The buzz surrounding humanoid robots continues to grow as they move from prototype toward early commercial development, with automotive manufacturing looking to be the big adopter in the early stages. IDTechEx analysis suggests declining hardware costs are reshaping the economic baseline, but even so ROI will greatly depend upon utilisation and effective output. The cost curve is certainly improving, but how or if the ROI is realised will depend strongly on the deployment environment. The core variable in humanoid robot economics, says IDTechEx, is not only equipment cost, but the effective value of the work delivered by the robot. In practical terms, this means whether the robot can perform economically valuable tasks consistently, reliably and at a sufficient level of productivity across different environments. And large-scale commercialisation will depend on continued improvements in software capability, task generalisation, system integration and deployment efficiency, rather than hardware cost decline alone.