Shipments quadruple and the market goes affordable — 36kr's profit accounting
From the Robots digest for 2026-10-12
What happened: 36kr (published October 12, 2026, ~4:45 AM ET) reports humanoid robot shipments have "skyrocketed four times," and that affordable models account for 70% of overall sales volume — with the piece's framing question being who has actually earned the profits.
What's genuinely new: Two datapoints. The quadrupling is a fresh empirical shipment-rate claim (the record's shipment layers: SAG 19,100 H1 2026 units +272%, IDC's +432.1% H1 reading from October 2 — different scopes; this piece adds its own multiplier without stated scope in capture). The 70%-affordable share is genuinely new — the record carries the G1's ~$16,000 headline and Agility's ~$200k filed number as the pricing spread, but no volume-weighted price-mix datum. The margin question ("who earned all the profits") is consistent with the public-markets thread's rate-targets-sans-profits pattern (XPeng's October 11 writeup flagging the same). It is a development of the "robots — Public markets: robotics companies racing to price themselves" storyline, which holds the shipment tables this data feeds.
Watch: Which models constitute the 70% (Unitree's G1 is the obvious candidate but unnamed in capture), whether the quadrupling reconciles with IDC's +432% H1 figure or reflects H2 data, and whether any listed vendor breaks out humanoid-segment margins.
Links: 36kr