Corner overtaking aftermath
In fact, compared with other humanoid robot companies that are still in the demonstration stage, Youbi has already achieved corner overtaking commercially.
FLXA402 In order to solve the problem of commercialization, the best solution is to finance and occupy the market segments. First of all, by 4 times on the Spring Festival Gala stage to open popularity and obtain financing. Since its establishment, Youbi has received investment from Tencent, Qiming Venture Capital, CDH Investment, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Surprisingly Home and other well-known institutions. Before the IPO, Tencent and Qiming Venture Capital held more than 5% of the shares of YouBeisheng, making them the first and second largest institutional investors.
Secondly, Youbi has launched some low-cost consumer and educational robots through the application of subdivided fields to finance and subdivide the income of the track for research and development investment.
The prospectus mentioned that the average price of educational robots is less FLXA402 than 15,000 yuan, and consumer robots are less than 2,000 yuan, but the average price of the Walker series of humanoid robots that Youbi is most proud of is 5.988 million yuan, and the production cost is still difficult to reduce.
Before the launch, the company sold more than 760,000 robots, of which the Walker series sold only 1 in 2021, 8 in 2022, and 1 in the first half of 2023. That is to say, in two and a half years, the Walker series has sold only ten units.
This commercial means of cutting into the subdivision field is effective in the early stage, and even can achieve the effect of overtaking corners. It is also because of this strategy that the company is currently in a leading position in products and patents, and has successfully developed servo drives independently in 5 years, reducing production costs.
However, product breakthroughs that subdivide the track (education, logistics, consumer) have not solved the core technical problem of humanoid robots – how to solve the universality of intelligence? How can production costs be reduced?
In contrast, Tesla hopes to combine robots with the FLXA402 car-making industrial chain to reduce manufacturing costs. For example, Optimus uses a pure vision solution to sense the environment, and obtains information about surrounding objects through 3D multi-vision technology, and can be used with Tesla’s vision sensors, FSD chips and other parts.
Moreover, the driving data of Tesla owners can also be used to continuously optimize the FSD algorithm to improve the ability to sense the environment and autonomous analysis.
With several technological advances, according to Musk, the cost of the robot is expected to be further reduced, even less than $20,000. Zhou Jian, the founder of Youbi, also said that Tesla’s cost reduction may be the key to ushering in mass production in the industry.