China

The more you understand China the less you know… The enigma that is China is changing rapidly. David’s 19 years of China experience puts some of China’s developments into context.

BYD drew a robot. The drawing you should study is the dealership floor.

15 October 2026

BYD filed a design patent this week, and the drawing matters less than where BYD says the robot will go.

On 9 October, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration published an “Embodied AI Robot” design patent with BYD as the holder, according to CarNewsChina and Star News Korea. The drawings show a black-and-white humanoid with a rounded, screenless head and jointed torso, arms and legs, designed to walk, balance and interact with people. It looks very like “Xiao Di”, a robot a BYD executive teased on social media earlier this year. Figures disclosed earlier put Xiao Di at 1.61 metres and 58.5 kilos, with 31 degrees of freedom and a hand accurate to plus or minus one millimetre. BYD has not confirmed that the patent shows the production model.

Most carmakers now have a humanoid in a slide deck. BYD has also said where its one will work. According to CarNewsChina, its executives plan to deploy these robots across the company’s own dealership network, to greet customers, explain the cars and demonstrate the in-car infotainment. They are meant for the showroom, not the factory.

That makes this a retail story. For twenty years the dealership has been the weak link for premium car brands. Service varies from one site to the next, and a carefully built brand can be undersold by whoever happens to be on the floor that Saturday. BYD wants to automate the one role no carmaker has ever controlled: a salesperson who never has an off day, never improvises the pitch, never forgets the script, and demonstrates the infotainment the same way in Shenzhen as in Stuttgart. The robot is the headline. The bigger change is brand control reaching the last metre of the sale, the one part the brand has never owned.

China matters here because of how BYD builds. It is the world’s largest integrated maker of electric vehicles, and it is making this robot the way it makes everything else: in-house, at scale and from its own parts. It set up a dedicated robotics team in 2022, invested in AgiBot in 2023 and took a stake in Percibot in 2025. It has also been running Ubtech’s Walker S1 inside its own Changsha plant to collect operating data. BYD already makes the batteries, motors and actuators and runs the factory floor, so the robot is simply the next product down the same line. A Western carmaker partners with a robotics firm and negotiates over the margin. BYD owns both sides of that deal, and Western boards keep underestimating what that is worth.

There is reason for caution. A design patent is a drawing. There is no price, no reliability data and no deployment date, and Xiao Di may never get beyond the teaser video. A hand accurate to a millimetre still has to survive a showroom full of children and spilled coffee. So far BYD has shown renders and no revenue, and scepticism is fair.

The intent is still clear. BYD wants to know whether a humanoid can be the brand’s own face in the room where the sale happens. That is a far more commercial question than whether one can work in a warehouse, and almost no Western retailer or carmaker is seriously asking it yet.

What to watch. See whether BYD puts one of these robots on a dealership floor before it puts one in a factory. The order of deployment will show what BYD thinks the robot is for. If customers meet it first, BYD is selling brand control rather than cost savings, and that is the version retail executives should worry about.

The Roth Read. Picture the robot on your own shop floor, in your uniform, saying your words every time, without fail. BYD has said its humanoid belongs where the customer decides, in the showroom. If your brand still treats the last metre of the sale as somebody else’s problem, BYD is about to show you what that assumption costs.

The subsidies were never the point. The habit was.

10 September 2026

For a year, three of China’s largest companies spent billions of dollars teaching their customers a single reflex. That reflex has now been learned. The coupons are being withdrawn, the free-delivery banners are coming down, and what is left behind is worth more than everything the subsidies cost. A new expectation. When I think of something, I buy it and get it right away.

That sentence is not mine. It belongs to Jiang Yanxin, a Beijing shopper quoted by Reuters, who ordered a doll on her way to meet friends for lunch and found a courier already at the restaurant by the time she reached her table. “I’m used to shopping this way now,” she said. That is the whole war in one line. After a year in which Meituan, Alibaba and JD.com poured money into coupons, free delivery and merchant incentives, what I call  instant retail has become the new battleground: electronics, flowers and even medicine, delivered in under sixty minutes.

