The well-known character from the Bitcoin scene, Friedcat, published an update about the current status of ASICMiner on the Bitcoin Talk forum. First, he released the numbers:
Financial Status
Mining Income: 102,041.82BTC
Blade Sales Income: 29,594.75BTC
USB Sales Income: 37,524.00BTC
Total: 169,520.57BTCDevice and Infrastructure Expense: 397,800.00$ + 4,909,930.00?
Electricity Expense: 729,542.05?
Labor Expense: 327,081.00?
Logistics Expense: 132,184.90?
Deposits: 117,506.01?
Total: 397,800.00$+6,216,243.96?(Check the balance sheet here)
After this, Friedcat talked about hardware franchising. “This is a new business model option besides self-mining and hardware sales. We will rent the excessive hashing power to financial and technical capable people, accepting full deposits at the market price, shipping the devices and collecting a certain PPS rate based on the theoretical hashrate. The PPS rate, the dividing of cost coverage, as well as warranty/exit strategy are being discussed in detail and executed as small-scale experiments”, he wrote.
According to the CEO and representative of ASIC Miner, “this model is similar to hardware sales in the aspect that we do not have in control on how the users make use of our devices, therefore has more decentralization in spirit. And like with self-mining, it aims at settings in scale, enjoying the reduction of NRE cost and operating cost overall, and reducing potential marketing/advertisement/customer service costs”.
Friedcat also explained the predicted timeline of the project. ASICMiner will “deploy/sell all hashpower arriving in July and early August” between August and September. Then, between September and November, the company intends to “deploy/sell the hashpower ordered at early July”. Finally, from November to December, ASICMiner will proceed to the “experimental products of 2nd-gen chips and modular large-scale deployment solutions”.