A leading Chinese humanoid robot maker has said its latest machines are at most half as efficient as human workers, underlining the challenges in deploying them to solve labour shortages and increase productivity.
Michael Tam, chief brand officer at Shenzhen-based UBTech, which has partnerships with carmaker BYD and Apple contractor Foxconn, said its Walker S2 robots were 30 to 50 per cent as productive as humans and only in certain tasks, such as stacking boxes and quality control.
Yet manufacturers are still racing to order them to avoid losing out to competitors, Tam told the Financial Times. “You can imagine ... if Tesla has the advantage of deploying their own human robots into the manufacturing line, that means maybe BYD, they are staying behind.”
Policymakers in China have thrown their weight behind the humanoid robot industry and encouraged deployment of AI-driven technology in factories, hoping industrial settings will prove to be a compelling use case.
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The country accounted for more than half of global installations of industrial robots in 2024, largely consisting of traditional machines such as mechanical arms, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
Proponents of humanoid robots argue that their ability to move between production lines makes them deployable in a wider range of scenarios than traditional machines. Elon Musk has touted Tesla’s efforts to build its Optimus robot and spoken enthusiastically about fully automated factories.
Analysts have given mixed reactions to UBTech’s promotional videos, which show its robots carrying boxes between production lines and performing more difficult tasks such as replacing their own batteries.
They argue that humanoid robots present a more complex set of challenges than static arms or conveyor belts, including requiring independent power supplies, having a greater number of complex movable joints and potentially engaging in tasks that require more advanced decision making.
For UBTech, one problem the company hoped to solve this year was developing a multifunctional hand, Tam said, as current Walker models require a human to switch the robot’s appendage for different tasks.
At a UBTech showroom last year, journalists were invited to shake hands with a non-industrial-use robot. It failed to respond at several points without repeated prompting from several attendants.
UBTech said it hoped to boost its Walker robot’s performance to 80 per cent of human performance by 2027. The company said it met a target to deliver 500 humanoid factory robots last year and that it aimed to produce 10,000 by the end of this year.
This week, it said it had signed an agreement with European aircraft manufacturer Airbus to supply the Walker S2. That followed a partnership with US semiconductor producer Texas Instruments, signed last year, UBTech said.
Airbus said its collaboration with UBTech was at “a very early concept testing phase” and that the aircraft maker was “discussing potential future collaborations with various innovative companies in the industry”.
“Many deployment cases that you see, they are just at [a proof of concept] stage or demo stage and there are a lot of challenges before we really can see any commercial operation,” said Marco Wang, a Shanghai-based researcher at Interact Analysis.
He added that UBTech’s targets were “very ambitious”, noting that most humanoid robot deployments in China were in government-sponsored research centres. “That doesn’t really mean anything about commercial operations,” he said.
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But Kelvin Lau, an analyst at Daiwa Capital Markets, said UBTech’s goals were feasible and that humanoid robots could be useful for factories not initially designed for automation.
“It should be gradually improving,” he said, noting that 80 per cent of human efficiency might suffice for factories, given robots do not need to take breaks or holidays.
UBTech narrowed its losses in the first six months of 2025 to 440 million renminbi (€53.25 million) from R540 million the previous year. Revenues rose 28 per cent to R621 million.
Research and development spending in 2024 was equivalent to 37 per cent of revenue, which mainly came from consumer and educational robots.
Its biggest listed competitors include Shenzhen-based Dobot Robotics and Tesla, according to a Daiwa report. Other Chinese producers include Hangzhou’s Unitree Robotics, X-Humanoid and AgiBot.
Tam said subsequent generations of the Walker robot would benefit from data collected in factories where it is currently deployed.
“The more human robots that could be deployed into the real world, the more real data could be collected,” he said. “And then, like a circle, it ... [will] help human robots grow.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
