The humanoid robot is now selling for under 10,000 yuan

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Wang Xiaojun

In the past three years, the humanoid robot sector has remained hot, with accelerated industrial commercialization. However, due to insufficient product maturity and high prices, humanoid robots are either research tools in laboratories or performers in high-end commercial scenarios, still far from "entering ordinary households."

Now, this situation is about to welcome an important turning point. On October 23, Songyan Power officially launched the pre-sale of the world's first high-performance humanoid robot priced under 10,000 yuan — Bumi, priced at 9,998 yuan, bringing the "real" humanoid robot into the mass market for the first time.

This marks the transition of humanoid robots from laboratories and high-end commercial scenarios into the consumer-grade era.

At the media exchange event that day, Jiang Zheyuan, founder and chairman of Songyan Power, told Wall Street Insights that the core purpose of this product launch is to lower the price to under 10,000 yuan, allowing more consumers to access it, thereby expanding the consumer market while further compressing supply chain costs.

However, he also admitted that Bumi is currently still positioned more for performance and education, and it cannot yet fulfill the expectations of having robots do real work. He agrees with UC Berkeley professor and top robotics expert Sergey Levine's prediction: by 2030, robots will be able to independently manage an entire household like a domestic helper.

The "dawn moment" for the large-scale industrialization of humanoid robots is getting closer, and Songyan Power is attempting to accelerate this process through the price reduction of Bumi. Meanwhile, the first shot in the consumer-grade humanoid robot market has already been fired, and the upcoming competition will become increasingly fierce.

How the Thousand-Yuan Machine is "Forged"

Songyan Power has been focusing on the development of small-sized humanoid robots, and the newly launched Bumi is also small-sized, standing at 94 cm tall and weighing only 12 kg.

The low price is the biggest highlight of Bumi's launch. In the current humanoid robot industry, most products are priced at hundreds of thousands, and humanoid robots priced in the tens of thousands are considered low-priced products. The price of Bumi being under 10,000 yuan makes humanoid robots affordable for more people.

Although the price has dropped to under 10,000 yuan, Bumi is not a "toy"; Songyan Power has labeled it as "high-performance." According to official information, Bumi possesses excellent motion control capabilities, enabling stable and smooth bipedal walking as well as flexible dance movements.

From a product positioning perspective, Bumi primarily targets technology enthusiasts, young programming learners, and family users, while also providing kits and course solutions for educational institutions and maker spaces.

In other words, Bumi's main usage scenarios are still education and entertainment, and it has not yet realized the expectation of having humanoid robots do household chores.

Jiang Zheyuan stated that humanoid robots have not entered the consumer-grade market because the technology is not sufficient and the model generalization is inadequate, making it impossible to perform tasks such as elderly care and domestic work. "Our idea in launching Bumi is that if humanoid robots cannot complete these tasks, they should first provide emotional value, accompany children, teach children programming, and learn English, which is a direction that can quickly enter households in the short term Therefore, Xiao Bu Mi can be considered a quasi-consumer humanoid robot, standing in the middle ground between consumer and non-consumer.

The main reasons for choosing to develop small-sized humanoid robots, according to Jiang Zheyuan, are threefold: first, to enhance the robot's affinity and reduce user fear; second, to achieve extreme cost-performance ratio; and third, in the physical world, small-sized robots have better motion performance.

Small-sized humanoid robots are not uncommon in the industry. In addition to the N2 and E1 previously released by Songyan Power, there are also UBTECH's Wukong series and Leju's small-sized robots. However, Jiang Zheyuan emphasized that having performance like Xiao Bu Mi for under 10,000 yuan should be a first in history.

How does Songyan Power balance cost and performance by compressing the price of a "high-performance" humanoid robot to under 10,000 yuan?

According to Wall Street News, Xiao Bu Mi can be priced under 10,000 yuan for several reasons: first, it uses a large amount of composite materials, not all metal, balancing lightweight and low cost; second, the product's low weight itself reduces costs; third, a high proportion of self-research, with core components like controllers and the entire motor system being self-developed, thus significantly lowering costs; fourth, the product's gross profit margin is not high.

"For us, a humanoid robot is essentially plastic, aluminum, iron, copper wire, magnets, and chips, with not much else, so the fundamental price can be reduced," Jiang Zheyuan revealed. The localization rate of Xiao Bu Mi's core components is almost 100%, and the ordinary version has fully achieved import substitution. The price of Xiao Bu Mi's second generation may be even lower.

In Jiang Zheyuan's view, the prices of all humanoid robot companies will trend downward in the future, ultimately converging to reasonable profit margins and price levels. As prices drop, it will bring about two major impacts.

