--- title: "AgiBot shipped 9,700 humanoids, then changed how it counts them" date: 2026-11-03 category: Humanoids & Robotics site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-robot-humanoid-paid-hours-economics language: en --- # AgiBot shipped 9,700 humanoids, then changed how it counts them > AgiBot shipped 9,700 robots in the first half on 2 billion yuan of revenue. Its metric Worken admits a harder truth: eight hours on is not eight hours worked. A robot waits at the end of a line for a tablet to arrive on a conveyor. It lifts the tablet, loads it into a test rig, waits, unloads it, and sorts it by result. Then again, and again, for six days, while cameras stream everything. That test, run in June at a Nanchang factory, is still the most detailed public measurement of a Chinese humanoid doing paid work. ## Key takeaways - AgiBot (智元机器人) says it shipped 9,700 robots in H1 2026 on revenue near 2 billion yuan (≈ US$282M), passing 20,000 units in September. - On 29 October it proposed Worken — active robots × autonomous hours × output efficiency — to measure work done, not machines sold. - Its best-documented deployment, at Longcheer's Nanchang plant, ran eight robots for six days: 17,625 tablets, about 64,800 operations, 99.99% success. - Economics turn on utilisation: a 300,000-yuan (≈ US$42,000) machine costs 30 yuan an hour at 2,000 hours a year, about 62 at 960. - Unitree, listed in Shanghai in August, grew nine-month revenue 56% while third-quarter profit fell 17% as research spending rose 250%. ## A new unit, announced on a stage On 29 October in Shanghai, AgiBot president and CTO Peng Zhihui (彭志辉) introduced a word: Worken, from "work" and "token". It multiplies active robots by autonomous working hours by an output efficiency ratio, measured against a skilled worker on the same task. "Ten thousand units off the line is a victory for manufacturing," he said. "Ten thousand units on the job is a victory for physical AI." Worken is a company invention, not a standard. It addresses a problem the sector created: firms valued on demos, where a robot that walks on stage is impressive and commercially worthless. It also concedes something. If you need a new unit to describe how much work a robot does, the old unit was measuring the wrong thing. ## The one line with public numbers Eight AgiBot G2 robots joined a tablet inspection line at Longcheer's Nanchang plant. Over six days they ran 64 hours of live-streamed operation, handled 17,625 tablets and completed roughly 64,800 operations, with a reported success rate of 99.99%. The task is modest: pick a tablet off a conveyor, load it, wait, unload, sort by result. A fixed arm could do it. What the humanoid adds is swapping between SKUs without rebuilding the line. AgiBot also disclosed failures: communication faults between robots and test equipment, and robots colliding. Both were fixed. But the gap between 99.99% of operations and 100% of shifts is where factory managers live. One stopped line costs more than a month of robot wages. ## What an hour actually costs The arithmetic that decides this follows; the numbers are illustrative and exclude subsidies. Take a humanoid at 300,000 yuan (≈ US$42,000). Depreciation over five years with no residual value is 60,000 yuan a year. Run it 2,000 hours — eight hours a day, 250 days — and depreciation alone is 30 yuan an hour. Now run it 960 hours, which is what ten working days a month looks like. Depreciation doubles to about 62 yuan an hour. Add maintenance, power, integration and supervision — at Chimelong the robot-to-staff ratio started near 1:1, is now about 3:1, and is targeted at 10:1 — and the hourly cost roughly triples. A humanoid's cost per hour is a function of how often it is switched on, and almost nobody publishes that. A report this year from CAICT, the telecoms research institute, found that many deployed humanoids run fewer than ten days a month — a figure that fits the shipment data: Counterpoint counted about 22,000 units shipped globally in the first half of 2026, more than 60% to stages, showrooms and laboratories. The robots exist. The shifts do not. ## Growth without profit The listed numbers say the same from the other side. Unitree (宇树科技), which listed in August, reported nine-month revenue of 1.82 billion yuan (≈ US$256M), up 55.7%, and net profit of 387 million yuan (≈ US$54M), up 270%. Then look at the third quarter alone: revenue up 70% to 665 million yuan, profit down 17% to 113 million, research spending up 250% to 127 million, or 19.1% of revenue. That is a hardware company racing to stay relevant in software: revenue scales with units, research faster, profit later, if at all. ## Where the deployments work The most convincing deployments are not factories. They are places where a robot's job is to be seen: Chimelong theme park in Hengqin, where AgiBot deployed 300-plus robots within a month and now runs close to 500. That is a real business — tickets, shows, crowds — but a different one from manufacturing. In a park, a robot that works 70% of the time is an attraction. On a production line it is a liability. According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), the shift from counting units to counting hours is the first time the sector has priced its own weakness: the question is no longer whether a robot can do a task once, but whether a customer will pay for the second thousand repetitions. ## Honest limitations Everything about AgiBot here comes from its own announcements and briefings at its 29 October event. It is private; none of its shipment, revenue or deployment figures have been audited. The Longcheer test was a demonstration, not a contract. It ran six days, not six months, and 99.99% refers to individual operations — an easier bar than line availability. The cost-per-hour arithmetic is mine, built on a hypothetical price. Real quotes vary, and local subsidies change payback entirely. The "fewer than ten days" figure comes from a CAICT report whose sample is not public, so treat it as an indicator. ## What readers can do now - **If a vendor quotes a price per unit**, ask for cost per operating hour at your duty cycle. The same machine is cheap or unaffordable depending on how many shifts you can fill. - **If you are piloting a humanoid**, measure line availability, not task success. A robot that completes 99.99% of motions but stops the line twice a week has negative value. - **If you are underwriting the sector**, discount unit counts and ask for hours. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-robot-humanoid-paid-hours-economics Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.