At Tesla's annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, on Thursday evening, more than 75% of investors approved Elon Musk's $1 trillion CEO Performance Award. The package is tied to ambitious milestones, including nationwide robotaxi deployment, large-scale production of the Optimus humanoid robot, and market-capitalization thresholds designed to align long-term value creation with Musk's strategic vision to dominate the 2030s by controlling the most advanced technologies.

A limited internal production of Optimus has already begun at Tesla's Fremont, California factory. The goal next year is to ramp up series production with an eventual goal of a million humanoid robots per year.  

"So we're going to launch on the fastest production ramp of any product of any large complex manufactured product ever, starting with building a one million unit production line in Fremont. And that's Line One. And then a 10-million-unit-per-year production line here (at Giga Texas). I don't know where we're going to put the one hundred million unit production line, maybe on Mars. But I think it's going to literally get to one hundred million a year, maybe even a billion a year," Musk told investors at the annual shareholder meeting yesterday

In October, we cited Chinese media that said Tesla placed a $685 million order for linear actuators from Sanhua Intelligent Controls, with deliveries expected to start early next year. 

Tesla is the leader and one of the few U.S. companies that can scale humanoid robot production ahead of the 2030s. 

We shift our attention to China, where rare-earth minerals and high-tech factories are plentiful, and find that a number of robot companies are gearing up for mass production. 

Goldman Sachs analyst Jacqueline Du spoke with a handful of Chinese companies embedded within the humanoid robot supply chain, including Sanhua, Tuopu, Rongtai, Shuanghuan, Minth, Joyson, Zhaowei, Best Precision, and Shuanglin. 

Du found that most of these companies are ramping up series production in China, Thailand, and to a lesser extent, Mexico. 

Here are Du's key takeaways after her meeting with these companies that provide clients with a snapshot of the humanoid robot space in China:

• Most suppliers are actively planning capacity both in China and overseas (primarily in Thailand, and less in Mexico), to support potential humanoid robot mass production, though no company has yet confirmed sizable orders or definitive production timelines. Current capacity planning ranges from ~100k to 1mn robot equivalent units per year (which looks bullish on industry growth outlook vs GSe of 1.38mn units of global humanoid robot shipment by 2035E). Most firms intend to scale up gradually upon actual order placement and therefore not necessarily indicating an imminent oversupply risk but most supply chain companies have an optimistic forward-looking view on industry outlook;

• Across the ecosystem, suppliers are broadening their product portfolios, evolving from single components to integrated modules, expanding product categories from actuators to sensors and structural parts, each targeting ambitious market share gains. It is quite evident that all of these companies that are more or less levered to the automobile industry appear eager to expand into robotics components in search of new growth engines and at the same time to better utilize their existing capacities with certain production synergies;

• Many companies are aggressively showcasing their technical capabilities and scalable production readiness, emphasizing their rapid design-to-product turnaround, agile service as key comparative edge to secure and expand market share in the supply chain. We note mentions of robotics customers such as Tesla Optimus, Agibot, Leju, Xpeng, etc. which could suggest these companies are more likely the earlier ones which rely more on outside suppliers to kick start volume production of robots with timing commonly expected in 2H26E;

• We remain constructive on long run humanoid robot technology trend but will need to monitor the key robot products performance and concrete end-applications to assess whether a technology inflection point will be near in sight. Key checkpoints afterwards are: 1) Tesla Optimus Gen 3 launch by Feb/Mar 2026; 2) Public disclosure of China/global humanoid robot companies' 2026E order/shipment targets by end-2025/early-2026. We are Buy rated on Sanhua H, Inovance and Shuanghuan; Neutral rated on Sanhua A, Leaderdrive, Best Precision and Moon's Electric under our coverage which are related to the humanoid robot space.

Our coverage has focused on the rise of humanoid and robodogs:

Give it until the 2030s before these bots start entering the average household.

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