After taking a job, UBTECH's market value soared by 45 billion?

Shocking! The valuation reached 80 billion in one day

Once upon a time, when the rhetoric of the first year of humanoid robots was everywhere, I believe most people responded with a cautious attitude, calmly saying: wait a little longer.

Unexpectedly, only three months after the beginning of 2024, we have seen achievements, applications, bets from giants, and financing exceeding 100 million yuan... wave after wave of good news, almost knocking me out...

And just today, another bombshell dropped in the mobile phone industry!

01 Sudden move! Valuation soars

On December 29 last year, UBTECH (HK9880) rang the bell at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and officially entered the capital market as the "first humanoid stock". However, on the first day of its debut, the stock price once fell below the offering price of HK$90 per share, reaching a low of HK$88.25 per share, and finally closed at HK$90.85 per share, basically flat.

After that, although UBTECH's stock price fluctuated, and even fell below HK$69.80 per share on January 3, the closing stock price did not fluctuate much.

On March 6, UBTECH's share price surged 88.13% and closed at a jaw-dropping HK$202.800 per share (the highest price). Its total market value soared to HK$84.799 billion, sweeping away the embarrassment of its IPO at a low price.

However, it is worth noting that as of closing, UBTECH only traded 1.8144 million shares with a turnover of 283 million.

Judging from the capital inflow, there is no large inflow or outflow, and the funds are mainly concentrated in the net mid-term orders of retail investors.

In addition to UBTECH, the robot concept also saw a surge, with an increase of 2.32%. 23 companies hit their daily limit, with Tengya Precision, Zhuchengcheng Technology, Jiangnan Yifan, Saimo Intelligence, and Bioo Intelligence ranking in the top five with the highest increase of 20.03%.

Tianqi Shares, which has a close relationship with UBTECH, also achieved its first daily limit at 1:00 p.m.

Tianqi shares is not only an important customer of UBTECH, with which it has important strategic cooperation, but also a joint venture to establish "Wuxi UBTECH Robotics Technology Co., Ltd.", in which it holds 22% and 78% of the shares respectively.

02 Why is there such a sudden surge?

Inclusion in Hong Kong Stock Connect

On March 5, UBTECH was officially included in the Hong Kong Stock Connect target list, which means that mainland investors can directly purchase UBTECH shares without having to open a special Hong Kong stock account. This undoubtedly attracted more investors' attention to UBTECH and also received incremental inflows from passive funds.

The concept of humanoid continues to ferment

The birth of ChatGPT, a groundbreaking product, has set off an AI craze around the world. The success of ChatGPT proves that AI already has powerful cognitive capabilities, and this capability is evolving at a speed that people could never imagine in the past, becoming the core driving force for pushing artificial intelligence from the virtual world to reality and realizing embodied intelligence.

Today's humanoid robot market is bustling with big names, whether Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Nvidia, all betting on humanoid robots. The prosperous scene both at home and abroad is largely due to "that man" - Musk.

According to Musk's vision, Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus will create a precedent in the history of robots and become "the foundation of future practical humanoid robots". After mass production, the unit price will be less than US$20,000. He also said that the demand for humanoid robots will far exceed that of electric vehicles, reaching as many as 10 billion units.

Recently, Musk has frequently updated Optimus's new developments. Today, Optimus can already dance, do yoga, and fold clothes. Even its much-criticized walking function has become much smoother and faster.

What makes the market even more agitated is the frequent large-scale financings since the beginning of the year. 1X received $100 million in financing with a 13-page PPT; Figure AI received a huge amount of financing of $6.75 billion, and its shareholders include an "all-star" lineup of Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon founders, Nvidia and Intel; among domestic players, Xingdong Jiyuan raised 100 million, and Yushu Technology raised nearly 1 billion...

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia are also actively developing and deploying their computing power and data resources, which will undoubtedly inject strong impetus into the future of humanoid robots.