The scoreboard has already moved. Goldman Sachs said in April that Meituan’s meal-delivery share had slipped from the 75 to 80 per cent it held before the price war. On Analysys data cited by Reuters, Meituan commanded 45.3 per cent of the broader instant-retail market in the second quarter, with Alibaba’s Taobao Instant Commerce ahead at 45.7 per cent and JD.com holding 7.7 per cent. The meal-delivery fight, in other words, has been swallowed whole by a bigger one.

Here is why it matters, and why the Western reader should not file this under “another Chinese price war.” The subsidies were a customer-acquisition cost disguised as generosity. Liu Xingliang, director of the Beijing-based Data Centre of China Internet, put it precisely to Reuters. The industry, he said, “has moved from the first stage of winning users through subsidies to a second stage of retaining users, expanding supply and calculating order-level economics.” Translation: the giants bought the habit at a loss, and now they must make the habit pay. The clever part was never the discount. It was recognising that a shopper who has had paracetamol at her door in under an hour will never again plan a trip to the chemist. The behaviour is a one-way door.

The damage sits where it usually sits. The food industry analyst Zhu Danpeng, quoted by Reuters, says the battle benefited consumers but the damage to small restaurant operators is still there, because a subsidised order is a thin order, and thin orders on someone else’s platform are a poor way to run a kitchen. That is the ledger the West should read most carefully. Instant retail does not create demand so much as it relocates margin, from the shop you owned to the network you rent. The convenience is real. So is the tax on it.

For a Western retailer, the lesson is not “build one-hour delivery.” It is subtler and harder. The Chinese platforms understood that logistics density, payment and media sit in one loop, so a subsidy in one part of the loop buys behaviour that monetises in another. Amazon has the pieces. Most Western grocers and chains have them scattered across four vendors and three contracts, which is why their version of instant retail is a feature nobody remembers rather than a habit nobody breaks.

What to watch. Watch retention now that the coupons are thinning. The whole thesis rests on whether the habit outlives the discount. If second-half order volumes hold as subsidies fall, the giants have bought something durable. If they sag, they have rented attention at a ruinous price, and the analysts warning that users may not stay will have their answer.

The Roth Read. Stop asking whether you can afford one-hour delivery. Ask what habit you are willing to buy at a loss, and whether you own the loop that makes it pay you back later. China just proved the subsidy is the cheap part; the expectation it leaves behind is the asset, and right now your competitor is teaching your customer to expect something you cannot yet deliver.

America shut the door on the robot. Berlin propped it open. Now Europe has to choose.

9 September 2026

The most interesting thing at IFA Berlin this week is not a robot. It is a legal document, three thousand miles away, that decided which robots you will be allowed to buy.

On the show floor at Messe Berlin, Chinese humanoid makers arrived in force. MagicLab, a Suzhou company founded in January 2024, opened its first major European trade show with the MagicBot X1, a 31-degree-of-freedom humanoid standing 180cm tall, and reports on its own unaudited figures more than 12,000 units shipped and an order book above RMB 1.1 billion, roughly £120 million. Galbot ran a fully autonomous store from Booth 160. Zeroth showed off the W1, a tracked home robot that carries 110 pounds. All real, all working, all drawing the longest stares in Hall 25.

And all, as of five weeks ago, barred from the United States. On 28 July the US Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced robots to its Covered List, classifying any mobile robot over 4.4 pounds that senses, connects and navigates as posing, in the FCC’s words, “an unacceptable risk to US national security.” The definition, as K&L Gates set out on 3 August, catches nearly every machine on that Berlin runway. Washington shut the door. The TechTimes coverage notes more than 930 Chinese companies have pivoted toward Europe in the wake of it.

So here is the thing worth saying plainly. America did not make a technology decision. It made a data decision. The robots are excellent. The question the FCC asked was not “can it fetch the item from the shelf” but “where does what it sees go next.” A humanoid working a pharmacy shift or patrolling a home is a sensor package on legs: cameras, microphones, a floorplan of your store, a map of your customers’ movements, a feed uploaded to a cloud. And China’s National Intelligence Law obliges Chinese firms to assist state intelligence work when asked. That obligation travels with the device, GDPR or no GDPR.

