The Unitree Perp Is Marking 8% Below Shanghai's Last Print

Three Sessions, Minus 20%

Unitree did not sell off on news. It sold off on arithmetic.

The stock opened at 1,100 yuan on August 19, 629% above the 150.80 yuan IPO price, then gave back a chunk of it intraday to close at 845 yuan, up 460%. Thursday it gapped down and closed at 687 yuan, off 18.7%. Friday it shed another 2.12% to 672.41 yuan.

Run it from each anchor: down 20.4% from the first close, down 38.9% from the opening print, more than 170 billion yuan of market value erased in two sessions.

The setup was visible before the bell rang. Underwriters priced the deal at 150.80 yuan for roughly $9 billion and raised about $904 million; the retail tranche was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, a STAR Market record. Two very different prices, set by two very different books. The 9:30 auction on Wednesday belonged to the second one. Everything since has been the first one reasserting itself.

The Perp Is Pricing Monday, Not Friday

Here is the part that makes this move interesting rather than just another post-IPO fade.

At about 6.72 yuan to the dollar, Friday's 672.41 yuan close is roughly $100.06 a share. The para:UNITREE perp is at $91.91 — call it 617 yuan implied, an 8% discount to the last cash print. Twenty-four hours ago that same perp was near $98.90, essentially at parity with Shanghai. The entire 7.07% slide happened over a weekend, with the A-share market shut and no reference tape to follow.

That is what a perp is actually for. From Friday's bell to Monday's open, Hyperliquid was the only continuously quoted venue where Unitree risk could change hands, and $15.3 million turned over doing it. A discount that size is not noise on a tracker; it is a directional statement about where the stock reopens.

The obvious objection is that arbitrage should crush a basis this wide. It cannot, not here. A freshly listed STAR Market name is not readily borrowable offshore, and Stock Connect access to STAR stocks is gated on institutional professional-investor status and index eligibility. There is no clean trade against 617 yuan on Hyperliquid versus 672.41 in Shanghai. Basis on this instrument stays wide because almost nobody is positioned to close it.

Worth noting for the record: HIPERWIRE marked this perp at $101.80 on August 18, the day before listing. Friday's cash close translates to $100.06. The offshore pre-IPO book was within 2% of where three sessions of real Chinese price discovery actually landed. The 1,100 yuan debut auction was the outlier — not the perp.

Growth Without Profit

The fundamental case for the unwind is not subtle, and it was in the prospectus.

2025 was the showcase year: 1.7 billion yuan of revenue, up 332%, with 591 million yuan of adjusted net profit. That made Unitree the only humanoid maker at scale that was actually earning money — the core of the bull case.

2026 broke the pattern. Q1 revenue rose 68.49% to 423 million yuan while adjusted net profit fell 52.55% to 40.25 million. First-half guidance repeats it: revenue up 35.6% to 45.4%, profit excluding one-offs down 6.4% to 22%. R&D and selling expense is consuming the top line, and management is not signalling restraint — 48% of the 5.92 billion yuan raised is earmarked for AI model development.

Then there is the mix. Over 70% of revenue comes from research and education buyers: universities, labs, demo budgets. Industrial deployment is around 9%. At 672 yuan the stock carries an embodied-AI platform multiple. The revenue line still reads like a scientific instruments vendor with a viral marketing department.

The US channel is also narrowing. DoD added Unitree to the Section 1260H Chinese military companies list in June, and the FCC put foreign-produced advanced robots on its Covered List on July 28, blocking new models from equipment authorization. The current lineup was certified before the cutoff and can still be sold. Every model after it is a problem.

What Monday Opens Into

Under SSE STAR Market rules, a new listing has no daily price limit for its first five trading days; a 20% band applies from day six. Unitree has burned three — August 19, 20 and 21. Monday and Tuesday are sessions four and five, still uncapped in both directions. The band does not switch on until August 26.

So the perp is discounting into two more sessions where a 672-yuan stock can print 500 or 850 with nothing to stop it, on an instrument that offers up to 10x leverage. Against that backdrop an 8% discount is a fairly conservative bet, not an aggressive one.

One last thing worth flagging: the contract annotation still describes para:UNITREE as tracking a share value ahead of its public listing. That framing expired on August 19. This is no longer a pre-IPO estimate with a wide error bar around an unknown clearing price — it is a levered directional position against a live, quoted, and extremely volatile A-share. Same ticker, different instrument.