Standard Robots has submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the third time. The Shenzhen industrial mobile-robot maker has become a genuine dark horse in the autonomous-mobile-robot race, its customer list spanning 3C electronics and car manufacturing with Huawei, Xiaomi, Toyota and NIO among the names.
Founder Wang Yongkun, just 35, started the company in 2016 from a 12-square-metre office with a five-person team and a startup loan. He bet early on laser-SLAM autonomous mobile robots, machines that route, avoid and schedule themselves on the factory floor. A 2018 cash crunch nearly killed it; at 26 he took over as CEO, pitched 140-odd institutions in three months, and landed Huawei as a seed customer.
The financials are the familiar China-hardware paradox. Revenue climbed from 162m yuan in 2023 to 301m yuan in 2025, gross margin from 31.6 per cent to 40.5 per cent. Yet Standard Robots has never made a profit, with net losses of 100m, 45m and 202m yuan across 2023 to 2025, the last up 347.5 per cent. Cumulative red ink exceeds 350m yuan.
The reason is structural. Staying ahead in natural navigation, swarm scheduling and high-precision positioning demands heavy R&D. Worse, industrial mobile robots are not consumer goods. Every deal needs on-site surveys, bespoke design, installation and support, so sales and commission costs swallow the gross margin, while standard products have been discounted from hundreds of thousands of yuan per unit to a few thousand as the field crowds in.
Overseas is the pivot. Non-mainland-China sales rose from 9.8m to 60.4m yuan, lifting their share of revenue from 10.2 per cent to 24.1 per cent, as foreign buyers pay for the solution rather than haggle on price. But building overseas delivery, compliance and service still burns cash, and on the books cash and equivalents had shrunk to 77.8m yuan by late 2025. Getting the orders was the easy part. Turning them into money is the harder problem.
Read the original report (OFweek)
Translated and adapted from OFweek (ofweek.com).