The "shovel seller" behind Unitree and Agibot is about to launch its IPO.
This trip to Hong Kong means that Leader Harmonious Drive is marching towards the dual "A+H" capital platform.
The commercialization prospect of humanoid robots remains to be verified, but the companies that "sell shovels" in the upper reaches of the industrial chain have successively reaped results.
Recently, Leader Harmonious Drive, the domestic leading manufacturer of harmonic reducers, announced the launch of its Hong Kong listing plan. On August 26, the company's board of directors reviewed and passed relevant proposals for applying for the initial public offering of H shares and listing on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. However, the issuance is still in the planning stage, and specific arrangements such as issuance scale, issuance price and issuance timeline have not been determined. The company was listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board as early as 2020, with a current market value of over 50 billion yuan. This trip to Hong Kong means that Leader Harmonious Drive is marching towards the dual "A+H" capital platform.
The core product of Leader Harmonious Drive is the harmonic reducer in robot joints, which converts the high-speed low torque of the motor into the low-speed high torque required by the joints, and is the core component for robots to achieve precise movement. Research reports from Guojin Securities show that taking Tesla Optimus as an example, each humanoid robot currently requires about 14 harmonic reducers, and this number is expected to rise to more than 20 in the future.
As the expectation for mass production of humanoid robots heats up, Leader Harmonious Drive has become an important beneficiary of this round of industrial boom. The company's relevant products have obtained Tesla's certification and entered the supply chains of leading robot enterprises such as Unitree and Agibot.
However, around the time when Leader Harmonious Drive announced its Hong Kong listing plan, Unitree Robotics, which had just landed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, experienced a sharp volatility, which also made the market re-examine the valuation of humanoid robots. How high a valuation the capital market is willing to pay for this industry has become a question that Leader Harmonious Drive must answer on its way to Hong Kong's capital market.
Top Nanjing University graduate in the 1990s built a 500-billion-yuan listed company
The predecessor of Leader Harmonious Drive was originally a Suzhou-based metal products factory undertaking processing with supplied materials, namely Suzhou Hengjia Metal Products Co., Ltd.
In 1999, ZUO Yuyu, who graduated from the Physics Department of Nanjing University, joined Hengjia Metal and was in charge of the precision machining business. At that time, the company was mainly engaged in the processing of precision components.
Around 2003, a research trip to Japan changed the fate of Hengjia Metal. At that time, Japan already had a relatively mature robot industry, and a number of core component enterprises with extremely high specialization had taken shape. Among them, harmonic reducers are widely used in industrial robot joints, whose precision, service life and stability directly affect the motion capability of robots, and are also one of the links with the highest technical barriers in the robot industrial chain.
Perhaps due to his physics background, ZUO Yuyu immediately realized the great value of this field. While studying the transmission principle, mathematical modeling and tooth profile design of harmonic reducers, he combined the precision manufacturing experience accumulated over years to explore materials, heat treatment, processing and assembly techniques repeatedly. For a whole decade, Hengjia Metal gradually developed from an inconspicuous OEM into an independent company with core technology R&D capabilities, namely Leader Harmonious Drive.
In March 2011, the first reducer prototype of Leader Harmonious Drive was sent to Jiangsu Provincial Product Quality Supervision and Inspection Center for Reducers for testing. However, making a prototype does not mean that the product can be sold. In the field of harmonic reducers, Harmonic Drive Systems from Japan has long held a dominant position and formed a technical monopoly. Therefore, Leader Harmonious Drive embarked on a path of domestic substitution.
The strategy adopted by Leader Harmonious Drive is to start from the domestic market, complete customer sample testing, then enter small-batch trial use, and obtain the opportunity to realize mass supply after long-term operation verification. At the same time, Leader Harmonious Drive did not simply copy overseas products, but formed its own technical path around materials, tooth profile design and manufacturing techniques, and mastered the manufacturing capability of core components in its own hands relying on the precision machining capabilities accumulated in the past.
