by XU Meihui
AgiBot, one of China's leading humanoid robot makers, has delivered its 5,000th humanoid robot, marking one of the fastest production ramps in the emerging embodied-robotics market and underscoring China's growing scale advantage.
Public filings indicate that players such as Unitree and UBTech remain at annual volumes in the low hundreds.
Co-founder, president and CTO PENG Zhihui said the company moved from small pilot runs to full-scale manufacturing this year, with real-world deployments now driving product refinement. "What really matters is consistent performance in real environments," he told Jiemian News.
Peng said AgiBot has strengthened its software stack, hardware architecture and component supply chain, adding that the 5,000-unit milestone lays the foundation for 10,000 units in 2026 and 100,000 units over time.
Senior vice president WANG Chuang said the hardest phase was not scaling from 1,000 to 5,000 units, but setting consistent standards between the first 200 and 1,000. Early batches lacked clear benchmarks for gait accuracy, noise levels and lifespan, which had to be defined through real-world testing. Once those standards were in place, manufacturing and quality teams took over with formal yield and process controls.
Costs have also dropped sharply, with mainstream models now priced slightly above 500,000 yuan (about US$70,000), roughly half of early-unit levels.
China's humanoid makers are scaling quickly even as global output remains limited. In the United States, Figure AI has begun automated manufacturing, while Tesla's Optimus program is progressing more slowly than planned. Nomura expects China's combined humanoid and quadruped production to surpass Tesla's in 2026, driven by faster ramp-up among domestic firms.
Industry group GGII forecasts that leading Chinese producers — including AgiBot, UBTech, Unitree and Fourier Intelligence — could reach 50,000 to 100,000 units of annual capacity next year, positioning China as one of the world's largest production hubs for general-purpose robots.
Market forecasts point to rapid expansion. IDC expects the global robotics market to exceed 400 billion dollars by 2029, with China accounting for nearly half. Morgan Stanley, in its latest long-term forecast, projects that humanoid deployments could reach one for every ten people by 2050.
For AgiBot, surpassing 5,000 units marks a shift from experimental runs to industrial-scale production. The next challenge is whether falling costs and broader real-world applications can support sustained commercial adoption as global competition intensifies.