This is the retail read, and it is uncomfortable. The store estate is about to fill with autonomous machines, and the best ones, on price and capability, are Chinese. A retailer weighing a fleet of shelf-scanners or greeters is no longer just buying labour. It is buying a data posture. Every aisle those robots walk becomes a question about who else, ultimately, can see it. That is a boardroom conversation, not a procurement one, and most boards have not had it.

The China lesson here is not the scare. It is the speed. Washington’s ban did not slow these firms; it rerouted them, and within weeks they were on a Berlin catwalk. That is the structural advantage the West keeps underrating: manufacturing scale and iteration velocity that turn a closed market into a redirected one overnight. While Brussels debates a framework, Suzhou books a booth. One vendor, AiMOGA, has already cleared the EU’s EN 18031 standard, certified by TÜV Rheinland. The compliant path exists. Most exhibitors simply have not walked it yet.

Which leaves Europe with the decision America has taken off its own table. Copy the ban and lose access to the best hardware on the market. Wave everyone through and inherit the exposure. Or do the harder thing: build the standard, insist on it, and buy on proof rather than fear.

What to watch. Watch certification, not spectacle. The number that matters over the next year is not units shipped or backflips performed. It is how many of these machines carry an independently verified European compliance credential. That badge, dull as it sounds, is about to become the most valuable thing a robot can wear onto a Western shop floor.

The Roth Read. If you are putting robots in your stores, stop asking what they can do and start asking where what they see goes. Insist on a data layer of your own or an independent one that does not leave your jurisdiction. The demo will dazzle you; the data flow is the deal. Buy the robot that can prove its answer, not the one that gives the best show, because your customers will not forgive you for the map you handed away.

The carmakers ran out of margin. So they went looking for a body.

1 September 2026

Read the balance sheet, not the backflip

A car company does not raise nine hundred million dollars for a robot because the robot is ready. It raises it because the car has stopped paying, and everyone in Shenzhen can read the same balance sheet.

This week Xpeng’s robotics unit raised more than $900 million at a post-money valuation above $6.3 billion, in a round led by IDG Capital with Tencent, Alibaba and Gaorong Ventures alongside. The company calls it the largest single private financing ever recorded in China’s embodied AI industry. It is not alone. AiMOGA, the robotics arm of Chery, is reported by Reuters to be preparing an IPO. BYD has unveiled a humanoid called Xiao Di. Changan, GAC, Li Auto, SAIC and Seres are all, per industry reports, building humanoids of their own.

The Western press files this as China chasing Tesla. Read the quote that matters instead. Michael Dunne of Dunne Insights, a man who has spent his career inside this market, told TechCrunch why Xpeng’s founder moved: “He sees razor-thin profit in cars on the near horizon. Robots look much more promising.” That is not ambition talking. That is a man doing arithmetic.

Now the part worth arguing with. A car is not naturally a commodity. It became one for these companies because they let it become one. A brand is a feeling, a badge, a way of being read at the school gates, and every point of that feeling is a point of price you do not have to give away. In China’s EV war some manufacturers gave it  away anyway, quarter after quarter, until the only ground left to fight on was cost. Once a company reaches that ground it is no longer a carmaker. It is a contract manufacturer of batteries, motors and control systems on wheels, and a humanoid is the same components in a different shape. Which is exactly Dunne’s point: “They have all the hardware to get the job done.” Batteries, actuators, motors, the control stack, all of it flows straight out of a mature EV supply chain that the West does not have and cannot conjure in a quarter.

So the structural lesson is this. When your product is treated as a commodity you cannot defend the margin, so you move the factory to the next product that still has one. The supply chain turns out to be the asset and the vehicle was only its current shape. A country that owns the batteries and the motors can change that shape far faster than a country that owns only the software.

But look at what a brand actually buys in that story. It buys the choice to stay. The manufacturers whose badge still commands a premium are not scrambling into robotics, because their cars still pay them. Brand is the thing that stops a category collapsing into cost, and it is the cheapest insurance a manufacturer will ever hold. The Chinese groups now pivoting are not proof that brand stopped mattering. They are proof of what it costs when you stop investing in it.

