Unitree's robots are built by cheap hands, not machines, and that leaves the automation market wide open for the West
I Toured Unitree's Factory. I'm More Bullish on the West
After touring Unitree's Hangzhou factory, the author found that China's robot production still relies on manual labor: the company's machinery was worth only about $50 per robot in 2025, and labor made up just 8% of costs. Automating a motor line would cut a single robot model's cost by only 1.7%. But at American wages, where labor would be roughly 40% of costs, the same machine could save about 9%, making automation far more valuable in the West.
The robots are Chinese; the robots that make robots will be Western.
- tristanj
I believe this conclusion is flawed. The author argues:
1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.
2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because these costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.
3) Labor costs are higher in America.
4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.
5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.
Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not imply a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.
I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:
1) Labor is still relatively cheap.
2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.
3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.
4) Tooling is inadequate. Some robotic parts are delicate, complicated, and difficult to automate manufacturing of. American companies have hit the exact same problem: Tesla is assembling the hand/forearm of Optimus by hand because it hasn't figured out how to automate manufacturing them. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-p... . Apparently, Tesla has hundreds of handless Optimus robots just standing around, waiting for hand manufacturing to catch up.
5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. Unitree only so […]
- YuechenLi
I don't really follow the logic in the article at all:
The argument is that Unitree's assembly process is currently very manual because there is no incentive to automate, which is because labor cost isn't the bottleneck here, where in the US labor cost are much higher, therefore the US will have incentive to automate more. Those are reasonable so far, until you try to use that as a conclusion that this is why the West will win?
First of all, what does he think the other 92% of the cost of manufacturing is? A small portion of that is materials and electricity, but the biggest part of the remaining cost is assembly tooling/fixtures for the assembly line, and a fully automated assembly line is much, much more expensive compared to a semi-automated or manual production line.
In other words: it's not that Unitree couldn't build fully automated assembly lines if they wanted to, but spending tens of millions of dollars fully automated assembly line that takes up floor space and requires even more labor for manual maintenance for a product that is only being produced by the hundreds to thousands in quantity every month rather than millions simply does not make economic sense to begin with.
Second, why is he assuming that a fully automated assembly line will be cheaper to build in the US than in China, especially since he toured a factory with fully automated assembly lines at BYD in China immediately after? And sure, I would absolutely argue that American software engineering is more […]
- lifeisstillgood
Some thoughts:
“””
America has run this experiment before. In 1964 about half a million Mexican farmworkers were shut out. In 1965, 20% of California's tomatoes were picked by machine; by 1970 the figure was 99.9%.“””
I honestly had not considered closing down (legal) immigration as a forcing function for automation. Industrial policy as immigration law.
But I don’t think I get the rest …
Higher costs onshore mean machines give us an advantage - i get that.
The rest I may be missing
- pocksuppet
It seems like much of the disparity between the West and China isn't about China having some better manufacturing technology. They do, but it's not the real issue. Really it's all about financial imbalances - people get paid less and the rent is lower. In the West we have a huge rent-extraction sector which produces nothing and makes it much harder to afford to start any activity.
- iamanatom
Unitree G1 Supply Chain Visualization:
https://robodienst.com/supply-chain/unitree-g1
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way; I just found it useful and thought I'd share it here.)
- pyrale
Honestly, this kind of take:
> the robots that make robots will be Western.
is quite reminiscent of the dismissive attitude of many tech people here towards stuff that doesn't originate in the US. It really feels strange to have lived through this change, from a place that used to be pretty cosmopolitan and focused on tech, to a place one can't browse without reading daily jingoistic comments.
It also feels like an atmosphere change rather than a deliberate one, in that people say that stuff casually, almost without thinking about it or the implications thereof. These ideas have permetated so much into the discourse that people don't really scrutinize them before repeating them.
- spike021
their humanoid robots really creep me out. I've been to a few conferences for work over the past few months and they usually have a booth and then have someone walking them around by remote control.
The conference venues have concrete flooring, so I just suddenly hear loud rhythmic thumping as these things stomp around a corner.
After the initial "huh that's a cool robot thing" thought, it really started giving me the heebeejeebees.
- cortesoft
> It doesn't need more. Labour was 8% of what it cost Unitree to make its robots in 2025, outsourced assemblers included, and most of the rest was parts
Ok, but what drives the cost of the parts? I am sure the parts manufacturers spend on labor, and the parts the part makers buy depend on labor. Labor drives all vast majority of the expense if you go all the way down the supply chain.
If we automate more and more of that labor with robots, then it drives down all the costs.
If we get truly autonomous robots that have the mobility and precision of humans, they could replace all of the labor. The 'switching' cost goes way down compared to the machines that do the work today.