Unitree Robotics shares opened at 1,100 yuan in Shanghai, valuing the robot maker at about $66bn and placing its first public trade roughly 75% above the level implied by a cryptocurrency market before trading began.
The opening price was about seven times the company’s initial public offering price of 150.8 yuan. Unitree’s shares therefore rose by roughly 600% against the IPO level, delivering a significantly stronger debut than traders in the pre-market crypto market had anticipated.
A perpetual futures contract linked to Unitree Robotics on the cryptocurrency exchange Hyperliquid had previously suggested that the company would be valued at close to $38bn. That implied valuation was already well above the company’s IPO value, but it still fell substantially short of the valuation reached when Unitree shares began trading in Shanghai.
The difference highlights the uncertainty involved in using crypto-based markets to estimate the likely performance of companies before they list publicly.
Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures market allowed traders to take positions on Unitree’s expected valuation before the Shanghai trading session started. Its pricing indicated that traders were optimistic about the robot maker, but the actual opening price exceeded their collective estimate by about three quarters.
Unitree Robotics’ debut contrasts with the June listing of SpaceX. In that case, cryptocurrency perpetual futures were relatively close to the range in which the stock traded on its first day.
The two examples suggest that crypto markets can sometimes provide a useful indication of investor expectations ahead of an IPO, while also showing that those markets do not always accurately predict the price at which a newly listed company will begin trading.
Unitree’s Shanghai debut was the stronger of the two outcomes when measured against the expectations reflected in pre-listing crypto trading. The company entered the public market at a valuation of approximately $66bn, despite the Hyperliquid contract having pointed to a figure of around $38bn.
The robot maker’s IPO had been priced at 150.8 yuan per share. Once trading opened, the 1,100-yuan price represented a dramatic increase over that level and gave the company a market value around seven times higher than its IPO valuation.
The result also underlined the difference between an implied price in a perpetual futures market and the price established by real buyers and sellers on a stock exchange. Hyperliquid traders had effectively placed a pre-market bet on Unitree’s public debut, but Shanghai investors pushed the valuation considerably higher.
While the Unitree result points to the potential of crypto markets to price forthcoming IPOs, its gap with the eventual opening valuation also demonstrates their limitations. The comparison with SpaceX’s June debut shows that such markets can be close to the outcome in some cases, but can also miss the scale of demand when a company begins trading publicly.
