CNPC's Kunlun takes 60% of a new industrial robot venture with Unitree, which gets 20%

China National Petroleum Corp.'s equipment arm is setting up an industrial robot company with Unitree, and it will own most of it. A merger notice published by the Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Regulation on Nov. 4 shows CNPC Kunlun Manufacturing and its concerted party, Kunlun Capital, holding 60% of a new joint venture for "industrial embodied-intelligence robot solutions." Unitree and Beijing Fanjie Intelligence hold 20% each. The notice is open for comment until Nov. 13.

The split shows who is meant to run the business. CNPC is building its own robot integrator, with Unitree as the hardware partner, instead of buying robots one project at a time. Unitree makes humanoids, quadrupeds and robot components. Fanjie, founded in Beijing on April 20, 2026, develops AI models; 机器人前瞻 reports that it works on combining world models with embodied foundation models and was incubated by the Beijing Weishi Embodied Intelligence Research Institute and a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Automation. The majority sits with the customer, a group whose business is oil and gas, engineering services and petroleum construction. All three will jointly control the venture, which keeps Unitree at the table, but this is a different role for Kunlun: in a notice the same regulator published in April, it took 20% of a gas-turbine blade venture in which Shanghai Lianqing Power held 80%.

The two sides were already linked through capital. Kunlun Capital took 903,290 shares, about RMB 136 million, in Unitree's August IPO as a strategic investor with a 12-month lock-up, China Energy News reported at the time. Kunlun Manufacturing itself was registered in Hebei's Xiong'an New Area on Oct. 20, 2023, and makes energy equipment.

The notice also sizes the market the venture is entering. In industrial embodied-robot solutions, in China and worldwide, it lists Unitree's share, the venture's share and the parties' combined share at 0–5% each.