Shanghai Securities: Frequent catalysts for robot bodies, continue to pay attention to the humanoid robot sector

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, Shanghai Securities has released a research report stating that recently, both domestic and international industries have seen intensive catalysts, with a noticeable increase in entrants. Domestic companies such as Huawei, ByteDance, BYD, Xiaomi, GAC, and Ant Group are all ramping up their efforts in embodied intelligence, while overseas companies like Tesla, 1X, and Figure AI are accelerating their commercialization and mass production pace. The emergence of DeepSeek AI is driving the development of general-purpose robotic large models, aiding humanoid robots in achieving embodied intelligence. The humanoid robot industry chain has entered a stage of "a hundred flowers blooming and a hundred schools of thought contending," with humanoid robots now entering industrial scenarios, becoming a highly certain application trend both domestically and internationally. The commercialization of humanoid robots is promising, and it is recommended to pay attention to domestic component manufacturers that will benefit. Future attention should be given to catalytic events related to the humanoid robot industry chain, such as the release of results from domestic and international humanoid robot manufacturers.

Recommendations for the T chain include: ① Assemblies: Sanhua Intelligent Control (002050.SZ), Topstar Group; ② Reducers: Double Ring Transmission, Zhongdali De, etc.; ③ Motors: Mingzhi Electric, etc.;

For the Seres robot industry chain, recommended companies include: Yongmaotai (605208.SH), Longsheng Technology, etc.;

For the Huawei robot industry chain, recommended companies include: TOPSTAR (300607.SZ), Zhaowei Electromechanical, Zhongjian Technology, Hechuan Technology, Aifute, etc.

The main viewpoints of Shanghai Securities are as follows:

(1) According to the Robot Lecture Hall WeChat official account, TOPSTAR has entered the humanoid robot market. Recently, TOPSTAR officially launched its first wheeled humanoid robot—"Xiao Tuo," which features a four-steward wheel design and supports 360-degree omnidirectional movement. Based on the company's accumulation in the high-end servo field and the pre-trained embodied model COT-VLA built in collaboration with Zhipu, it can achieve autonomous reasoning and decision-making for complex tasks.

(2) According to the Robot Lecture Hall WeChat official account, Zhiyuan Robotics has debuted the "Webster Flip."

The Lingxi X2 humanoid robot developed by Zhiyuan Robotics successfully completed the challenging "Webster Flip," becoming the world's first humanoid robot to achieve this move. The "Webster Flip" originates from competitive gymnastics, requiring athletes to perform continuous rotations and flips in the air, demanding high core strength, spatial awareness, and body coordination. It is exciting that the domestic robot Lingxi X2, with its self-developed motion control algorithm and high-precision sensor system, accurately replicated the entire set of movements, demonstrating exceptional motion control and dynamic balance capabilities. The Lingxi X2 stands about 1.3 meters tall, has 28 degrees of freedom, and possesses comprehensive movement, interaction, and operational capabilities. It can walk and run like a human, ride a bicycle, dance, and use a balance bike. Now, it has also learned high-difficulty gymnastics movements.

(3) According to the Robot Lecture Hall WeChat official account, Modulus Technology has recently successfully completed a tens of millions Pre-A round of financing. This round of financing was exclusively invested by Qingcheng Capital, and the funds will mainly be used for Modulus Technology to expand production lines, enhance delivery capabilities; deepen penetration in scenarios such as robotics, smart vehicles, new energy, consumer electronics, and healthcare; and continue to tackle the research and development of materials and algorithms for high-precision, multi-modal sensing (4) According to the Robot Lecture Hall WeChat official account, Figure has completed a Series C financing with a valuation of $39 billion, raising over $1 billion. Figure announced on Tuesday that it has completed its Series C financing, with new capital exceeding $1 billion and a valuation reaching $39 billion. This round of financing was led by Parkway Venture Capital, with other participants including Nvidia, Brookfield Asset Management, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, AlignVentures, Tamarack Global, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce, T-Mobile Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures. Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure, stated in a press release: "This milestone is crucial for unlocking the next phase of growth for humanoid robots, expanding our AI platform Helix, and scaling BotQ manufacturing. The support from new partners and the continued support from existing investors reflect Figure's market leadership and our shared belief that this technology will become a natural part of daily life in the future."

(5) According to the Robot Lecture Hall WeChat official account, Musk's KPI of 1 million units once again catalyzes the mass production rhythm of humanoid robots. Documents submitted by Tesla to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 15 show that CEO Musk purchased over 2.5 million shares of Tesla stock on September 12, with a total value of approximately $1 billion. Previously, the Tesla board proposed a new compensation plan for Musk, with a potential value close to $1 trillion. Under the agreement, the Tesla board granted Musk up to 423.7 million restricted stock units, accounting for about 12% of the company's adjusted total equity, which will be distributed in 12 batches. One of the operational goals to unlock the trillion-dollar compensation is to require cumulative deliveries of 1 million humanoid robots.

(6) According to the Robot Lecture Hall WeChat official account, Luxshare Technology collaborates with Kepler Robotics. On September 17, news broke that Chinese enameled wire manufacturer Luxshare Technology announced it has partnered with two collaborators to develop AI-embedded household service robots, which will be sold in Europe and the United States. Luxshare's robotics division, Ningbo Junwu Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., signed a cooperation agreement with Kepler Robotics and a leading cross-border e-commerce company, with the goal of selling no less than 1 million robots within the next three years. Luxshare will establish a joint venture company controlled by Junwu Intelligent to manage its own brand of embedded AI home robots.

(7) According to the Robot Lecture Hall WeChat official account, Figure collaborates with Brookfield to develop a humanoid robot dataset. This collaboration will cover Brookfield's extensive real estate portfolio, including over 100,000 residential units, 500 million square feet of commercial office space, and 160 million square feet of logistics facilities, to collect human video data. This data will be used to train Figure's proprietary vision-language-action model Helix, which powers the company's autonomous humanoid robots Figure has begun data collection work in the Brookfield environment and plans to expand the project in the coming months. As part of the agreement, Brookfield has participated in Figure's Series C financing. Both parties will also explore broader infrastructure cooperation, including support for GPU data centers and the possibility of deploying humanoid robots within Brookfield's global business scope.

Risk Warning

The development progress of humanoid robots is less than expected; the commercialization of humanoid robots is less than expected; competition among potential suppliers of humanoid robots is intensifying