The other gap cuts both ways. Dunne names it plainly: the question is whether they can catch Tesla, and by extension the American labs, “on the AI side of the equation.” Hardware is China’s, for now. The brain is still contested. But notice which problem is easier to buy your way out of. You can hire researchers. You cannot hire a decade of battery plants.

For anyone running a store, the read is sharper still. The moment a humanoid works on a shop floor or in a stockroom, the retailer’s biggest line of cost stops being staff and starts being units. That is not a labour story you can hand to an HR memo. It is a question about what your store is for when the person who once greeted the customer is a leased machine amortised over three years. The answer is the same one it has always been. People go where they are known, and a machine on the floor only frees your people to do the part a machine cannot.

What to Watch The IPO, not the demo. AiMOGA filing to go public is the real signal, because a prospectus forces the question every backflip video dodges: where does the money come from, and when. A robot that can dance is a hobby. A robot with a revenue line is a business. The market is about to make several of these companies write the number down.

The Roth Read. Stop watching China’s robots and start reading China’s balance sheets, because the carmakers already have. The humanoid is rarely the threat. It is the tell: somebody with a better cost base is about to enter your category wearing a new shape, and they can only do it because that category let its brands become interchangeable. So ask which of your rivals owns the supply chain. Then ask the harder question. If your badge came off your product tomorrow, would anyone still pay more for it? That answer is the margin you are actually defending, and it is the only one nobody can build a factory to take from you.

One American startup built a robot without China. Read the receipt before you cheer.

14 August 2026

A startup this week made a boast that would have sounded unremarkable a decade ago and sounds almost heroic now: it built a robot without China. Wired told the story with the tone of a triumph. Read to the end of the invoice and it is closer to a confession.

The piece, in Wired, profiles a firm that set out to source a robot’s components anywhere but China. It got most of the way there. Mostly. That word is doing an enormous amount of work, and it is the whole story. Because while one Western company was auditing its parts list for provenance, the numbers coming out of China last week were of a different order entirely. Fresh data circulating this week put China at roughly 97 percent of the world’s humanoid robot output. Unitree opened its subscription on the STAR Market on 10 August at 150.80 yuan a share, a valuation near 61 billion yuan, the first pure-play humanoid listing on China’s exchanges. Its supplier ecosystem is throwing off 20-billion-yuan valuations of its own. And in Hubei this week, seven national standards for testing humanoid robots were formally launched. Not products. Standards. The rules everyone else will one day be measured against.

Hold those two facts side by side. One company proving it can escape China’s supply chain, celebrated as an achievement. One country writing the grammar of the industry, treated as background noise. The headline is the plucky escape. The story is what you had to escape from.

The reason a China-free robot is news is that it is hard, and it is hard because China spent fifteen years making it hard. Not through malice, through mastery. The batteries, the rare-earth magnets, the actuators, the harmonic drives, the motors: the boring middle of the machine, the parts nobody photographs, are overwhelmingly Chinese, and they are Chinese because China chose to own the unglamorous layer while the West chased the demo. A backflip trends. A supply chain compounds. Go and look at Chengdu, the city the West files under pandas and hotpot and slow living, and behind that postcard sits a dense weave of factories, labs and robotics lines quietly building the thing itself. The relaxed image is real. It is also cover.

For anyone who sells things, the lesson is not to panic about tariffs or to romanticise reshoring. It is to understand what resilience actually costs. The Wired startup did an admirable thing, and it did it by accepting higher prices, thinner options and a smaller catalogue of what is even possible to build. That is the real exchange rate of independence, and every brand and retailer weighing a supply chain should price it honestly rather than sloganeer about it. You can decouple. You will pay for it in money, in speed, and in ambition. Sometimes that price is worth paying. Pretending it is free is how you lose twice.

There is a harder truth underneath, and it is the one the standards story tells. Whoever writes the test methods shapes the market. Hubei launching national testing standards while Washington debates banning a dancing robot is the entire asymmetry in one week. One side is arguing about what to keep out. The other is deciding what counts as good.

