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The big Beijing robotics conference opened on August 19 and runs through the 23rd, and the scale is real. Organizers count more than 2,000 exhibits, up about 27 percent from last year, over 300 exhibitors, up around 36 percent, and more than 150 products shown publicly for the first time, and they put the full five day showcase near 3,000 products.
Humanoids are the whole marketing story this year. UBTech was offering an emotional care humanoid to individual buyers at 168,000 yuan, more than 24,000 dollars, that talks, changes facial expression, and moves its neck and hands. Unitree had robots boxing and dancing, one even played ping pong against a person, and its shares began trading in Shanghai the same week. Xiaomi gave its first humanoid a public debut on the floor.
What keeps me honest is the footage nobody puts on a poster. Reporters at the event watched a humanoid try to fold a shirt and it still could not manage it after several minutes. A demo that dances is not a deployed machine earning money on a line, and that gap is where most of the money gets made or lost. I treat the category as early, so I would rather hold the scaled component and platform suppliers that sell into every robot maker than guess which prototype becomes a product.
On exposure, I gave up trying to own the booth stars directly. The pure play humanoid makers on this floor are mostly too new or too small to enter a broad China tech index, and a fund such as CNQQ only reshuffles its basket on a semi annual schedule, so the robotics link I actually hold is Xiaomi inside a diversified vehicle rather than any specialist on display. If mandates matter to you, KWEB stays with the internet names and carries no mainland A shares, while CQQQ counts A shares only at a partial inclusion factor, so how far each one reaches across the two listing venues is not the same.