Canaan Creative, a major Chinese bitcoin miner manufacturer, has reportedly filed an IPO application with the U.S. SEC.
This article was originally published by 8btc and written by Lylian Teng.
Canaan Creative, one of the world’s largest bitcoin mining machine manufacturers, has filed an application for an initial public offering (IPO) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), people with knowledge of the matter disclosed.
According to the source, the AvalonMiner manufacturer has secretly filed its application with the SEC and reportedly aims to raise $200 million. It makes Canaan the first of China’s “big three” mining machine giants to move forward with a U.S. IPO application. 8btc has reached out to Canaan, but the company made no comment on the move.
The filing confirmed a January report from Bloomberg that the company was considering an IPO on U.S. soil. The move comes weeks after Canaan’s rival bitcoin miner makers, Bitmain and Ebang, were also reportedly seeking to go public in the U.S., with the former aiming to raise $300 million to $400 million through the shares sale in the U.S. Prior to this, Bitmain, Canaan and Ebang all failed in IPO attempts based in Hong Kong.
The trio’s U.S. IPO plans come as the bitcoin miner mega-sellers report soaring demand for mining machines amid the bitcoin rally that’s been running since April 2019. But it is still unknown whether this kind of business will be wanted in the U.S. capital market, especially after the hesitation from Hong Kong.
Based on the financial figures included in its Hong Kong IPO filing, the gross profit of Canaan Inc. in 2015, 2016 and 2017 was roughly $2 million (13.88 million yuan), $19 million (132 million yuan) and $88 million (604 million yuan), respectively.
Financial figures from Canaan, shown in the company’s prospectus for its Hong Kong IPO filing.
Founded in 2013, Hangzhou-based Canaan is known for producing China’s first bitcoin mining machine — AvalonMiner, which features customized, super-fast ASIC chips and marked the end of computer-based mining. In its recent funding round, the company reportedly raised several hundred million dollars, with its valuation standing at several billion dollars. According to the Hurun Greater China Unicorn Index 2018 released this January, Canaan was valued at roughly $2.2 billion (15 billion yuan).
Canaan’s road to an IPO has been full of twists and turns. The company had tried to list on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange via a backdoor listing in 2016, but the plan was canceled after failing to satisfy the regulatory requirements. In August 2017, the company submitted a listing application to the National Equities Exchange and Quotations, but ultimately it retreated from the domestic market under an unfriendly policy environment in March 2018. In May 2017, Canaan made a comeback targeting the Hong Kong market, but it let its IPO application lapse six months later.