Size isn't everything in China's IPO markets. Unitree, perhaps the country's best-known humanoid robotics maker, is in the middle of an initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR Market, the exchange's board for tech startups that was launched in 2019 as China's answer to the Nasdaq, with its trading debut expected this week. Days later, the fast-fashion platform Shein will reportedly begin its own IPO in Hong Kong, with shares potentially debuting as soon as Aug. 28, according to Reuters.

Shein's offering dwarfs Unitree's: the fast-fashion giant hopes to raise as much as $3 billion, roughly three times what the robot maker is targeting. Yet it is Unitree's IPO that is drawing most of the attention. Retail investors are scrambling to buy in, and secondary markets are pricing in a massive jump in valuation once the startup debuts.

Unitree is smaller and younger than Shein, which has a decade of global expansion behind it. But in the eyes of investors, the robotics company is the more exciting bet, as appetites shift toward AI and hardware and away from e-commerce and internet platforms. Taken together, the two offerings are a real-time snapshot of where capital is moving in China's tech sector — and where it is moving from.

A robotics boom

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

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

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

More than 70% of Unitree's humanoid robots go to academic and research institutions, though some Chinese state-owned enterprises and major manufacturers are beginning to experiment with robots from Unitree and other robotics startups — a customer mix that underscores how early large-scale commercial adoption of humanoids still is.

The contrast with rivals is stark. Fellow robotics company UBTech, already listed in Hong Kong, posted a net loss of $104 million last year, while U.S. labs such as 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. That strength is policy-backed as well as market-driven: China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued guidelines in 2023 setting targets for building out the country's humanoid-robot industry, including mass production by 2027. Smart Analytics Global, a Californian research firm, calculated that Chinese firms were responsible for 97% of all humanoid robot shipments in the first half of the year. That same report notes that Unitree isn't even the market leader anymore; that title goes to Agibot, a Shanghai-based rival that is currently preparing for a Hong Kong listing later this year.

That dominance is spurring concern in Washington. In late July, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission 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 received in 2022.

According to its prospectus, Shein generated $41.2 billion in revenue last year, up from $38.8 billion in 2024, and 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 — in the U.S., shipments valued at up to $800 qualified for the exemption. The U.S. eliminated these exemptions last year, and Europe followed suit in July, imposing a 3-euro duty on small e-commerce parcels.

"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 a listing 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 — and a busy one, as the city has attracted a growing share of Chinese tech listings amid intensifying scrutiny of Chinese companies in Western markets.

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. Unitree's own debut this week will be an early test of whether that enthusiasm extends beyond chips to robots.

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.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.