For reference, and is anyone more technically-inclined in the chip fab space able to roadmap gen4 info now that's we're two weeks into the next quarter:
Brief Answers to Shareholder QuestionsFirst of all, we would like to explain the situation we had in this May. The sales of chips mainly happened before May, while the ramp-up speed of chip sales slowed down mainly because of the lack of flexible whole-device solutions (having features of easy transportation, widely available components, etc) from our customers (device producers). As dedicated projects on improving the design of BE200-based devices we believe we will see much better sales because the room for hash rate growth is still huge and our cost in terms of $/G is highly competitive.
The other point we would like to address is that we are not cooperating with any mining device producers other than in the forms of simple buyer-seller relationship. Nor we hold shares of any other device producers. Our pricing strategy was discussed in the board before, which targets low margin large quantity instead of high margin small quantity because: 1) If both device producers and miners can have real profit after risk premium we will develop reliable consumer of chips in the long time. 2) It alleviates the problem of many potential purchasers waste time waiting for future price adjustments. 3) Higher quantity of orders in this generation leads to much more support from the fab with respect to all future generations of chips.
1) On the Balance Sheet, approximately how many chips does the current Inventory (Products + Materials + Masks) represent?
A little less than 60P of wafers, most of which are on their final stages of production. The materials consist mainly of lead frames for packaging. The mask is re-usable for years if there are continuing demands for the corresponding wafers.
2) How many months of inventory do you estimate that represents?
Depending on the Bitcoin price. Under this price we expect it to be 1-1.5.
3) On the Cash Flow there was significant expenses for gen3 production (~6mil USD). Does that represent the bulk of gen3 expenses, or are the expenses for gen3 going to continue (additional wafer batches ordered, etc.)?
It represent the order we already placed and paid for. There still are forecast plans for June we haven't paid for. They may be cancelled or delayed to later months according to how fast customers can turn Bitcoin chips to hashing power.
4) When will dividends start, and how frequently will they occur?
When the cash-flow becomes positive. After we decide to put significant quantity of chips on ASICMiner owned farms it should be per week. Before that, per month.
5) What is the status of gen 3.1 (shipping to customers, I think?)? How much does it help with energy usage -- do we have final chip performance numbers yet?
All shipped chips are gen 3.0 ones. What we had chosen for 3.1 helps with energy usage at 10% range and has some performance degrades. The final chip performance number is about 0.7W/G at 0.78V and 320MHz. Below that voltage we have less power draw and less speed.
6) What is the progress on gen4?
It is 28nm and has two major improvements: the first one is to fix the design errors we had with 40nm (which made our silicon data two times worse than simulated data). We believe that 0.35W/G at rated speed of 400MHz would be achievable in 40nm if no mistakes were made before. The second one is the technology improvement from 40nm to 28nm in terms of density, speed and power.
We are on the stage of evaluating the final design choices by running the physical design flow on different settings.
7) What is the status of self mining? What is the rollout schedule for the data centers?
8 ) What is the status of franchising partners? When can we expect to see income from them?
We will report the more detailed status to the board first. The short answer is that deploying and financing is easy while getting cheap electricity and proper device solution takes time. When we have farms running we can update the related information with real time hash rate.
9) Can you please clarify this sentence from 21st April : "The dividend schedule will be aggressive, as AM will not require large sums of retained capital." < is this still actual, or meanwhile something changed?
It is still actual. The condition in May is not a part of the plan. When we were forecasted permissively about this summer's production power of the fab, we ordered as many wafers as we could to prevent the bottleneck with wafer production.
10) What is the average selling price of AM gen3 chips (price per Gh/s)?
About 0.5$/G for sold chips.
11) What is that ~4M CNY in financial report/expenses at exchange?
Exchanged to USD.
12) What is the cash flow ratio between the amount of Chips Fabricated and the percentage of the batch that is dedicated to cost.
There are no orders dedicated to cost in the short time. So it's 1:0.
13) What is the Break Even Point of this batch of Chips?
Although the cost of making could be estimated by companies with experience on fabricating chips of high-end technology nodes, we
would rather retain the accurate price per chip from the public.
14) What is the estimated conversion time from chip sales to dividends?
The conversion time itself is fast and should not be the main stagnation of the time frame.
15) Will the funds from future Gen 3 chips be used to fund Gen 4 chips or distributed as a dividend, and what relative percentage of income will be retained for Gen 4?
Both. 1/3 as forecasted.
16) Previously our Asicminer farm was mining bitcoins and distributing a weekly dividend, will Asicminer update its present hash rate in the mining farms to account for current difficulty changes and to procure a secondary supply of Bitcoins to adapt for rapid changes in Bitcoin prices?
Yes. But that should be when we replace the farm with BE200 based devices, otherwise it is no point considering the 0.12-0.15$/kwh electricity price we get for our old farms.
17) What ever happened to the dedicated PR person and should AM make a website for distributors and for Chip inquiries?
18) Can we please get weekly, bi-weekly or monthly updates about progress, plans, sales etc. for preventing FUD in this thread?
19) Can you please communicate more clearly/frequently with shareholders?
When we are sure we get a good solution for the lack of communication we will announce.
20) What are the future plans and visions of Asicminer?
There will be at least two generations ahead. If future Bitcoin market cap allows there can be more. As we are keeping the chip design capability to grow with state-of-the-art technology as well as good channels with fabrication we can be flexible in terms of business mode be it chip-based or device-based.