With the rapid development of the domestic industrial robot market, Chinese robot manufacturers began to look for local suppliers that can replace imported products. Leader Harmonious Drive seized this window period, gradually entered the domestic robot industrial chain, and completed customer verification by continuously improving product performance and stability in addition to advantages in price, delivery and localized services.
According to the company's 2025 annual report, the harmonic reducer business of Leader Harmonious Drive has taken a leading position in the Chinese market, and has begun to deliver products in batches to leading international robot customers. With the rise of embodied intelligence and humanoid robots, the number of customers and product shipment volume of the company in this emerging scenario have also increased significantly. Leader Harmonious Drive stated in its annual report that its market share of harmonic reducers in embodied intelligence scenarios is at the leading level globally, but it did not disclose specific market share data.
This bet has also created a new wealth story. ZUO Yuyu, founder and chairman of Leader Harmonious Drive, and his elder brother ZUO Jing, vice chairman, are the most important actual controllers of the company. By the end of August, calculated based on the company's market value of about 535 billion yuan, the market value of shares held by ZUO Yuyu, founder and chairman, is close to 100 billion yuan, and the market value of shares held by his elder brother ZUO Jing is also around 100 billion yuan.
The "shovel seller" behind Unitree and Agibot
Although Leader Harmonious Drive was listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board as early as 2020, it has really attracted widespread attention only in the past two years with the boom of humanoid robots.
At the beginning of 2025, the company's share price was fluctuating around 108 yuan. In the second half of the year, with the continuous advancement of Tesla Optimus and the acceleration of product iteration and commercialization of domestic robot enterprises such as Unitree Robotics, the company was revalued by the capital market.
In 2025, Unitree Robotics began to increase its procurement of upper limb harmonic reducers from Leader Harmonious Drive, and the supply share of Leader Harmonious Drive in related products once reached about 70%. In addition, leading manufacturers such as UBTech and Agibot are also customers of Leader Harmonious Drive.
Looking at the financial report, in the first half of this year, the harmonic reducer and metal component business realized a revenue of 288 million yuan, accounting for more than 80% of the company's total revenue. At the same time, another business centered on mechatronic products is also growing rapidly. The so-called mechatronic products further integrate components such as reducers, motors and sensors, providing robot manufacturers with modular products closer to complete "joints". In the first half of this year, the revenue of this part of the business reached 54.735 million yuan, accounting for about 15.7% of the total revenue.
In June 2026, Morgan Stanley raised its forecast for China's humanoid robot shipment for the second time within the year, sharply raising the 2026 shipment volume from the previous 28,000 units to 50,000 units, and predicted that the shipment volume will reach 446,000 units by 2030, corresponding to a market size of 15 billion US dollars. According to its forecast, the compound annual growth rate of China's humanoid robot shipment from 2025 to 2030 will reach 106%.
If this forecast is finally fulfilled, it means a huge incremental market for reducer enterprises. At the World Robot Conference in August this year, Leader Harmonious Drive further released a signal of capacity expansion. According to on-site information and industrial chain data, the company's current harmonic reducer production capacity has reached 1 million units, and it plans to hit 1.5 million units by the end of the year; the company also revealed that the visibility of its on-hand orders has been scheduled to the third quarter of 2027, of which humanoid robot-related orders account for more than 40%.
However, the "shovel selling" business also has its own troubles. The hotter the humanoid robot market is, the more players will enter the reducer track. In the past, this was a business that highly relied on imports and had a limited number of competitors. With the completion of domestic substitution and the expansion of industry demand, more and more enterprises have begun to enter this field, and the competition has gradually shifted from "whether there are products" to "whose products are cheaper and whose delivery is faster".
