Unitree Technology went public on August 19, with its opening price surging more than 600% and shares briefly hitting 1,100 yuan. While robots have yet to enter households on a large scale, the capital markets have already started racing ahead of the curve. But why?

If you look only at current revenue and profits, it's hard to explain such a high valuation. What the market is truly paying for is a much bigger narrative: the robot of the future may not be a machine sold to you, but rather a "labor force" sold to you. This is precisely where humanoid robots hold their most imaginative potential.

In recent years, the most viral robot videos often feature running, dancing, backflips, and boxing. Netizens watch for the spectacle, but companies are crunching the numbers. A factory won't spend hundreds of thousands of yuan on a robot just because it can do a backflip. What business owners really care about is: How many hours can it work in a day? Can it carry goods, tighten screws, or perform inspections? How long does it take to repair when it breaks down? How many years until it pays for itself?

At the end of the day, the biggest hurdle for robots is no longer "looking like a human," but "working like one." Once that threshold is crossed, the business model transforms entirely. Previously, selling robots was essentially selling equipment—earning profit per unit sold. In the future, if robots can continuously learn and adapt to different roles, what gets sold could be a batch-replicable "machine labor force." At that point, companies like Unitree wouldn't just be competing for the robot market, but for the far larger labor market behind manufacturing, logistics, commercial services, and even home services.

This is also why capital dares to place its bets early. And China happens to hold a significant advantage—an abundance of application scenarios. Factories, warehouses, ports, shopping malls... the vast manufacturing and service sectors provide a natural "training ground" for robots. The more work robots do, the more data they accumulate; the more data they have, the smarter they become; the smarter they become, the more jobs they can take on. This is what could form a true moat.

Of course, a 600% surge on the first day of listing by no means signals that Unitree has already won. Quite the opposite—the faster the stock price runs, the more performance has to catch up. Capital can pay in advance for the robot world a decade from now, but companies must ultimately deliver on the story through orders, profits, and real-world applications.

So, when evaluating robot companies going forward, it's better to skip the backflips and instead ask three key questions: How much work can it do? How much money can it save? How quickly will it break even? When these three calculations truly add up, humanoid robots will cease to be just headline material in tech news and will become ordinary workers on the assembly line.

Unitree's listing is merely capital pressing the accelerator first. What truly determines the outcome of this race is when robots start earning money for people.