Text | Silicon Arrival
Who would have thought that the most profitable business in 2025 would be renting robots to shopping malls for marketing.
At that time, as long as you had a humanoid robot in your hands, you could make a net profit of 10,000 to 20,000 yuan a day.
However, just one year later, this opportunity for sudden wealth, which was filled with gold, completely turned into a strangulation war.
Large manufacturers entered the market, rents plummeted, and 90% of new players lost money.
The trend of scarcity arbitrage has come to an end. Where will robot leasing go?
01 Enter the market with a head start
The robot leasing business is experiencing an almost out-of-control craze.
From those who run advertising companies, those who rent digital cameras, to ordinary individual entrepreneurs, everyone is squeezing in with red eyes.
QiChacha data shows that the number of domestic robot rental-related companies has exceeded 153,000.
In 2025 alone, there will be an influx of 38,200 households.
By 2026, the momentum has not diminished, but has become even crazier. In just three months, 9114 new companies have been added, with an average of nearly 100 novices entering the battlefield every day.
Even if the scope is narrowed down to the most cutting-edge and highest threshold humanoid robot rental, according to estimates, there are about 3,000 active players across the country in a short period of time.
Everyone is placing bets desperately, because what is in front of them is a huge profit cake that is expanding at an abnormal speed.
2025 is known as the first year of the industry’s explosion, and the market size of the entire industry will directly reach 1 billion.
In 2026, the market for the whole year is expected to break through the 10 billion yuan mark in one fell swoop, a year-on-year surge of 900%.
In one year, it grew tenfold.
Facing the trend of tenfold growth in a year, countless entrepreneurs who smell the money have invested all their wealth to enter the market.
However, can they really make money?
02 I once really lay down and counted money
In 2025, the robot rental market will be a carnival period of “whatever you have is what you get”.
A Yushu G1, which sells for about 100,000 yuan, can be rented for up to 30,000 yuan per day in a scarce market environment.
In other words, as long as the machine is rented out for 3.3 consecutive days, the cost of buying the machine will be fully recovered.
Mr. Lei from Changsha is a typical example.
He bought an advanced version of G1 for 319,000 yuan and rented it out for 8,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan per day.
According to this rent, as long as you work for 40 days, the cost of buying the machine will be fully recovered. The schedule will be fully booked for two months. After that, one day of renting will be a net profit of one day, which is a complete “recovery myth”.
Arong from Guangdong has amplified this logic to the extreme.
He spent more than 3 million yuan to stock up on goods. With the scarce spot resources at hand, he recorded 2 million yuan in one month in February 2025, and by May he had a cumulative revenue of 5 million yuan.
This is not the ceiling yet.
It is said that making 5 million yuan in three months is only average among peers. Those who make more can earn more than 10 million yuan in a quarter.
The story gilded these pioneers and ignited the dream of getting rich for countless people across the country.
“Qingtian Rental”, which was only established at the end of December 2025, is even more popular.
By mid-2026, less than half a year after its establishment, it had more than 4,000 dispatch robots, signed nearly 400 city partners, and its valuation was pushed to 7 billion yuan.
For Qingtianzu alone, there are more than 20,000 people queuing up to sign up as partners to buy machines and collect rent.
Everyone is immersed in the illusion of buying a machine to collect rent, thinking that this is a money printing machine that can make money for a long time.
But they didn’t realize that the huge profits only existed because there was “short supply” at the time.
When thousands of robots flood into the market at the same time, the nightmare begins immediately.
03 Reality slapped me hard
Before the wind gets hot, the cruel price war has pushed ordinary people into the pit of fire.
The big factories have come in.
Big manufacturers have always been attacking in terms of dimensionality reduction, and their way of grabbing the market is to directly flip the table.
The daily rental price of JD.com’s self-operated Yushu U1 has dropped to 1,571 yuan. Qingtian Rental has launched “1 yuan flash rental” in 10 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. A two-hour experience only costs 1 yuan. The reservation channel attracts more than 500,000 visits, and the fastest tickets are sold out in 7 seconds.
