Asthe market for humanoids reaches a fever pitch, soaring demand for their components has sparked a gold rush for the sector’s suppliers. Shares of Shanghai-listed Leader Harmonious Drive Systems, which makes robotic joints, or harmonic reducers in industry parlance, have jumped 40% in the past year on sizzling sales. The surge has minted a pair of new billionaires: company founder and chairman Zuo Yuyu, 56, and his older brother and vice chairman Zuo Jing, 61. Based on Thursday’s closing price of 203.8 yuan, the siblings, who each own a 17% stake, are worth $1 billion apiece.
Known also as Leaderdrive, the Suzhou-based company was set up in 2011 by Yuyu, whose mission was to make affordable components for robots. Today, it’s China’s largest manufacturer by market share of harmonic reducers, which operate as the joints of robots. According to J.P. Morgan, Leaderdrive’s domestic customers include humanoid heavyweights UBTech Robotics and Agibot. It has also fulfilled small-batch R&D orders from Tesla and Nvidia-backed Figure AI, the investment bank said. Leaderdrive doesn’t disclose the names of its customers and didn’t respond to a request for a comment about the brothers’ net worth.
J.P. Morgan estimates in a March report that Leaderdrive’s share in the Chinese harmonic reducer market is between 30% to 40%. The company also makes other components such as rotary actuators, which are the “muscles” that convert electrical signals into motion. These components are deployed in a range of applications from semiconductor manufacturing equipment to medical apparatus.
In 2025, Leaderdrive’s net profit more than doubled year-on-year to 124.4 million yuan ($18.2 million) on a 47% jump in revenue to 570.7 million yuan. The company attributed the rise to the booming market for industrial robots and humanoids. The components it makes for that segment accounted for 74% of its sales during that period. Those for mechanical equipment contributed nearly a fifth to total revenue, with the rest from components for computer numerical control (CNC) machines and medical equipment.
Leaderdrive, which derives 90% of its revenue from its home base, has begun expanding overseas markets. In February, it forged a joint venture with Taiwanese billionaire Chin Jong Hwa’s auto-parts supplier Minth Group to develop joint modules for humanoids in the U.S. The joint venture, noted J.P Morgan in a February report, “is well positioned to serve major customers such as Tesla, Figure AI, and Boston Dynamics, and is set to benefit from the accelerating adoption of humanoid robots in the U.S.”
A physics graduate from Nanjing University, Yuyu joined metal processing company Hengjia Metal in Suzhou in 1999 and was put in charge of its mechanical engineering business. He expanded the portfolio to include electrical components and secured big customers such as Switzerland’s ABB, U.S.’s General Electric and Japan’s Nachi-Fujikoshi, according to Leaderdrive’s 2020 prospectus.
In 2003, Yuyu veered into robotic components and started to work on the side to develop harmonic reducers. It wasn’t until 2011 that the first product was ready to be launched, which is when he set up Leaderdrive, according to the company’s prospectus. In an interview with state-owned newspaper Shanghai Securities News in 2020, Yuyu disclosed that his success was hard-won. “The core technology was firmly in the hands of Japanese firms. We had no blueprint but only a process of constant trial and error,” he recalled. “If there’s a secret to our success, it’s the ability to endure and the willingness to invest the time.”
His older sibling Jing, who was working in the government’s tax bureau, joined the company in 2014 as a general manager. The duo took the company public on Shanghai’s Star market in 2020, raising around 1.1 billion yuan in the IPO.
The Zuo brothers are the latest Chinese billionaires to amass a fortune from the robotics supply chain. Other billionaires include Wang Xinyang, founder of Changchun-based robotics image sensor maker Gpixel Changchun Microelectronics, and Howard Huang, founder of Shenzhen-headquartered Orbbec, which makes 3D vision cameras that enable robots to perceive depth like human eyes do.
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