipped more humanoid robots than Unitree in the first half of the year.

Wang has repeatedly offered timelines for a major breakthrough. In mid-October, he said OpenAI's GPT-6 could spark a robotics leap "within one or two years." A few days later, he said robots with AI could have their "ChatGPT moment" as early as 2027.

The industry is still young, though. More than 18,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025, mostly from Chinese makers, but over 85% were used for shows, education, data collection, or guided tours rather than factory work. That split leaves factory deployment, particularly on complex tasks such as fine assembly, as an important measure of whether the industry's capabilities are translating into broader industrial use.

Unitree itself has warned that if big companies are slow to adopt humanoid robots, its valuation could be at real risk.