By Laurie Chen
BEIJING, Oct 28 (Reuters) – Unitree on Wednesday said third-quarter revenue rose 70% from a year earlier to 665 million yuan ($99.7 million) in its first earnings result since listing, as China’s best-known humanoid maker faces its first market test amid cooling investor sentiment and a China tech market rout.
However, net profit attributable to shareholders fell 17.4%to 112.7 million yuan, below analyst’s 224 million yuan forecast, as the company more than doubled research and development expenses.
For the first nine months of the year, revenue climbed 55.7% to 1.82 billion yuan and net profit rose 270.5% to 386.7 million yuan, the Shanghai Stock Exchange filing said.
The company attributed the January-September profit surge to higher gross profit and to a large one-time share-based payment expense booked in the prior-year period.
It is one of the few profitable domestic robot firms as the sector searches for viable commercial applications of the technology.
Research and development spending jumped 249.6% in the third quarter to 127.0 million yuan, or 19.1% of revenue, as the company invested more on embodied-intelligence large models, computing capacity and its R&D team.
The filing did not say how the roughly 6 billion yuan ($900 million) raised from its initial public offering would be used.
Investors are closely watching the company’s performance as a bellwether for future listings of Chinese humanoid robot makers, whose technology has not yet proved commercial viability.
Reuters reported last month that Chinese regulators are slowing down IPOs for humanoid robot firms amid tech stock volatility, as they scrutinise whether soaring valuations and revenue tied to state-backed projects reflect real commercial demand.
(Reporting by Laurie Chen and Shi Bu in Beijing; Editing by Joe Bavier and Tomasz Janowski)
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