With a roll from a big factory, ordinary people are instantly trapped.
The once crowded “Robot Stall Street” in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, has been basically emptied out.
The daily rent of most robots has also dropped from 10,000 to 20,000 to hundreds or even thousands, and most ordinary people have fallen into losses and quietly exited the industry.
But what is more fatal than the plummeting price is that this business has no stable demand at all.
Qingtian Rental data shows that entertainment performance and commercial marketing orders account for 65%.
To put it bluntly, customers rent robots not for work at all, but simply as moving props for greeting guests at shopping mall openings, handing out rings at weddings, and as a way to create new posts on WeChat Moments.
There is no repurchase for this kind of one-time transaction. Once the festival is over, the robot can only gather dust in the warehouse.
However, if the robot lies in the warehouse for one more day, it will become a banknote shredder running crazily.
Because the iteration speed of humanoid robots is comparable to that of smartphones, the average annual depreciation rate is as high as 20% to 30%, and one repair costs thousands or tens of thousands.
The engineering prototype that was bought for 300,000 to 800,000 yuan in 2024 now has a second-hand residual value of only 30,000 to 60,000 yuan, and the asset depreciates at an alarming rate.
Even if you finally get an order, this business has already turned into a hard-working industry.
Today’s robots do not have the ability to work autonomously. Every time an order is placed, a human engineer must be sent to accompany the robot throughout the process and conduct on-site rehearsals to prevent crashes.
In essence, it has become “people serving machines.”
A boss revealed that their daily rent for bare metal dropped to 2,500 yuan, but with the operator’s labor and travel, the total price soared to 5,000 yuan.
Customers will turn away if they find it expensive, but if they have to pay for the order manually, they will lose money on the trip.
Therefore, there is a joking saying in the industry: “If you don’t get an order, you are waiting for death; if you get an order, you are courting death.”
04 Where is the way out for the future?
This reshuffle has forced the entire industry to think about, apart from one-time performances, what is the real value of robot rental?
Obviously, the second-tier dealer model of making money by buying robots and then renting them out is no longer viable.
Players who can really survive have already changed their playing style, mainly relying on three moves:
The first tip is that if you don’t make money with hardware, you can make a lot of money by customizing your skills.
For example, Hangzhou Xingshu Intelligence rents the robot hardware to you at almost the cost price. It relies on writing exclusive programs for the robots, making up a dance, playing Tai Chi, beating drums, or customizing a set of welcome words.
You can charge 500 to 2,000 yuan for adding an action, and you can pay in 3 days, and all you earn is pure profit.
The second trick is not to buy the machine yourself, but to build a platform to earn intermediary fees.
For example, Qingtian Rental doesn’t even buy a single machine, so it doesn’t strain the funds at all.
They only build a platform to collect idle robots across the country, and match them with anyone who wants to rent them. They earn intermediary service fees for each order and ensure income during droughts and floods.
The third trick is to not do shows in shopping malls, but work hard in factories to earn long-term meal tickets.
Shopping malls rent robots to hold events, and then cancel the rental when the heat is over.
But once the factory is used smoothly, the lease will be renewed for many years.
Robots have also begun to enter factories for park patrols, security inspection coordination, and workshop material handling. These types of light industrial orders already account for about 10% of the orders on the Qingtianzu platform.
Although 90% of the rentals on the market are commercial performances with fresh pictures, the prices of commercial performances have long been priced out.
In the future, the only way that leasing companies can survive and continue to make money is to work honestly and help customers solve specific problems, and don’t expect to earn unreliable eyeball fees.
History does not repeat itself, but it always rhymes with the same.
When drones and shared bicycles first broke out, exactly the same story happened.
First, the scarcity of production capacity triggered a profiteering spree across the entire network, then the influx of hot money from all sources led to vicious price bargaining, and finally 90% of those who followed the trend became cannon fodder.
