Bloomberg: Bitmain to apply for IPO as early as September to raise $3 billion

Previously, there were reports that Bitmain may submit a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in September and is expected to be listed in Hong Kong at the end of this year or early next year. Recently, an article about Bitmain published by Bloomberg seems to have further confirmed this news.

Bloomberg quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Bitmain is preparing to go public in Hong Kong and plans to raise $3 billion. The article revealed that Bitmain will submit its listing application documents to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as early as September. The person familiar with the matter also said that Bitmain has not yet finalized the details of the listing and the fundraising target may change.

Regarding his views on listing, Wu Jihan said in May that he was open to the company's listing in Hong Kong or the United States, partly because it would provide early investors such as Sequoia Capital and IDG Capital with exit opportunities.

As the price of Bitcoin has been falling since the beginning of the year, if Bitmain successfully goes public, it will also show the confidence of the capital market in the cryptocurrency industry to a certain extent. The Bloomberg article also pointed out that if Bitmain successfully goes public, it will be a milestone event in the cryptocurrency industry.

For Bitmain, choosing an IPO may also mean that its future will no longer be limited to mining machines, and the funds brought by the listing will help it expand into other areas.

Previously, Wu Jihan had expressed the hope to expand into areas such as artificial intelligence. Bitmain's chips designed specifically for cryptocurrency mining machines are called ASICs, which can also be used in areas such as artificial intelligence (such as machine learning) that require a lot of computing.

In November 2017, Bitmain launched its AI brand SOPHON and announced the company's first dedicated custom chip for tensor computing acceleration processing for deep learning applications - BM1680, which is suitable for inference prediction (Inference) and training (Training) of deep neural networks such as CNN, RNN, and DNN.

Regarding Bitmain's AI strategy in 2018, Bitmain's Product Strategy Director Tang Weiwei once introduced that it will accelerate the implementation of AI products in public security, big data, the Internet and other fields.

In addition to Bitmain, other mining giants that have chosen IPO include Canaan Creative, which has applied for listing in Hong Kong and is exploring the field of artificial intelligence, and Ebang International, which has submitted a prospectus for listing in Hong Kong.

The recent weakness of the Hong Kong stock market, coupled with the Sino-US trade war, makes it unclear whether investors will flock in. Moreover, the income characteristics of miners are different from other types of companies. They are closely related to the cryptocurrency market, which has large fluctuations. We will continue to pay attention to the follow-up news of Bitmain.