According to the documents received by CoinDesk, in September the largest producer of mining equipment Bitmain plans to raise $18 billion through initial public offering (IPO).

Thanks to the funds raised through the issue of shares, the capitalization of the Chinese giant can reach from 40 to 50 billion US dollars. Bitmain’s listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange will take place either in the last quarter of this year or in the first quarter of the following year. China International Capital Corporation will act as an underwriter. Around the same time, other Chinese “unicorns” of the mining market – Canaan Creative and Ebang Communication – will hold IPO.

Bitmain one of the most expensive cryptocurrency companies, successfully held pre-IPO in July and raised $1 billion. Then the market value of the company was estimated at $15 billion. For comparison, the US cryptocurrency company Coinbase in April were estimated at $8 billion.

Shortly before that, Bitmain managed to attract $400 million of venture investments from Sequoia Capital. The U.S. IDG Capital and Coatue Management, a Russian company DST Global and Singapore’s EDBI and GIC participated in the same funding round.

If the Chinese company will be able to attract $18 billion, it will press Facebook in the ranking of the largest IPO.

The projected share price and trading volume are not known yet, but investment banks forecast a p/e ratio (price/earnings) of 20 during the first year of public trading.

This forecast is based on the company’s financial performance. Thus, for 2016-2017 and the first quarter of this year, Bitmain’s profit amounted to $3.2 billion. In 2017, the company’s income amounted to $2.5 billion, while just in the first quarter of 2018 this figure reached $2 billion. This year, Bitmain expects to receive $2.5 billion in profits.

Previously, we reported that Bitmain invested $3 million in the blockchain startup tribeOS, which specializes in developing solutions for combating fraud in the advertising business.

Recall that last month Bitmain introduced bitcoin miner Antminer S9j with a hashrate of 14.5 TH/s.