Canaan Creative, the manufacturer of Avalon Bitcoin mining equipment has raised $90 million in its initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, a figure that is considerably lower than initially marketed in its October SEC filing.
The company which listed its American Depository Shares (ADS) on the tech-focused NASDAQ on Thursday listed them at $9 each for a total of 10 million shares. The $9-mark was the lower range of its marketed price range on its filing which allowed for a quotation price of up to $11 which could have led to a $110 million IPO raise. Initially, the company had marketed a $400 million anticipated raise in its SEC filing before revising the figure later.
The initial underwriters to the IPO were Galaxy Digital, Citi Group, Credit Suisse, China Renaissance Holdings Ltd., and CMB International Capital Ltd among others but Credit Suisse cut its ties to the offering due to concerns on the possibility of “sufficient orders” according to people familiar with the matte. It is this fallout that may have led Canaan, an Hangzhou China-based company to revise its IPO projections to a modest $90 – $110 million.
On its first day of trading, the Canaan shares, which were listed on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol ‘CAN’, closed only a penny below the listing price at $8.99. However, the hour following the listing, the price of the shares rose by as much as 44% to reach $11.23 before falling back down within 30 minutes.
Despite the choppiness in the initial trading hours, the price of the shares is now stable and some in the industry are calling the IPO a success. Dovey Wan, a founding partner at crypto investment firm Primitive Ventures wrote on Twitter on Thursday that the Canaan IPO was “a big milestone for the whole industry regardlessly [sic] the current market climate.”
Following this successful IPO, investors are now looking at the next major IPO from leading Bitcoin miner manufacturer Bitmain which has also filed an IPO application with the US SEC to list its shares on the NASDAQ platform. Bitmain controls about 64.5% of the bitcoin mining market while Canaan holds about 23.3%.
Bitmain hopes to raise $300 million from its public offering with sponsorship from companies such as Deutsche Bank. Both Bitmain and Canaan tried offering their shares in their native home countries but failed to get approval from both Hong Kong and mainland China regulators who said that such offerings from cryptocurrency businesses are “premature.”
