China's humanoid robot industry is not being built from scratch. It is being assembled from the supply chain that already exists for smartphones. In April, a humanoid robot called the Honor D1 completed the Beijing half-marathon in 48 minutes and 19 seconds under remote control and 50 minutes and 26 seconds in fully autonomous mode, beating every other robot in the 112-team field. The machine that won the race was built using liquid-cooling technology originally developed for Honor's smartphone division, with structural components supplied by Lens Technology and AAC Technologies, two of the largest precision parts manufacturers in China's mobile phone supply chain. The company that assembled those components into a bipedal robot capable of running 21 kilometres without overheating is the same company that, until recently, was known primarily for putting screens on phones.
The supply chain pivot
Lingyi iTech, a Shenzhen-based manufacturer that supplies precision components to Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi, announced in early 2026 that it was going "all in" on embodied intelligence. The company is building a super factory in Beijing targeting production of 10,000 humanoid robots per year by the end of 2026 and 500,000 per year by 2030. Lens Technology, which makes cover glass for iPhones and Samsung Galaxy devices, supplied structural components for the Honor D1. AAC Technologies, the world's largest manufacturer of miniature acoustic components for smartphones, provided additional precision parts. These are not robotics startups. They are the companies that built the physical infrastructure of the smartphone era, and they are repurposing that infrastructure for the next product category.
The logic is industrial, not speculative. China's smartphone market shipped roughly 280 million units in 2025, but growth has stalled. The components that go into a phone — precision motors, sensors, thermal management systems, lightweight structural materials, battery cells — are the same components that go into a humanoid robot. The factories that manufacture them at scale already exist. The engineers who designed them are already employed. The pivot is not from phones to robots. It is from one form factor to another, using the same supply chain.
Factory floor deployment
UBTech, one of China's largest humanoid robot companies, partnered with Foxconn in 2025 to deploy its Walker S1 robots on iPhone assembly lines. The Walker S2, the next-generation model, entered mass production in early 2026 with orders exceeding 800 million yuan. Foxconn itself is now planning humanoid robot manufacturing lines in Vietnam, with production trials scheduled for September 2026 and official production beginning in November. The company that built more iPhones than any other factory on earth is preparing to build the robots