What to watch. Watch the standards, not the share price. Unitree’s listing will grab the headlines, but the seven testing standards out of Hubei are the quieter tell. When a country moves from making the robots to defining how all robots are judged, it has stopped competing in the market and started owning it.

The Roth Read. If your resilience plan is a press release about being China-free, you have mistaken a gesture for a strategy. Map your real dependencies, price the cost of leaving each one, and decide which are worth the premium and which are pride. Independence is a line item, not a slogan, and the brands that survive the next decade will be the ones honest enough to read the invoice.

The robot you never see is the one already picking your order

11 August 2026

Ask people what a robot looks like and they picture a face, two legs, a hand that waves. The robot that actually touches your life has none of those. It is a squat orange trolley in a warehouse in eastern China, and it has probably already handled something you ordered this week.

The BBC went inside a facility run by Geek+, which it describes as the world’s largest supplier of autonomous mobile warehouse robots. The pictures are undramatic on purpose: fleets of low, flat machines gliding under shelves, lifting them, carrying the whole rack to a human who picks the item and sends it on. A company executive put the honest part plainly. The early challenge, he said, was getting customers to believe such robots could create real value. That belief problem is now solved. The market has moved from proving the idea to buying it at scale.

Here is why that matters more than any humanoid demo you saw this month. The debate about robots and work keeps staging itself as a confrontation: the machine that walks in and takes the job. That is the wrong picture. The real displacement does not arrive on two legs and announce itself. It arrives as a floor plan. It arrives as a warehouse redesigned around the machine, where the human is no longer the picker but the exception the machine defers to, the pair of hands that handles what the shelf-carrier cannot. The work does not vanish. It is quietly rewritten, and the terms of the rewrite are set by whoever supplies the robots.

Right now, increasingly, that is China. Not because of some sudden leap in cleverness, but for reasons that are structural and dull and therefore durable. China builds the motors, the batteries and the chassis at a cost and speed no one else matches, and it deploys at a scale that turns every warehouse into a live test bed. Geek+ did not win the global warehouse by inventing a wheel. It won by iterating faster, shipping cheaper, and running more robots in more buildings than anyone else, until the learning compounded. While the West argued about whether automation was ethical, the fulfilment centre behind your Saturday delivery was quietly being run from Suzhou.

For anyone who runs a retail operation, this is the uncomfortable truth beneath the humanoid theatre. The efficiency that lets a rival undercut you on delivery speed and price is not visible on the shop floor and not printed on the box. It is upstream, in a building you will never tour, powered by machines you did not choose and cannot easily match. Your customer feels only the outcome: it came faster, it cost less. They will never know a robot did it, and they will not care. That is precisely the point. The most consequential robot is the one that has been designed to disappear.

And the jobs question deserves better than the two lazy answers. It is not the robot apocalypse, and it is not the comforting line that new work always appears. It is a redistribution of who holds the skill and who holds the leverage. The warehouse worker becomes a supervisor of throughput, faster to train and easier to replace, while the value migrates to the software and the supplier. A society that wants good work out of this has to fight for it deliberately. It will not fall out of the machine on its own.

What to watch. Watch the gap between the robots we photograph and the robots we buy. The humanoids get the headlines and the funding rounds; the wheeled workhorses get the contracts. When a Western retailer announces a fulfilment upgrade this year, read the fine print for whose robots are inside. The name on the invoice is the real story.

The Roth Read. Stop watching the robot that waves. Watch the one that hides. If the efficiency that beats you on price and speed is built into a warehouse you have never seen, running on machines from a supplier you never chose, then your competitive edge is already being set by someone else’s floor plan, and you should decide today whether you are going to own that layer or rent it.

The robot can jump. The question is who owns the ground it lands on.

7 August 2026

A humanoid robot leapt, wobbled, and stayed on its feet. That is the clip going round this week. The real story is not in the air. It is in who built the thing, and where.

