Bitmain earns $2.5 billion a year from Antminer, second only to HiSilicon in China

Zhan Ketuan, co-founder and co-CEO of Bitmain, a domestic custom chip design and development company, disclosed to the media for the first time that Bitmain's revenue in 2017 was about 2.5 billion US dollars. At the same time, Zhan Ketuan said that Bitmain has surpassed Spreadtrum and become the second largest chip design company in the mainland after HiSilicon.

Moreover, Bitmain has become TSMC's second largest customer in China since the second half of last year, and is likely to rank among the top five customers in the world this year. Hou Mingxiao, a semiconductor industry analyst at Lyon Securities, estimates that cryptocurrency mining chips will account for 7% of TSMC's revenue this year, of which about 80% of orders come from Bitmain.

It is reported that Bitmain was founded in Beijing in 2013. At that time, there were about 50 manufacturers in the industry engaged in the development of mining machine chips. By 2017, Bitmain had monopolized 80% of the global shipments of mining machine chips. One of the important reasons why it has become one of the few winners in the mining machine industry is that Bitmain does not sell chips directly, but sells the chips on mining machines as a whole to increase added value.

The mining chips designed by Bitmain also have core competitiveness. Its self-developed Bitcoin mining ASIC chips have the highest computing efficiency per unit power consumption, and the mass production scale reaches billions. In 2017, Bitmain has jumped into the top five chip design companies in mainland China. Currently, Bitmain has more than 1,000 employees, of which more than 60% are R&D personnel.

The blockchain industry is currently in the limelight, but no one can predict the market situation after the limelight ends. Since 2015, Bitmain has noticed the risks of over-reliance on Bitcoin mining machines, so it started a second venture and got involved in the research and development and production of AI chips.