At the Shanghai auto show in April last year, a Unitree robot dog tumbled and bowed for the crowd and drew more attention than the cars. Almost nobody asked what was inside it. The part handling motion control and sensing came from a Fuzhou company called Rockchip.
On 27 October Rockchip reported quarterly net profit of RMB 473 million, up 90.49 per cent year on year. The same day, Xiamen-based SigmaStar reported RMB 701 million, up 752.76 per cent. Between them, two Fujian chipmakers earned RMB 1.174 billion in three months while the companies building the robots were still hunting for orders.
The counter-cyclical position
Rockchip’s route in was improbable. Li Min founded the company in Fuzhou in 2001 at thirty-six, with a first product line built on repeater electronics, the gadget that let students slow an English tape without changing the pitch. Rockchip held as much as 80 per cent of that market. When repeaters died it moved to MP3 players, then to Android tablets, then made the decision that defined it: while everyone chased smartphone systems-on-chip, it put everything into AIoT, on the theory that appliances, cars and industrial equipment would each need a cheap computing core.
That bet put it inside robot dogs, industrial machines, agricultural equipment and companion robots. Its 2026 interim report lists a portfolio covering motion control, visual perception, decision-making and human-machine interaction, with the RK3588 and RK3576 handling recognition, mapping and path planning and the RK182X coprocessor addressing heavier multimodal inference.
There is a second business that is easy to miss: selling chips into the equipment that trains robots. Before a robot reaches a factory, a research team buys cameras, multi-sensor capture rigs and compute to record motion and environment. Rockchip now sells a data acquisition reference design covering multi-sensor input, synchronised capture, image processing and encoded transmission. Quarterly revenue reached RMB 1.573 billion, up 43.57 per cent, though the company does not break out robotics separately, and part of the profit still comes from automotive electronics, machine vision and consumer devices.
The camera company that became an eye supplier
SigmaStar’s origin is a divestiture. Lin Yongyu, born in 1969 in Putian, spent fifteen years at MStar, the television chip leader, rising to general manager and chief operating officer of its China business. MediaTek’s acquisition of MStar, announced in 2012 and completed in 2018, reshuffled the industry. A year before completion, Lin left at forty-eight with his core team and founded SigmaStar in Xiamen, funded with USD 2 million from a MediaTek subsidiary.
The television business stayed with MediaTek. The surveillance chip line, then a marginal product, went with Lin. It turned out to be the better bet: four of every ten network camera processors shipped worldwide now come from SigmaStar, and on 2024 shipment volume it was the largest supplier of vision AI systems-on-chip, with 41.2 per cent of the security segment.
Robots are the newer story. Vacuums, mowers and pool cleaners all need an eye before they need anything else. SigmaStar shipped more than ten million robot vision chips in 2025, five times the prior year, for a 23 per cent global share and second place. It listed in Shenzhen with a 197 per cent first-day gain, filed in Hong Kong in September for a dual listing, and posted third-quarter revenue of RMB 1.917 billion, up 151 per cent.
What the profit is actually made of, and what it is not
Neither company’s growth is mainly a robotics story yet. SigmaStar’s profit engine is edge AI: RMB 1.764 billion of first-half revenue at a 55.55 per cent gross margin, driven by hundreds of millions of installed cameras being re-chipped. Rockchip’s growth comes from industrial inspection equipment and automotive cabins, markets with budgets today. Robots are on the table, not yet the meal.
There are two warnings buried in the filings. SigmaStar’s inventory reached RMB 3.182 billion by the end of September, up RMB 2.252 billion since the start of the year, while operating cash flow for the nine months was RMB 422 million against net profit of RMB 1.564 billion. Rockchip said rising memory, passive component and PCB prices have delayed some customers’ production and pushed chip orders out.
And the window is not permanent. Rockchip and SigmaStar are neighbours and competitors, and both face Nvidia and Qualcomm at the high-performance end. Qualcomm launched its Dragonwing IQ10 robotics line in January and is developing next-generation compute with Figure. Domestic content in quadruped robot components already exceeds 75 per cent, but localisation of high-end compute has barely started, and the runway may be shorter than the orders suggest.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-11/ART-8321201-12003-30710025.html.