Humanoid shipments jump 432% to nearly 25,000 in the first half as Chinese makers take over 95% of the market, IDC says

Humanoid robots are leaving the lab faster than most forecasts assumed, and almost all of them are Chinese. Global shipments reached nearly 25,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 432.1% from a year earlier, IDC said in a report published on September 29. The market was worth more than $740 million, an increase of 322.7%.

China accounted for the bulk of that growth. Shipments in China exceeded 19,000 units, up 426.3%, giving the country about 77.9% of global volume, according to IDC. Measured by the nationality of the vendor rather than the destination, Chinese makers supplied more than 95% of all humanoids shipped worldwide in the period.

IDC raised its long-term outlook on the back of the numbers. It now expects global humanoid shipments to exceed 750,000 units in 2030, about 50% above its previous forecast. Lily Li, research manager at IDC China, said rapid iteration of embodied AI models, a maturing supply chain and continued cost reductions should allow humanoids to prove their commercial value in more real-world settings. She said competition is shifting away from mechanical structure and hardware specifications toward overall embodied intelligence.

The mix of buyers is starting to change. Research and education, performances and exhibitions, and government data-collection centres together took 83.8% of shipments in 2025, IDC said, but their share fell to 69% in the first half of 2026. Industrial manufacturing, retail, transport and logistics, leisure and tourism, and household consumption are the emerging uses. IDC named AgiBot, UBTech and Galbot as vendors concentrating on industrial deployments.

IDC's rounded figures also allow a rough reading of prices. Dividing market value by units gives average revenue of about $29,600 per humanoid in the first half, a ROBOTNESS calculation. Because units grew faster than value, average value per unit fell by about 21% from a year earlier, and the growth rate implies a first-half 2025 base of roughly 4,700 units. The decline is consistent with a shift toward lower-priced models, although IDC did not publish a breakdown by price band or robot size.

The listed Chinese makers have shown similar momentum in their own disclosures. UBTech reported selling 921 full-size humanoids in the first half of 2026, and Unitree raised RMB6.1 billion when it listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in August. Both now trade as public benchmarks for a sector that, by IDC's count, is overwhelmingly Chinese.

Outside China the numbers are far smaller. Agility Robotics, one of the most commercially advanced US humanoid makers, disclosed $1.8 million of 2025 sales in the S-4 filing for its planned Nasdaq listing. Figure AI raised $1 billion at a $39 billion post-money valuation in September 2025 on expectations of future production. South Korea's government, in a plan adopted on September 30, put China's share of the humanoid market at 87%, the United States at 3% and Korea at 1%.

For suppliers and buyers elsewhere, the data set the terms of competition. Makers of actuators, reducers, sensors and compute modules for humanoids face a customer base that is mostly Chinese, and Western humanoid companies will be measured against Chinese cost curves at volumes they have not yet reached. Governments are reacting. Korea's plan to buy more than 1,700 robots in 2027 explicitly cites the Chinese lead as the reason to create public demand.

The figures carry caveats. IDC counts shipments, not robots doing paid work, and more than two thirds of first-half volume still went to research, education, demonstrations and government data centres, where buyers often purchase for data collection or display. IDC publishes rounded totals, so per-unit values derived from them are indicative. Market share estimates also differ by source, because the Korean government's 87% for China and IDC's 77.9% by destination and 95% by vendor rest on different and undisclosed bases.

The next checkpoints are company disclosures. STAR Market companies, Unitree among them, must publish third-quarter reports within one month of the quarter's end, by October 31. UBTech's full-year results are due by the end of March 2027 under Hong Kong listing rules, and IDC's full-year 2026 data should follow early next year.