Robots assembling robots: UBTECH's Liuzhou factory will make 1 humanoid every 10 minutes

The most interesting thing about UBTECH's new humanoid robot factory in Liuzhou isn't the production rate. It's who's doing the producing.

Walker S robots — the same industrial humanoids the factory is designed to make — work the floor alongside collaborative arms and automated guided vehicles. They handle depalletizing, parts replenishment, and component transport. Then they go through more than 4 hours of testing before shipping. It's a closed loop: humanoids building humanoids at industrial scale, for the first time anywhere.

UBTECH opened the facility on September 12 in Liuzhou, Guangxi. At full capacity, the factory will produce 1 industrial humanoid every 10 minutes ... more than 10,000 per year. That's the takt time the line is engineered for, and it's 3 times faster than UBTECH's earlier Guangdong facility, which was running at one every 30 minutes as recently as March 2026.

What 10 minutes actually means

Takt time is the heartbeat of a production line: the designed interval between finished units rolling off the end. One humanoid every 10 minutes is an engineering statement: the factory is built for that cadence. Whether it's running at that pace continuously is a different question.

UBTECH's own projections are more conservative. 

The company projects 5,000 units for 2026 and 10,000 by 2027. Running continuously at 10-minute takt time for a full year would theoretically produce around 52,000 units. The 10,000 figure is the realistic ceiling for now — roughly a fifth of theoretical maximum capacity. That gap is normal for any new production ramp; it reflects real-world constraints from tooling, staffing, supply chain, and demand.

The demand side is the one that matters most. And by that measure, UBTECH has more momentum than almost anyone in the industry.

Who's buying

The customer list reads like a roll call of Asian manufacturing. 

BYD, Geely, FAW-Volkswagen, Dongfeng Liuzhou Motor, Audi FAW, and BAIC have all put Walker S2 units on production lines, using them for repetitive mobility-heavy tasks. Foxconn and SF Express are deploying them in warehouse and logistics operations. Airbus signed an agreement in 2026 to purchase Walker S2s for aircraft assembly testing. Texas Instruments has purchased units for its semiconductor plants.

That last pair is worth flagging. 

Airbus testing humanoids for aircraft assembly is a statement about dexterity confidence. And Texas Instruments, a major semiconductor supplier, buying Walker S2 units from a company that uses TI chips in its robots creates a supply chain loop that most companies would find hard to engineer deliberately.

The financial numbers reflect actual orders, not projected ones. Since early 2025, UBTECH has booked more than 800 million yuan — roughly $112 million — in humanoid orders, with a backlog now exceeding 1.4 billion yuan. In the first half of 2026 alone, full-size humanoid revenue reached RMB 590.3 million, up 1,445% year over year on 921 units shipped. Total group revenue for H1 2026 was RMB 1.269 billion, up 104.2%.

That's actual revenue booked and units shipped.

The factory as a technology statement

Beyond headcount and output, the Liuzhou facility is an argument about manufacturing methodology. The plant uses Siemens Digital Industries Software for its backbone: Plant Simulation for digital twin modeling of the production floor, Intelligence Center X for scheduling and quality control

It's all integrated into UBTECH's own Yanshee manufacturing operations platform. 

Each finished robot gets a unique serial number with full traceability across component sourcing, assembly parameters, and inspection records. Automotive-grade quality documentation for a humanoid robot.

Flexible work cells replace fixed overhead conveyors. The 13.8-meter ceiling — tall enough to accommodate wheeled Cruzr robots moving freely — is a design choice, not an accident. The facility is built to reconfigure as models evolve, not locked into a single robot's geometry.

Why this is the milestone it claims to be

The history of humanoid robots is mostly a history of prototypes, demos, and carefully staged press events. Honda's ASIMO walked stairs 20 years ago. Boston Dynamics' original hydraulic Atlas parkoured its way to YouTube virality. 

None of it, of course, was production grade, scaled, or actually doing work.

UBTECH's Liuzhou factory is something different. It's the first time a humanoid robot company has stood up a facility explicitly engineered for four-digit annual unit volumes, with named customers already receiving shipments and a revenue line that's growing at four-figure percentages.

Is the technology where it needs to be? 

UBTECH itself says it's targeting 80% of human productivity by 2027 ... so it's not there yet. The dexterity and multitask challenges are real and unsolved. The gap between production capacity and actual delivered value in customer factories is still being measured.

But the production infrastructure is now real. And the customers paying real money for these robots are real. That combination — industrial-scale manufacturing plus industrial-scale buyers — is something the humanoid industry has been working toward for decades.

Sources

• The Robotics Media — UBTECH's Liuzhou Smart Factory Rolls Out One Humanoid Every 10 Minutes
• eWeek — UBTECH Factory Targets One Humanoid Every 10 Minutes
• eWeek — China Goes Big: UBTECH Mass Deploys Humanoid Robots
• robots-maker.com — UBTECH Walker S2: The Engineering Behind China's First Mass Humanoid Robot Delivery