Chip Shop Canaan Reportedly Prices IPO At $9 Per Share

This afternoon, China-based chip company Canaan Creative priced its US-listed IPO at $9 per share, raising $90 million, according to Bloomberg. The company had targeted a $9 to $11 per share.

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As a company Canaan is best known for its ASIC business or application-specific integrated circuits. ASICs themselves are perhaps best known for their use in the computing-intensive task of mining cryptocurrency.

Though Canaan would like you to know that its ASICs can also be used for artificial intelligence-related computing. The firm’s most recent F-1 filing (an S-1 filing submitted by a company domiciled outside of the United States) says “AI” nearly 230 times.

Financial Recap

As Crunchbase News reported previously, the company’s financial numbers are odd. Canaan’s revenues have fallen thus far in 2019, as has its gross profit. Both results are in precipitous decline, with revenue falling about 60 percent to $134.2 million over the first three quarters of the year. Over the same time frame, gross profit fell over 68 percent.

Canaan also slipped from a profit in the first nine months of 2018 to a similarly-sized loss ($33.1 million) during the same time period of this year.

The company needs cash sometime soon, perhaps explaining the debut. With $46.5 million in cash and equivalents at the end of calendar Q3 2019, Canaan burned $30 million from its combined operating, investing, and financing activities during quarters one, two, and three of this year.

This is the third time Canaan has tried to go public, and it ended up pricing at the bottom of its range. More when it starts trading tomorrow.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.