Bitmain Files For Its IPO With Hong Kong Stock Exchange

By Sumedha Bose

It is finally official, crypto-mining giant Bitmain has finally applied for its Initial Public Offering (IPO) with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Along with that, they have also submitted an IPO prospectus where they detail out their plan to list the company with a heavy voting rights structure. The existing shareholders will have greater voting rights. Previously Temasek had denied funding Bitmain’s IPO amidst controversies and rumours.

The company has still not revealed how much they expect to earn in revenue from the IPO. The public is also unsure about how much the value of the overall IPO would be. The number of shares that will be up for grabs remain a mystery too.

Bitmain has seen a massive upward curve as their customer base grew from 6,000 customers in 2015 to 80,000 customers in the first 6 months of 2018. The eanred an impressive revenue this year which is close to $2.845 billion including a net profit of $1.123 billion. Bitmain claims that  95% of the revenue made was from the sale of a whooping 2.56 million mining rigs.

The documentation clearly mentions that Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan, the co founders of the company – hold 20.25% and 36% shareholdings respectively.

With 11 functional mining operations in China, Bitmain is currently a huge name in the crypto mining domain. Each of these mining farms have the capacity to run almost 20,000 mining rigs. China is the main hub of mining operations for Bitmain, but it is now looking to expand its business to the U.S. It plans to bring three U.S.-based mining facilities online by the first quarter of 2019 – in Washington State, Texas and Tennessee.

Bitmain is also looking to invest in Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chip design which is a important component of crypto mining. What these chips essentially do is that they increase computational efficiency but make sure that lesser power is consumed.

The company is heavily staffing itself to pursue this strategy. The company had already built up a team of 840 full time engineers, by June, who would be focused on chip design, platform design, software, and hardware development and would account for 30% of its entire team.

It is also planning to get heavily involved in the blockchain ecosystem by investing in crypto start-ups.