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Before the Dragon Boat Festival, listed company Luyitong announced that it planned to acquire a company whose main business is manufacturing chips for Bitcoin "mining machines" for 3.06 billion yuan.
The founder of the latter is Zhang Nangeng. He is well-known in the Bitcoin community and is known as "Pumpkin Zhang". Five years ago, he was an engineering graduate student who stayed in his dormitory and played anime. After that, he started a business to develop and produce chips for Bitcoin mining.
In recent years, Bitcoin has experienced ups and downs, and its price has fluctuated greatly. After May this year, the price of Bitcoin began to soar again.
In this trend, Zhang Nangeng sold the company to Luyitong for 3 billion yuan. If the restructuring is completed, the 33-year-old "Pumpkin Zhang" will gain nearly 500 million yuan in wealth.
A homeboy started a business and became a rich man
One year and four months after its listing, Luyitong began planning its first major asset restructuring.
The transaction plan shows that the company intends to acquire all the equity of Canaan Creative from Zhang Nangeng and 14 other parties by paying 1.061 billion yuan in cash and issuing shares to pay 1.999 billion yuan. The total transaction price is 3.06 billion yuan.
Canaan Creative was founded in April 2013, and it has just been three years since its establishment. Its main trademark is "Avalon Miner" and its legal representative is Zhang Nangeng.
If the acquisition goes through smoothly, Zhang Nangeng, the founder of Canaan Creative, nicknamed "Pumpkin Zhang", will become a billionaire.
(Zhang Nangeng, born in 1983, became the big winner of this 3 billion yuan deal. Five years ago, he was still a graduate student in engineering.)
Zhang Nangeng was born in 1983. In 2011, Zhang Nangeng, who majored in circuit design, was studying for a master's degree at Beihang University. Before he came into contact with Bitcoin, Zhang Nangeng's "life was very boring" and he "often used animation to kill time."
This year, Zhang Nangeng accidentally got to know Bitcoin. He used the professional skills he learned to make a machine for mining Bitcoin and sold it abroad to earn extra money. In 2013, Zhang Nangeng and his partners founded Canaan Creative. According to information, the four natural person shareholders of Canaan Creative, including Zhang Nangeng, were all born in the 1980s, and the youngest was born in 1985.
According to the consideration paid by Luyitong to several shareholders, after the transaction is completed, the net worth of Zhang Nangeng and the other three will reach nearly 500 million yuan, and the net worth of another person will exceed 100 million yuan. Canaan Creative will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Luyitong, and Zhang Nangeng will become a shareholder holding 6.73% of the shares of the listed company.
"Five years ago, he was a penniless engineering student, and five years later, he became a shareholder of a listed company." A netizen who had known Zhang Nangeng for many years commented.
In January this year, Zhejiang Provincial Party Secretary Xia Baolong praised Canaan Creative by name at the "Returnee Students Innovation Symposium" held locally, saying that he "highly praises the development of Canaan Creative, hopes that Zhejiang will become a national blockchain development and application highland, and hopes that Canaan Creative will continue to lead the development of blockchain applications."
Three natural persons bought more than 50 million mining chips
As Canaan Creative's main product, the Avalon mining machine is mainly used for "Bitcoin mining". Avalon is essentially a chip used for repeated calculations. Canaan Creative is responsible for the design and sales of the chip, and the foundry part is completed by TSMC.
(This is what a Bitcoin mining machine looks like, the core component of which is the Avalon chip. The picture comes from Baidu Tieba)
The plan shows that Canaan Creative only started actual operations in the second half of 2015. The company's net profit for the whole year of 2015 was only 2.45 million yuan; but in the first four months of this year, Canaan Creative has achieved a net profit of 44.49 million yuan.
How did the short-term surge in net profit come about? “After developing the AvalonMiner digital blockchain computing device and launching it on the market in the second half of 2015, the number of customers and orders increased, and revenue grew significantly,” Canaan Creative said.
The list of the top five customers shows that from January to April this year, the largest customer "Chen Jiancheng" made purchases worth 33.76 million yuan. In addition, there are two unfamiliar natural persons "Liu Hui" and "Chen Jing" among the top five customers. The total purchases of the two in the first four months exceeded 22 million yuan.
The plan did not explain the backgrounds of these three natural persons, nor did it mention why the three natural persons purchased chips for mining Bitcoin.
(Canaan Creative's financial status and major customers)
"We focus on real business and don't want to hype concepts"
Luyitong's main business is the manufacture and sale of high and low voltage electrical equipment. Why did it pay a high premium to acquire a company related to Bitcoin?
In this regard, Luyitong explained that after the transaction is completed, the company will be transformed into a dual-core business company, "providing more reliable performance guarantees for listed companies."
However, some investors believe that Luyitong’s acquisition is intended to cater to the market’s concept of “Bitcoin” and is “telling a story”.
On June 17, a person from Luyitong Securities Department told company secrets that the company acquired Canaan Creative based on its optimistic view of the company's chip development technology, not for the concept of Bitcoin.
“We had no idea that Bitcoin would become so popular recently, and we didn’t care whether it was popular or not,” the source said. “We are focused on doing business and don’t want to hype up concepts. The market may have misunderstood this aspect.” She also said that she was “confident” that the asset restructuring would eventually be approved by the regulators. |
