China humanoid robots scale production while buyers lag
China’s humanoid robot manufacturers say they are building toward thousands of deliveries, with orders coming from government entities and private businesses, but the buyer side of the market remains less settled than the factory side, according to an Associated Press report.
The AP described a sector with visible public demos, including backflips, traffic direction and coffee making, alongside more practical proposed work such as parcel sorting in postal centers. The stated demand drivers are familiar: an aging population, higher labor costs and a push to automate repetitive or hazardous work. The harder test is whether these machines can perform useful work at prices customers will accept.
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The China humanoid robots market is already producing meaningful volume by early industry standards, but much of the demand still appears concentrated in research, state backed projects and controlled commercial settings rather than broad operational rollouts.
Orders are growing, but use cases remain narrow
Shanghai based Matrix Robotics makes AI equipped humanoids. Its flagship MATRIX-3 stands nearly 5.6 feet, or 1.7 meters, tall, has hands designed for finely controlled movement and is priced at around $77,000 per unit, according to the AP. Founder and CEO Allen Zhang said the company has received roughly 1,000 orders from customers including coffee chains and hotels.
Matrix has made only a few hundred robots so far, but says it could deliver 5,000 units within this year depending on orders. That is capacity language, not a confirmed shipment figure.
Shenzhen based EngineAI is pitching full size humanoids for security guard and museum guide roles, while also showing performance capabilities such as dancing and boxing. A basic edition of its humanoid costs 180,000 yuan, about $24,600. EngineAI brand and marketing head Issac Li told the AP: "The next step will be to move into more real life scenarios."
Analysts quoted by the AP were cautious about how much of this activity has crossed into durable deployment. Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at New America, said most humanoids are still more performative than functional and fall short in messy, unpredictable environments. Chibo Tang of Gobi Partners said the use cases remain limited, adding that without demand and market scale, companies cannot really enter mass production.
China has scale, and a bubble warning
China had more than 140 humanoid robot manufacturers and more than 330 models in 2025, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology cited in the report. The Chinese government also publicly warned last year about the risk of a bubble, given the lagging state of commercialization and applications.
State linked demand is a major part of the order book. Morgan Stanley said many of the more than 2 billion yuan, about $275 million, worth of China humanoid orders in 2025 came from state owned enterprises for use in places such as power plants, data centers and entertainment.
Several market figures in the AP report show why China is being watched closely. Barclays said Chinese humanoid robots accounted for around 65 percent of the global market last year. Omdia said that of more than 13,000 humanoids shipped in 2025, AGIBOT and Unitree each shipped over 5,000, while U.S. companies such as Figure AI and Tesla each shipped a few hundred or less.
Morgan Stanley expects China’s humanoid sales to more than double this year to around 28,000 units. Omdia forecasts annual shipments of advanced robots could surpass 1 million units by the early 2030s. Those forecasts remain forecasts, and the AP report makes clear that shipment growth is not the same as proven labor substitution.
Cost and data are still the deployment bottlenecks
Price is falling, but not enough for many buyers. Morgan Stanley said locally made parts have helped make Chinese humanoids 20 percent or more cheaper than foreign models on average, and it estimates the average price could fall to about $21,000 by 2030 from $45,000 last year. Some humanoids in China are already priced below $6,000.
Even so, the Mercator Institute for China Studies said China’s humanoids remain "far too expensive for widespread deployment." Sacks put the operating problem plainly: humanoids remain expensive to produce, fragile in operation and dependent on highly structured environments. That is a serious limitation in factories that already use specialized robotic arms for repetitive single function tasks.
The data problem is just as important. Wang Xiaogang, cofounder of SenseTime and chairman of ACE Robotics, said his company is collecting human centric data from factories, retail and offices. Eric Guo, founder and CEO of Shenzhen based AI² Robotics, said humanoids need data from a wide variety of public and private scenarios with a reasonable level of difficulty to learn more than single tasks, and that scaling such data could take years.
The AP said its June 6 story was updated on June 9 to correct the first name of Matrix Robotics CEO Allen Zhang.
Source: ottumwacourier.com