Price has become the most direct signal. Laifu Harmonic, which was listed on the Hong Kong stock market in June this year, explicitly mentioned in its prospectus that in order to obtain a larger market share, the company had adopted strategic price adjustments for harmonic reducers. Leader Harmonious Drive also cannot completely avoid this trend. In 2017, the average selling price of Leader Harmonious Drive's harmonic reducer was about 1900 yuan, which dropped to about 1100 yuan by 2024. In other words, the price of a single product dropped by about 42% in seven years. However, the price drop did not bring a continuous increase in the market share of Leader Harmonious Drive. According to statistics from institutions, the share of Leader Harmonious Drive in China's harmonic reducer market was about 33% in 2019, dropped to 25% in 2024, and rebounded to 27.5% in 2025.
The valuation of humanoid robots may need to "settle accounts"
In recent communications with people in the embodied intelligence industry, the most frequently mentioned word is "overheated".
The most typical example is Unitree. On August 19, Unitree Robotics was listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board with an issuance price of 150.8 yuan per share. On the first day of listing, its share price once surged to 1100 yuan in intraday trading, corresponding to a market value of over 440 billion yuan. But the carnival did not last long. By the end of August, the company's share price had retreated by nearly half from the intraday high on the first day of listing, and its market value had evaporated by more than 200 billion yuan.
In addition to the sharp fluctuation of share price, WANG Xingxing, the founder, has also reminded the market for many times that humanoid robots are still in the early stage of the industry, the technical routes have not been fully converged, and there is still a long way to go before real large-scale commercialization.
The recently concluded World Robot Conference also presented a similar reality. Although demonstrations such as folding clothes, boxing and doing housework are dazzling, their actual application effects are probably not optimistic. At the moment when a series of issues such as cost, reliability, battery life, dexterous operation and business model have not been effectively solved, the valuation logic of humanoid robots may need a new set of calculation rules.
This is also an unavoidable problem for Leader Harmonious Drive. Although as a "shovel seller" in the robot industrial chain, Leader Harmonious Drive does have a relatively mature industrial robot business with stable revenue and profit base, the current market value of more than 500 billion yuan is obviously not only the pricing for the existing reducer business, but also includes the market's expectation for the future. In the first half of this year, Leader Harmonious Drive realized a attributable net profit of 70.1 million yuan, which is about 140 million yuan after simple annualization. Calculated based on the market value of more than 500 billion yuan at the end of August, the corresponding price-earnings ratio has reached hundreds of times.
This is not to belittle humanoid robots, nor to deny the long-term value of the industry. On the contrary, if humanoid robots finally enter large-scale mass production, as a core component supplier, Leader Harmonious Drive will undoubtedly have the opportunity to obtain huge increments from it. But the problem is that the long-term space of the industry is not always consistent with the current valuation of a company.
A referable case is Laifu Harmonic, which was listed on the Hong Kong stock market in June this year. As another leading domestic harmonic reducer enterprise, Laifu Harmonic is also in the humanoid robot industrial chain and has the growth expectation brought by this round of industrial boom. But after entering the Hong Kong stock market, its share price performance also experienced a trend of opening high and then going low. The size and valuation of Leader Harmonious Drive are much higher than those of Laifu Harmonic, which means it needs to prove more.
Of course, Leader Harmonious Drive did not simply describe this Hong Kong listing as a financing activity. According to the company's announcement, deepening the global strategic layout, enhancing the international brand image and broadening financing channels are all the purposes of this listing plan. At present, overseas revenue accounts for about 14% of Leader Harmonious Drive's total revenue, and there is still much room for expansion in the international market.
In July 2026, the company established a joint venture with SKF, the global giant in the field of bearings and transmission, focusing on high-precision transmission components for robot joints. According to the planning of both parties, the joint venture is expected to be put into operation at the end of 2026, with its headquarters located in China, and will be laid out close to the industrial chain and customer groups to improve response speed. In addition to serving China, the world's largest robot market, this company can also use SKF's global sales network to further expand overseas markets such as Europe, Japan and the United States. Therefore, for Leader Harmonious Drive, the Hong Kong listing has both capital-level considerations and the need for global strategy.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Dongshitiao Capital" (ID: DsstCapital), the author is Wei Xianghui, and it is published by 36Kr with authorization.