The Economist sent a reporter to Shantou to cover a hit film. What came back was an autopsy. They are wrong about the patient. The piece (”Bottom of the class”, July 23) declares Shantou the special economic zone that failed, the odd one out among four. GDP per person of 54,000 yuan. Growth of 0.1% … Read more
Industrial embodied intelligence just cleared a practical hurdle. Topstar, a Dongguan-based smart-manufacturing equipment maker, has built a complete industrial data-iteration loop with Wuwen Zhike, a physical-AI data-platform company — letting embodied robots iterate quickly, reuse standardized components and deploy at batch scale. Wuwen Zhike was among the first in the sector to ship a physical-AI … Read more
Hikvision’s 2026 interim report, released this week, offered a clean read on where China’s robotics segment is heading. The surveillance giant posted group revenue of 46.82 billion yuan, up 11.97 percent year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 7.90 billion yuan, up 39.57 percent, and gross margin climbing to 49.97 percent. The … Read more
Another robotics company has knocked on the door of the Hong Kong stock exchange. Standard Robots, a Shenzhen-based maker of industrial autonomous mobile robots, has submitted a prospectus for a main-board listing. If it gets through, it would become Hong Kong’s first “industrial embodied-AI” listing. By the numbers, the company is no minnow. According to … Read more
ChangXin Memory Technologies, Inc. (CXMT) listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market this morning. Open: RMB 49.50 against an offer price of 8.66. Up 471.6%. Market value: RMB 3.3 trillion, straight past ICBC to the top of the A-share table. The biggest winner is the city of Hefei. Its state funds hold more than a third of … Read more
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, China’s embodied-AI zone was full of robots making coffee, taking photos and dancing. Sudo Tech’s booth drew crowds for the opposite reason: its robots quietly did unglamorous things — grasping objects, wrapping items in cloth with two hands, inserting parts into matching holes — with conspicuous stability, success rates and … Read more
After 12 years and roughly $3.2 billion in cumulative funding (per Tracxn data), Faraday Future has delivered fewer than 20 vehicles. Now the Jia Yueting-led company is abandoning the EV label altogether: an August shareholder meeting will vote on a renaming that rebrands FF as a “physical AI ecosystem company,” with humanoid and embodied-AI robots … Read more
In 2025, capital chased complete humanoid robots — a walking, talking demo unit could raise hundreds of millions. In 2026, the money has pivoted to a single component: the dexterous hand, what the industry calls the “last millimetre” of robot-world interaction. The numbers are stark. According to IT Juzi data cited by OFweek, China’s dexterous-hand … Read more
A year ago, the world’s first robot “6S store” opened in Shenzhen’s Longgang district with only a handful of machines on the floor. On July 28, it celebrated its first anniversary by announcing nine commercialised application scenarios, a multi-channel digital sales system — and a national footprint of more than 20 stores. The 6S concept … Read more
BYD Explorer No.1, a dedicated car-carrier vessel BYD uses to ship vehicles to overseas markets. Chinese cars cost far more abroad than at home. Take the Xpeng MONA L03, launched in Munich on July 16. Its pure-electric version starts at 35,600 euros in Germany (about 276,000 yuan); the extended-range version starts at 38,600 euros (about … Read more