The AGIBOT A3 Ultra, from the Shanghai firm AgiBot, has been shown clearing jumps, recovering its balance in a heartbeat, and holding its footing on uneven ground. The demonstration is genuinely impressive: controlled landings, smooth gait, fast recovery. It arrives the same week Google DeepMind detailed Gemini Robotics 2, a model that claims whole-body control from feet to fingertips and the ability to adapt to any two-armed robot in hours, and Xiaomi published Xiaomi-Robotics-1, trained on 100,000 hours of data across more than 1,700 scenarios, from homes to industrial sites. Three signals, one week. The brain and the body are both improving fast, and two of the three names are Chinese.

We have been trained to watch the acrobatics. A robot that can jump feels like a milestone because a jump is legible: we know what it costs a human body to do it well. But balance recovery is a solved-enough problem to be a demo reel. The harder, quieter breakthroughs are the ones you cannot film in a single dramatic take. A policy model that generalises to a task it was never shown. A data pipeline that turns 100,000 hours of raw motion into something a machine can learn from. Those do not trend. They compound.

Here is why a retailer or a brand owner should read past the highlight. The value in the next decade of robotics does not sit in the leg that jumps. It sits in the stack beneath it: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the manufacturing lines that turn a prototype into ten thousand units at a price a warehouse operator will actually pay. That stack is, today, disproportionately Chinese. Which is why the most telling story in robotics this week was not the jump at all. It was the quieter line from Washington: apparently roughly 90 per cent of US robotics research is now done using Chinese-made robots, and the US government is weighing a ban.

Sit with that number. The country that wants to lead this field is running its own experiments on hardware it does not make and may soon forbid. You cannot legislate a supply chain into existence overnight. China did not arrive here by luck or by copying. It arrived by controlling the boring parts: the components, the assembly, the willingness to put machines into hotels and restaurants and logistics floors and learn from the mess of the real world while others wrote white papers. AgiBot jumps because the ecosystem around AgiBot lets it iterate cheaply and fast.

So the correct reaction to the A3 Ultra is not awe, and not fear. It is a question about dependency. If your operation is planning to deploy service or fulfilment robots in the next three years, the machine in your building will very likely have been born in a Chinese supply chain, whatever badge is on the chassis. That is a commercial fact before it is a political one, and it will shape your costs, your options, and your resilience.

What to watch. Not the next jump. Watch whether the US ban moves from proposal to policy, and what it does to the price and availability of research-grade humanoids in the West. A ban that removes the cheapest hardware without replacing it does not protect an industry. It grounds it.

The Roth Read. Stop scoring these robots on what they can do and start asking who you will depend on to buy one. The clip you shared this week showed a machine that can jump; the balance sheet you sign in three years will show who controls the parts. If your robotics strategy has a hardware plan but no supply-chain plan, you do not have a strategy. You have a highlight reel.

Forget the backflips. China is teaching robots to clock in.

6 August 2026

For years the story from China’s robotics labs came with a soundtrack: a whir of servos, a crowd gasping, a humanoid landing a backflip. Impressive. Also beside the point. The signal this week is quieter and far more consequential. In an underground lab in Beijing, and on a training floor in Hefei, China has stopped asking whether its robots can dance. It is asking whether they can work.

A Chinese robotics firm, Gaobot, put the case plainly to camera this week: for decades industrial robots have done one thing, thousands of times, on a fixed program. Bolt here. Weld there. Repeat. What China now wants is a machine that can handle the mess of a real factory, the odd angle, the dropped part, the job nobody bothered to write a routine for. On 6 August, at a pre-training ground for embodied intelligence in Hefei, 83 robots from different companies were put through more than thirty replicated real-world scenes: the home, the shop floor, the warehouse. Not a demo. A rehearsal for employment.

The numbers behind this are not modest. IDC expects China’s spending on embodied intelligence to climb from 1.4 billion US dollars to 77 billion over five years, a compound growth rate near 94 per cent. Embodied AI has, for the first time, been written into the national government work report. Unitree, which shipped 5,500 humanoids last year, more than anyone on earth, has filed to go public. The language coming out of the sector is telling: 2026 is being called the year of mass-production commercialisation, the year the work leaves the lab.

