Chinese Public Firm to Buy $155M of Bitcoin Mining Hardware

Zhongjia Bochuang (ZJBC), a Chinese publicly-traded information and communications firm with a market cap of $900 million, announced plans to dive right into the Bitcoin mining space.

According to a March 9th report by local industry news outlet Chain News, ZJBC announced plans to buy $155 million of Bitcoin mining application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) produced by local producer MicroBT, part of the WhatsMiner series. The announcement specified that the firm plans to buy all the hardware within the next two years, and added:

The scale for the first year will be no less than 20,000 units with the first batch to be delivered by May 2021 with no less than 2,000 units.

According to reports, MicroBT disclosed that the two parties have so far signed a memorandum of understanding. Interestingly, according to ZJBC filings, about 2.8% of the firm's equity is connected to Chinese state capital. This may raise some eyebrows given that local authorities in China's Inner Mongolia region recently announced plans to stop all local crypto mining operations, pointing to an apparent conflict of interest with the local government's capital investment choices. 

ZJBC is not foreign to bitcoin mining operations. The company previously wrote to answer shareholder's inquiries:

Our fully-owned subsidiary Changshi Telecommunication has been involved in building and maintaining blockchain computing facilities since 2018 and brought in over 50 million yuan [$7.6 million] in revenue in 2018 already.

The Chinese market recently became particularly eager to invest in Bitcoin-involved ventures. As the BTC Times reported yesterday, local Bitcoin mining ASIC manufacturer Ebang perceived $170 million from two fundraising rounds conducted during last month alone, while waste recycling firm Code Chain New Continent raised $25 million in February to start mining as well.