The Shanghai United Assets and Equity Exchange recently disclosed a listing: CNPC Kunlun Capital is transferring 0.6349 per cent of Shandong Future Robot, equal to 234,372 shares, at a reserve price of 20 million yuan. The pure state-industry investor has deep ties to the company. In May 2025 the two signed an investment deal spanning technology sharing, resource access and market coordination, and that August Shandong Future closed a several-hundred-million-yuan strategic round that included Kunlun Capital among other industrial investors.
Kunlun Capital currently holds 10.386 per cent of Shandong Future, making it the second-largest shareholder. The transfer is not a state exit but a small stake optimisation that supports a planned capital increase and realises part of its paper gain. At the reserve price, the company is valued at about 3.15 billion yuan. After the deal, Kunlun retains its holding. Shandong Future also plans a capital increase after the transfer, and it completed joint-stock restructuring in January.
Beyond Kunlun, China Machinery Group, China Mobile, CICC Capital and other central-state champions have all taken stakes, betting on a global leader in deep-sea engineering equipment. Shandong Future has spent two decades in deep-sea and underwater gear, was first in China to achieve full-chain localisation of deep-sea robots and broke a long foreign monopoly. Its team is led by senior engineers including Tao Zewen and Leng Jianxing, one of the developers of the Jiaolong crewed submersible, and holds more than 160 proprietary technologies.
The company runs a 30,000-square-metre smart manufacturing park and a roughly 19,000-square-metre heavy-duty wharf test base. Its portfolio spans work-class ROVs, seabed cable-laying gear, deep-sea salvage, marine mining, underwater tunnelling, dredging, hull cleaning and underwater firefighting robots, plus key parts such as robotic arms, covering the full chain. It built Asia’s first commercial nodule-mining robot and China’s first river-dredging and bridge-caisson suction robots, and its 3,500-metre-class deep-sea ROV reached pilot production this April.
Its chain trencher VKG1100 completed first sea trials in the Yellow Sea, cutting to 3 metres in seabed with 400 kPa shear strength, a record for Asia’s most powerful and deepest trenching. The company is profitable with sound finances: 2025 revenue of 149 million yuan and net profit of 18.11 million yuan; first-half 2026 revenue of 54.2 million yuan and net profit of 1.1 million yuan; total assets of 1.154 billion yuan against just 145 million yuan in liabilities, a 12.60 per cent debt ratio. It won bids from Southern Grid’s ultra-high-voltage arm and CNOOC’s emergency-rescue equipment programme.
Overseas, its business spans Russia, Britain, France, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. A blower trencher is headed to a Saudi project, and at peak its overseas share has reached 70 per cent.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek Robot report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.