Brils lists on KOSDAQ after pricing its IPO at the top of the range and drawing 1,676-to-1 retail demand

Brils, an Incheon company that builds robot cells for car, battery and chip plants, began trading on KOSDAQ on Oct 1 after pricing its initial public offering at 19,500 won, the top of its 16,500 to 19,500 won range, the company said in a press release. Retail investors applied for 502,878,630 shares on Sep 17 and 18, a ratio of 1,676.26 to 1, and posted 4.9031 trillion won of subscription margin across 113,800 applications.

The ratio implies about 300,000 shares on offer to retail investors (502,878,630 divided by 1,676.26). Brils did not state the total size of the offering in these releases. Institutions committed to lock-ups on 21.75% of their allocation, which the company said cut the share of stock tradable on the first day to 21% from 26%. It plans to spend the proceeds on expanding its Songdo plant by 2,993.52 square metres to 4,654.54 square metres, building a physical AI data centre with 32 GPUs inside a planned humanoid centre, a mass-production hub in Asan, its Michigan subsidiary and a parts and AI lab in Daegu.

What sets Brils apart from most listed Korean robot companies is that it makes money. It reported 2025 revenue of 23.8 billion won and operating profit of 2.43 billion won, a 10.2% margin, and consolidated first-half 2026 revenue of 13.657 billion won with operating profit of 841 million won. Exports were about $5.1 million in the half, up 130.9%, and 56.7% of revenue; sales to the US alone, about $3.71 million, were 41.3%. The company set up BRILS USA LLC in Michigan in April and won a bumper-line project in Tennessee in January, it said.

By MEKAWIRE's count from company filings, Brils's 10.2% operating margin for 2025 is higher than that of the four listed Korean robot makers compared here, ahead of Robotis at 8.6% and far from the losses at Rainbow Robotics, Neuromeka and Doosan Robotics. The comparison has a caveat. Brils is mainly a systems integrator that designs, builds and services automation cells using industrial robots, cobots and AMRs, with more than 1,300 projects behind it, while the loss-making peers sell their own robot arms and platforms and spend heavily on development. First-half operating margin also fell to 6.2% (841 million / 13,657 million won).

The IPO story Brils sold investors is the next step: modular robot platforms, teleoperation and imitation learning to capture skilled workers' motions, and humanoid and quadruped robots shown at the listing ceremony. None of those has produced disclosed revenue yet. The numbers to watch are the second-half sales the company expects from medical-device customer AirLife, about $1.3 million, and whether the Michigan unit adds assembly in the US as planned.