Ebang, or producer of Ebit miners, the leading Chinese bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer, is reportedly planning to produce at least 400,000 units of mining machines this year.

The Hangzhou-based company is the third largest bitcoin mining equipment maker in the world after Bitmain and Canaan, owning a 9.2% global market share in terms of sales revenue.

According to a local news outlet Yuhang Morning Paper, the company, credited as one of the top 10 industrial enterprises in Yuhang (a district of Hangzhou) of 2018 by local government, is currently working in full swing on the annual production goal of more than 400K blockchain processing units (BPUs), commonly known as mining machines.

Ebang’s latest figures reveal that, the company sold about 159K units of mining machines in 2017, and more than 309K units in the first half of 2018, racking in 2.11 billion ($304 million) in sales revenue.

(source: prospectus of Ebang)

Though the company saw its sales orders for bitcoin mining machines in the following Q3 2018 suffer significant decreases, stating in the “Material adverse change” section of its prospectus,

“We experienced significant decreases in revenue and gross profit for the three months ended September 30, 2018 compared to the preceding three months ended June 30, 2018.”

The Ebit miner producer seems to show no flinch in the face of the industry downturn accompanied by the crypto sluggish, still aiming to produce an annual level of more than 400,000 units mining machines. That’s 2.5 times that sold in 2017, probably almost the same as the units sold in 2018.

8btc tries to confirm the figure from Ebang, while the company’s co-founder Hu Dong made no comment on it saying the company is in the quiet period (during which insiders of the would-be public companies are restricted from releasing new information around an IPO).

Ebang seeks to go public with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) last June; on December 20, the company updated its IPO prospectus which is currently still in the pending status. Bitmain, the dominant player in this segment who submitted the application in September 2018, also sees its IPO application pending; while the Avalon maker Canaan, who is the first one of the trio to make a listing attempt, has let its filing lapse.

The global cryptocurrency mining hardware market is highly competitive and dominant by a limited number of major players. According to Frost & Sullivan, the global top three ASIC-based cryptocurrency mining hardware companies, together accounted for approximately 85.2% of the market share in terms of sale revenue in 2017. The trio all see a decrease in corporate valuation due to the drop in the prices of cryptocurrencies.