九部门科技兴商意见：推动具身智能进入商贸与物流场景

The opinion turns commerce into an official deployment channel for embodied AI. For Chinese humanoid and service-robot makers, a nine-department document signed by MOFCOM, MIIT, NDRC and the central bank gives local commerce bureaus and state-linked retailers political cover to open stores, warehouses and delivery routes to pilots. Combined with the recommended national humanoid standards effective April 2027 and the sandbox clause, it lowers the cost of getting a robot into a real customer site, which is the scarce input for every humanoid programme.

The direct beneficiaries are the makers with service and logistics products already in volume: Unitree (more than 5,500 humanoids shipped in 2025), UBTech (921 full-size units sold in H1 2026, plus logistics and education lines) and AgiBot (more than 1,000 robots being placed in universities). Foreign rivals such as Figure AI (more than 350 robots delivered by April) and Agility have no comparable access to Chinese retail sites. In Korea and Japan, public-sector demand is being prepared through safety rules and procurement rather than through commerce scenarios.

No financial terms are attached to the opinion, so it changes demand expectations rather than cash flows. MIIT's reported 100,000-unit expectation, if it holds, would be about 14 times IFR's 2025 global full-size sales count, but the definitions differ and most of the Chinese volume appears to be smaller units. Investors pricing Chinese humanoid makers on unit growth should separate full-size from small-format volume; UBTech's 921 full-size units equal 2.3% of MIIT's H1 output figure.

Retail and logistics deployments favour cheaper, smaller and wheeled form factors, which shifts component demand toward low-cost actuators, cameras and edge compute rather than high-torque full-size joints. Chinese suppliers already dominate those lower tiers. For Korean, Japanese and German component makers the policy is a volume signal for China but not an opening: the document stresses safe and reliable open-source operating systems and domestic supply.

The SCIO transcript or an MIIT release that defines 'output' and confirms the 40,000 and 100,000 figures. Publication of the 2026 national humanoid standards system guide. The first named commerce sandbox pilots under measure 15, by city and retailer. The full-year 2026 humanoid output figure in early 2027.

Thesis: Beijing is buying demand for humanoids with access, not money, and the access is in commerce rather than manufacturing. Confidence: medium. The policy text is primary and clear; the volume figures are outlet-reported and their definition is unknown. A confirmed MIIT definition showing mostly full-size units would raise the importance of the 100,000 figure; evidence that pilots remain showroom deployments would lower it.

How does MIIT define humanoid output, and how many of the 40,000 units are full-size? Which retailers and logistics groups will open sites first, and on what commercial terms? Will local governments add subsidies on top of the 'existing channels'? How will the sandbox clause interact with product safety testing under the new standards?