Robots Take Over Mall Ground Floors: 38 Stores Open in China, Unitree's Flagship Turns Profitable
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-15
Robots are replacing cosmetics and EVs on Chinese shopping mall ground floors. Unitree opened its first direct-run store in Beijing's Wangfujing, while Zhiyuan, Qiyuan and Vita Dynamics expanded across 7 cities; at least 38 robot stores opened in H1 2026.
- Unitree sold 5,215 humanoid and 23,037 quadruped robots in 2025; Vita Dynamics' robot dog hit 6,540 pre-orders (100M yuan); Zhiyuan shipped over 5,100 units.
- Families prefer robot dogs (many under 40k yuan), while humanoids mostly serve as corporate greeters.
- The piece draws parallels to the EV mall-store boom-and-bust, arguing robots remain a pricey "toy" whose stores mainly build brand awareness and gather user feedback.
More from Embodied
- fal starts fine-tuning a physical robot to draw, results next week — OdinLovis · 2026-10-23
- PEARL demo: an LLM agent that checks experiment results, revises plans, and re-tests — KevinKaichuang · 2026-10-23
- CU Boulder's ATLAS Institute Opens Tenure-Track Robotics Professorship — ryosuzk · 2026-10-23
- MiTaS multi-resolution tactile imitation learning hits 80% success vs 35.5% vision-only baseline — Jan_R_Peters · 2026-10-23
- Princeton's Action Self-Distillation Teaches Robots Language Navigation with Zero Human Labels — shahdhruv_ · 2026-10-23
- Coding agents like Codex can already handle much of real-to-sim for robot manipulation — zhenjun_zhao · 2026-10-23