Here is why a retailer should read this over their coffee, not skim past it. The West has spent this year debating the humanoid as spectacle and as threat: will it take my job, can it fold my laundry, is it safe. China has quietly reframed the question as a supply-chain one. A machine that follows a fixed program is a tool. A machine that learns a new task from watching, that adapts to a scene it has not seen, is closer to labour. And labour, unlike tooling, scales into every corner of an economy: the stockroom, the loading bay, the shop floor at closing time.

Notice, too, where these robots are being sold. Unitree and AgiBot are not just filing IPOs; they are opening shops. A flagship store in Beijing. An Agibot deployment inside a JD MALL in Shanghai, fitted out as a retail complex, around five million yuan of investment in a single store. The West imagines robots arriving through the factory door. China is building the retail entrance first, letting the public meet the machine over the counter, where familiarity, and demand, are made. Dobot has gone further still, launching a humanoid pitched at the young family and the home.

The mechanism matters, and it is not magic. China’s edge is structural: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the assembly lines sit inside the same borders as the labs. When the New Yorker’s Kai-Fu Lee says the two countries are now “two different universes,” this is the concrete meaning of it. One universe is arguing about what the robot might mean. The other is collecting the training data, thirty scenes at a time, and pricing the shelf space.

What to watch. Watch the training grounds, not the trade shows. WAIC gives you the polished demo; the Hefei data-collection floor gives you the roadmap. When a single site is running 83 robots across warehouse, shop and home scenes, the next headline is not a better backflip. It is a purchase order.

The Roth Read. Stop watching Chinese robots for the trick and start watching them for the task. If your competitor’s stockroom is being rehearsed on a training floor in Hefei this year, you do not have a technology question, you have a cost-base question, and it is already being answered without you. The West is grading these machines on whether they can amaze us. China is grading them on whether they can be hired.

China did not spend last week building video tools. It was building eyes.

5 August 2026

Every retailer who watched three Chinese labs ship video models in seven days filed the news under marketing. Cheaper ads, faster content, a problem for the agency. Wrong drawer. What landed last week was the perception layer for the machines that will one day walk your shop floor, and it landed open, and it landed cheap.

The launches came within days of each other. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 now generates thirty seconds of video with sound in a single pass, holding characters, scenes and camera logic together across a whole narrative rather than one lucky shot. MiniMax’s H3 does fifteen seconds with stereo audio generated jointly rather than bolted on, and on 3 August MiniMax put the weights on Hugging Face for anyone to download. Alibaba closed the week with Qwen3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, which now sits second in the world on the public leaderboard for reading images and visual material.

So run the telescope the other way. A model that keeps thirty seconds coherent, objects that persist behind an obstacle, weight that falls the way weight falls, a cup that is still on the table after the camera moves, has not learned to draw. It has learned how the world behaves. Generation is only the exam. The syllabus is physics, permanence and consequence. And the same weights that let a machine imagine a scene let it read one.

Reading a scene, fast, in bad light, with a person moving through it, is the entire job of a robot’s eyes.

That is the triangulation, and it is why this is a retail story rather than a media one. China already holds the other two legs. By industry counts it ships the overwhelming majority of the world’s humanoid robots, and TrendForce expects Chinese output to nearly double this year, with Unitree and AgiBot taking around eighty per cent of shipments. It holds the motors, the batteries, the rare earths, and the appetite to put machines in public before the ethics committee has finished its report. What it lacked was sight worth putting behind the visor. It is now building that in the open and giving it away.

Price finishes the argument. DeepSeek’s V4-Flash update, the least photogenic of the week’s launches and probably the most consequential, costs roughly three cents to run the full Artificial Analysis intelligence battery, against $3.15 for the Western frontier. A robot has a battery, not a data centre. Perception has to be almost free before it can live inside a body on a shop floor, and last week it became almost free.

A caution worth keeping. None of this means the machine understands anything. Video models still get physics wrong in ways that are amusing in a clip and unacceptable in a machine holding a bottle near a customer’s child. A convincing picture of a grasp is not a grasp, and that distance is where the next two years of the argument will be fought.