Recently, NVIDIA announced the establishment of the GEAR laboratory, officially entering the field of embodied intelligence research, and will also hold the GTC 2024 conference on March 18. Core companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta will also participate in the conference. It is believed that it will trigger a new round of heated discussions at that time.

As for UBTECH itself, its founder Zhou Jian gave a speech at the Guangdong Province High-Quality Development Conference, the company went to the factory for practical training, its educational robot UGOT won the highest German iF Award, and its humanoid robot Walker X went to work at the news center of the two sessions... UBTECH has attracted a lot of attention with its impressive transcript.

Policy dividends continue to be released

Since last year, the national and local governments have successively introduced a number of policies to support the development of humanoid robots.

In October last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guiding Opinions on the Innovation and Development of Humanoid Robots", proposing that by 2025, the humanoid robot innovation system will be initially established, the complete machine products will reach the international advanced level, and mass production will be achieved.

In January this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and seven other departments issued the "Implementation Opinions on Promoting the Innovation and Development of Future Industries", which directly listed humanoid robots as a breakthrough focus.

At the two sessions, humanoid robots have become a hot topic. How to promote the establishment of a humanoid robot ecosystem and accelerate its application is the focus of the conference. A representative mentioned: "Artificial intelligence is a very broad field. To implement it in production, humanoid robots must be vigorously developed."

The introduction of a series of policies highlights the country's emphasis on the development of the humanoid robot industry. As more policies are implemented in the future, they will surely provide greater support for the industrialization process.

03 The technological winter is hard to overcome

However, all the investment boom is based on the premise that humanoid robots can be truly industrialized. If the technology lags behind and the commercialization process is slow, even the burning enthusiasm of capital will inevitably cool down quickly.

Boston Dynamics is a painful lesson.

This world-renowned humanoid robot company with top-level technology has been "sold" three times due to its difficulty in making a profit. It was first acquired by Google from the US military in 2013, then bought by SoftBank in 2017, and sold to Hyundai Motor in 2022. Many of these moves were due to technology waste and cash flow depletion.

The humanoid robot is expensive to manufacture, but it cannot bring direct commercial returns in the short term. This is the biggest dilemma facing the entire industry. Even UBTECH, which is currently in the limelight, also suffered a "bleeding listing".

According to the prospectus, UBTECH's operating income from fiscal year 2020 to the first six months of 2023 was approximately RMB 740 million, RMB 817 million, RMB 1.008 billion, RMB 284 million, and RMB 261 million, respectively. The overall revenue increased by 36% from 2020 to 2022, while the revenue in the first six months of 2023 decreased by 7% year-on-year.

However, in just three and a half years, UBTECH's accumulated losses have exceeded 3 billion yuan, and it is deeply mired in the quagmire of "increasing profits but not revenues."

Technological research and development is also a stumbling block to the development of humanoid robots.

Humanoid robots not only need to simulate human appearance, but more importantly, they need to be endowed with highly intelligent cognition, decision-making and action capabilities. This means that many cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, sensors , machine vision , and speech recognition need to be highly integrated to create a system that is close to general artificial intelligence.

However, the reality lags far behind the ideal.

Recently, the Figure AI team used a large model to teach its humanoid robot Figure 01 how to use a coffee machine. Although Figure 01 can operate the coffee machine independently after training, it lacks the understanding of the operation sequence and detailed movements. The robot's learning ability is still too single and is far from the level of comprehensive cognition of the human brain.

04 The industrial chain is accelerating its formation

The craze for humanoid robots is largely due to the accelerated formation of the industrial chain. The core links such as "brain", "cerebellum" and "limbs" are gradually being put in place, adding bricks and tiles to the era of "mass production".

Leading companies have become the dominant force in accelerating R&D and production line layout.

Taking UBTECH Robotics as an example, its industrial-grade humanoid robot Walker S has entered the NIO factory, participating in assembly and quality inspection operations in the automobile assembly workshop. It can be seen that it is only a matter of time before the production line is put into operation.