On one hand, it will explore more application scenarios; on the other hand, it will accelerate industry popularization. The price drop from main manufacturers will drive upstream supply chains to lower costs, leading to widespread benefits across the industry, reducing costs for everyone, allowing different types of robots to be used in various scenarios.

"For example, after Xiao Bu Mi comes out, upstream suppliers like joints and harnesses will cooperate to lower costs, and robotic arms will also become cheaper, making them affordable for small manufacturers," Jiang Zheyuan said.

Commercialization Reaches a Turning Point

Despite well-known investor Zhu Xiaohu criticizing its "unclear commercialization" and admitting, "Who would spend over 100,000 yuan to buy a robot to do these tasks?", this has not hindered the scale commercialization process of the industry.

The year 2025 marks the beginning of large-scale production for humanoid robots, with companies like Yushu, Zhiyuan, Figure, 1X, and UBTECH making continuous progress. Leading manufacturers are shipping over a thousand units, and the industry is accelerating from laboratory demonstrations to real-world applications and mass deliveries.

Many large orders for humanoid robots have emerged.

In July of this year, Zhiyuan Robotics and Yushu Technology won the bid for the humanoid biped robot OEM service procurement project from China Mobile (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd. (wholly owned by China Mobile), with a total budget of 124.05 million yuan (including tax). Among the publicly disclosed orders prior to this, this order can be considered the largest humanoid robot order in China.

Guotai Junan Securities' research report pointed out that the landing of this procurement tender is an important milestone event in the commercialization process of the domestic humanoid robot industry, which is currently in the critical stage of "from 0 to 1." Known as the "first stock of humanoid robots," UBTECH ROBOTICS refreshed the largest global order for humanoid robots with a 250 million yuan order in September. In October, it won the bid for the "Guangxi Embodied Intelligent Data Collection and Testing Center Equipment Procurement and Installation" project, with an order amount of 126 million yuan.

During Tesla's recent earnings call for the third quarter of 2025, CEO Elon Musk revealed that the Optimus humanoid robot plans to showcase a prototype close to mass production in Q1 2026, with a future annual production capacity target of 1 million units.

Although it has only been established for a little over two years, Songyan Power has also made good progress in commercialization.

Data disclosed by Songyan Power shows that in the first half of this year, it has secured over 2,000 commercial orders, with a total contract amount expected to exceed 100 million yuan. This means that Songyan Power has become the second humanoid robot company in China, after Yushu Technology, to clearly cross the "thousand-unit sales" threshold.

Songyan Power has a clear commercial path in mind. Jiang Zheyuan pointed out, "Our biggest goal in the second half of this year is to ensure the production and delivery of robots, turning orders exceeding 100 million yuan into actual receipts exceeding 100 million yuan. Next year, our goal is to achieve a delivery volume of 10,000 units."

Humanoid robots are making the leap from "technically feasible" to "commercially viable," but there is still a distance to truly enter thousands of households.

Zhang Zhengyou, Chief Scientist at Tencent and Director of the Robotics X Laboratory, believes that the commercialization of humanoid robots is far from the "big brother era." Currently, most are used for data collection, scientific research, and guiding.

Optimists believe that the explosion of humanoid robots will occur before 2030, while others think it will take longer. Wang Feili, an industrial analyst at UBS Securities, stated that a key milestone is the "electric vehicle moment," where after overcoming technological bottlenecks, sales could leap from 1 million to 10 million units within five years. For humanoid robots, this moment is "unlikely to occur within five years."

To enable humanoid robots to truly perform tasks, the industry generally believes that the main issue is the lack of data for embodied intelligence. Jiang Zheyuan pointed out that the current data scale is insufficient, and many local governments and listed companies are building embodied intelligence training grounds to collect data, reflecting that we are currently in a severe data scarcity era, with no significant improvement in data shortages this year.

Yao Maoqing, Partner, Senior Vice President, and President of the Embodied Business Division at Zhiyuan Robotics, also stated that Zhiyuan currently values the ability to let robots enter as many real scenarios as possible and obtain high-quality data in those scenarios, which is a crucial step for the current technological path of robot companies.

Since the beginning of this year, the embodied intelligence track, including humanoid robots, has been booming, continuously attracting the enthusiasm of capital and industrial companies. With unique events such as marathon running, boxing, and soccer, humanoid robots are rapidly reshaping public perception.

It can be anticipated that as more manufacturers release competitive humanoid robot products, the competition in this track may enter a heated stage next year, and only those manufacturers that maintain technological leadership, capital support, and commercialization capabilities are likely to survive the rounds of testing and become one of the final winners