The direction, though, is not ambiguous. The robot that eventually watches your shelves, greets your customer and judges whether that customer is confused or annoyed will not be running perception you bought from a vendor you can name. It will be running weights someone downloaded, most likely trained in China, tuned by a supplier three tiers below the name above your door. And it will still be your brand doing the looking.

What to watch. Not the next video demo, and not the next leaderboard. Watch for the moment a Chinese maker ships a robot whose perception layer is one of these video models, and says so. When those two industries start sharing a checkpoint, the cost of machine sight collapses the way the cost of machine text already has, and every question retailers assumed they had until 2030 arrives early.

The Roth Read. Stop treating AI video as a marketing line item and start asking who supplies your machines’ eyes, because you are about to buy vision the way you buy electricity: from someone else, invisibly, with no say in how it was made. Put that question on your risk register this quarter. The machine watching your customer speaks for you, whoever trained it.

China’s Suning Buys Carrefour China

23 June 2019

Today China’s Suning.com has announced that it will buy 80% of Carrefour China.

The deal is structured in a way that The Carrefour Group will sell 80% of its equity interest in Carrefour China to Suning.com. This is a cash transaction valuing Carrefour China at an enterprise value of €1.4 billion. The Carrefour Group will retain a 20% stake in the business and two seats out of seven on Carrefour China’s Supervisory Board. Suning has the right to buy the remaining 20% after a period.

Carrefour was a pioneer in China bring the hypermarket format to an excited Chinese Consumer in 1995.

I remember being at their first store opening and looking at the expressions of delight and amazement on the faces of Chinese consumers as they had not seen anything like this type of format or vast ranges and choice before.

Carrefour were the first western grocery and hypermarket retailer in China to realise the critical importance of trying to re-create the buzz, excitement and feeling of freshness of the Chinese wet market inside the hypermarket.

Today Carrefour has 210 hypermarkets and 24 convenience stores in China. This has generated in 2018 net sales of €3.6 billion (RMB 28.5 billion) and EBITDA of €66 million (RMB 516 million). It has had negative like for like sales – -5.9% in 2018 following -5.5 in 2017.

Other than generating needed cash for Carrefour and a China exit they were looking for, what does this transaction tell us about retail in China and globally?

Well much…

Suning.com is one of China’s leading physical and ecommerce retailers.

It has a network of over 8,881 physical stores in more than 700 cities across China from tier one’s to tier 4 and 5’s and runs the country’s 3rd largest B2C e-commerce platform.

One of the shareholder’s of Suning.com is Alibaba and this where it potentially gets really interesting…

Alibaba Group will soon have (when this deal closes after going through regulatory approval by Chinese the competition authorities (expected by December 2019) holdings in Auchan, RT-Mart and Carrefour in China as well as Suning. Alibaba invested some $4.6 Billion US Dollars for a 19.9% stake in Suning in August 2015. When Suning also agreed to invest 14 billion yuan to acquire 1.1 percent of Alibaba.

This gives Alibaba with its own growing network of physical stores called Hema / Hippo Fresh advantageous access to more physical space in China.

The first Hema store opened its physical doors in January 2016 and now has some 100+ stores across China. Consumers can buy their groceries and fresh products especially sea food both online and offline. Hema’s increasingly middle-class Chinese consumers are ordering their food for the evening on their commute home via their smart phones. Delivery is guaranteed for 30 minutes after an order has been placed if the customer lives within a 3km radius of a Hema store.

This proposition is one of the elements that Jack Mar  refers to as “New Retail”.

 

The combination of physical and virtual retailing is the key to “New Retail’s” success. Alibaba now has even move physical coverage available to rapidly accelerate its “New Retail” concepts and thinking. But whilst having physical and virtual stores is key , it’s useless unless you can digitise the entire supply chain, from growers, manufactures and every single element along the way , including the store…And that is where Alibaba “New Retail” really excels. It has a commanding lead in, thinking, technology and capability in digitising the entire supply chain and linking this to the consumer. The world outside of China should take note and learn. Whoever said physical retail is dead…