A top Chinese humanoid robot maker says its latest machines are only half as efficient as human workers.
UBTech chief brand officer Michael Tam said the firm’s Walker S2 robots were 30 to 50 per cent as productive as humans, and were only suitable for certain jobs, such as stacking boxes and quality control.
Chinese policymakers are backing humanoid robots and pushing AI-driven factory deployments, hoping industry is the first proper use case. The International Federation of Robotics says China accounted for more than half of global industrial robot installations in 2024, mostly traditional kit-like mechanical arms.
Humanoid boosters say legs and mobility let robots shift between production lines, giving them more flexibility than bolted-down arms and conveyors. Elon Musk has been punting Tesla’s Optimus project and talking up fully automated factories.
Analysts have had mixed reactions to UBTech promo clips showing robots hauling boxes and doing trickier work like replacing their own batteries. They say humanoids are harder than static automation, requiring independent power, more joints, and better decision-making.
UBTech chief brand officer Michael Tam said the firm is developing a multifunctional hand this year because current Walker models require a human to swap appendages for different tasks. At a UBTech showroom last year, journalists were invited to shake hands with a non-industrial robot, and it failed to respond at several points without repeated prompting.
UBTech says it aims to achieve Walker performance at 80 per cent of human performance by 2027, after delivering 500 humanoid factory robots last year. It is aiming to produce 10,000 by the end of this year.
The outfit has signed an agreement with Airbus to supply the Walker S2, after a partnership with US chipmaker Texas Instruments last year. Airbus said its work with UBTech was at “a very early concept testing phase” and that it was “discussing potential future collaborations with various innovative companies in the industry”.
Interact Analysis researcher Marco Wang said: “Many deployment cases that you see are just at [a proof of concept] stage or demo stage, and there are a lot of challenges before we can really see any commercial operation.”
He added that UBTech’s targets were “very ambitious”, noting most humanoid deployments in China sit in government-sponsored research centres. “That doesn’t really mean anything about commercial operations,” he said.
Daiwa Capital Markets analyst Kelvin Lau said UBTech’s goals were feasible and humanoids could help factories not built for automation. “It should be gradually improving,” he said, adding that 80 per cent efficiency might be enough because robots do not take breaks.
UBTech narrowed losses in the first six months of 2025 to Rmb440m (€53.8m) from Rmb540m (€66.0m) a year earlier, while revenue rose 28 per cent to Rmb621m (€75.9m).
R&D spend in 2024 was 37 per cent of revenue, which mostly came from consumer and education robots. Daiwa lists Shenzhen-based Dobot Robotics and Tesla as UBTech’s biggest listed competitors, with Unitree Robotics, X-Humanoid and AgiBot also in the mix.
Tam said, “The more human robots that could be deployed into the real world, the more real data could be collected. And then, like a circle, it will help human robots grow.”
