China’s robotics industry is experiencing a sharp divide, with more than 20 companies going bankrupt, dissolving, liquidating or shutting down business lines over the past 19 months, even as funding surges and dozens of firms line up for stock listings.
According to public reports and court announcements, the closures between February 2025 and September 2026 span at least 11 different fields. Recent cases include Yinghe Robotics, which was once valued at US$500 million and counted Meituan and ByteDance among its shareholders. A Shenzhen court accepted a creditor’s liquidation petition in July, and the first creditors’ meeting was held on Oct. 19. In September, pool-cleaning robot maker Zhicheng Power faced a creditor-initiated restructuring petition. In May, Shenlan Robotics (Shanghai), which owed over 23 million yuan (about US$3.2 million) in back wages and was once valued at 14 billion yuan (about US$1.97 billion), entered liquidation. In 2025, CloudMinds’ liquidation was accepted, while its parent once had a peak valuation above 20 billion yuan (about US$2.8 billion).
Meanwhile, robotics financing in the first eight months of 2026 reached 124.51 billion yuan (about US$17.5 billion), double the 2025 full-year total. By July, 50 robotics firms had entered the listing process.
Commentators argue that a technology bubble and a capital bubble have both been exposed. Many companies, they say, rely on continuous fundraising rather than positive operating cash flow, leaving them vulnerable when capital tightens. The result is a split in which high-quality firms keep raising money and going public, while weaker projects collapse.
An October report from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology noted that despite rising attention from investors and policymakers, the embodied intelligence sector faces bottlenecks in scaling applications and building stable profit models, with a clear gap between demos and real delivery. It predicted the market would complete its first round of shake-out over the next two to three years.
Source: Central News Agency (Taiwan), October 21, 2026
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/202610210323.aspx