Humanoid robot stores are opening in China’s most expensive shopping streets. Unitree and AgiBot now sell walking machines next to the handbags on Shanghai’s Nanjing West Road, and the crowds are real. The sales are not: one flagship store drew about 18,000 visitors in two months and took in roughly 615,000 yuan, barely enough for a handful of robots.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Unitree opened Asia's first embodied-intelligence store in a Shanghai department store on Nanjing West Road; AgiBot opened a robot-run shop in Minhang two weeks later. |
| 2A humanoid at these stores runs from about 9,000 yuan (~ā¬1,100) for a robot dog to roughly 85,000 yuan (~ā¬10,200) for the G1 humanoid. |
| 3Footfall is not sales: a Wuhan store reportedly pulled ~18,000 visitors and ~615,000 yuan in two months, and research and education still made up 73.6% of Unitree's robot revenue in 2025. |
| 4The stores are a bet on the next stage, not this quarter's till: Unitree is heading for a 4.2 billion yuan (~$618M) Shanghai IPO at a ~42 billion yuan valuation. |
From lab demo to shopping-mall storefront
For two years, humanoid robots lived on conference stages and in viral clips: a backflip here, a kung-fu routine there. That phase is ending. On 1 June, Unitree opened what it calls Asia’s first embodied-intelligence experience store inside the Jiuguang department store on Shanghai’s Nanjing West Road, a 100-square-metre space where shoppers can touch a G1 humanoid, a smaller R1 and a Go2 robot dog, according to Global Times. Prices are on the shelf: roughly 9,000 yuan for the Go2, about 39,900 yuan for the R1 and around 85,000 yuan for the G1.
Rival AgiBot, also known as Zhiyuan, went a step further on 13 June with a shop in Shanghai’s Minhang district that it says is run by robots end to end: machines greet customers, restock the back room, recharge themselves and even run their own fault checks. The 36Kr account of the two openings reads the moment plainly: embodied intelligence is entering its commercial cycle, and the storefront is where that cycle now begins.
Are shoppers actually buying humanoid robot stores’ machines?
Here the picture gets honest. A 7S humanoid robot store in Wuhan’s Optics Valley reportedly drew about 18,000 visitors in roughly two months and rang up around 615,000 yuan in sales. That works out to about 34 yuan of revenue per visitor. Even if every yuan came from the cheapest Go2 dog at 9,000 yuan, the store sold fewer than 70 machines to those 18,000 people, a conversion rate under half a percent.
The company accounts tell the same story from the top down. Unitree’s revenue jumped to 1.71 billion yuan in 2025, up from 392 million a year earlier, but research institutions and universities, not households, still drove 73.6% of its humanoid-robot revenue over the first three quarters of the year, down only slightly from 86.3% in 2024, as Rest of World reported from the IPO filing. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoids in 2025, the most of any maker worldwide. Most went to labs, pilots and exhibition halls. The shopping-mall shopper is still window-browsing.
Why open stores that barely sell
Because the store is not really about this quarter’s till. A physical shop does three things a viral video cannot: it collects real human interaction data, it turns a lab curiosity into a consumer brand, and it feeds an investment story at exactly the right moment. Unitree has won approval for a 4.2 billion yuan raise on Shanghai’s STAR Market, valuing the firm near 42 billion yuan and making it the first pure humanoid maker on China’s domestic A-share market. A crowded flagship store is a powerful thing to point investors toward.
The money agrees. Chinese robotics firms pulled in about 68.1 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with 50 separate deals closing in March, Global Times reported. It is the same capital wave lifting the rest of the sector, from the billions flowing into AI hardware and chip supply to the race to make AI agents cheap enough to run everywhere. Put a robot behind glass on a luxury street and the abstraction becomes a thing you can film on your phone.
The gap between the crowd and the couch
The bear case is simple: interest is not demand. An 85,000-yuan machine that walks and waves is a spectacle, not yet an appliance, and the tasks it reliably does at home remain thin. Industry analyst Liu Dingding put small-scale household adoption three to five years out, with mass penetration across Chinese homes closer to five to ten. The stores are running well ahead of the product’s usefulness, and a shop that entertains 18,000 people while selling almost nothing is a marketing cost dressed as a retail channel.
For European readers watching the AI trade, that gap is the signal worth holding onto. China’s push into embodied AI is the same story as its race in large language models: fast, cheap, and aimed at scale before profit. Unitree’s IPO will hand public investors a clean bet on humanoids, and index funds tracking the STAR Market are already exposed. The showroom crowds are proof the machines are ready to be looked at. Whether anyone takes one home is the number the next earnings season will have to answer.
