Canaan - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and Welcome to the Canaan Inc's Fourth Quarter and Full Year of 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the management's prepared remarks, we will have a question-and-answer session. Please note that this event is being recorded. Now, I'd like to hand the conference over to your speaker host today, Ms. Gwyn Lauber, Investor Relations Director of the company. Please go ahead, Gwyn.

Gwyn Lauber (Director of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator. Hello, everyone, and Welcome to Our Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today are our Chairman and CEO, Nangeng Zhang, and our CFO, James Jin Cheng. Leo Wang, Vice President of Capital Markets and Corporate Development, and Xi Zhang, Senior IR Manager, will also be available during the question-and-answer session. Our CEO will start the call by providing an overview of the company and performance highlights for the quarter. Our CFO will then provide details on the company's operating and financial results for the period before we open up the call for your questions. Before I begin, I would like to refer you to our Safe Harbor statement in our earnings press release. Today's call will include forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, our outlook for the company and statements that estimate or project future operating results or the performance of the company.

These statements speak only as of today, and the company assumes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements that may be made in today's press release, call, or webcast, except as required by law. These statements do not guarantee future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Please refer to the press release and the risk factors and documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent annual report on Form 20-F, for information on risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. In addition, during today's call and webcast, we will discuss both GAAP financial measures and certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of the company's performance.

These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for or in isolation from, GAAP results. You can find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations with comparable GAAP results, in our earnings press release, which is posted on the company's website. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Nangeng Zhang. Please go ahead.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Hello, everyone. This is NZ, CEO of Canaan. Thank you for joining our call. James, our CFO, and I are pleased to speak with you from our headquarters in Singapore and share our updates for the fourth quarter and the recent developments. In the first quarter of 2024, the trends of Bitcoin price and total network hash rate were relatively favorable for miners. Bitcoin price steadily rose from $61,000 at the beginning of the quarter to $93,000 at the end. The total network hash rate also increased from 622 EH/s to 842 EH/s. That said, in Q4, Bitcoin price grew faster than the hash rate. Using a typical electricity cost of $0.06 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, miners using our A50 machines saw their gross margin rise from about 40% at the start of the quarter to as high as 60% by the end.

This created a more profitable environment for mining and boosted miners' confidence. We fully leveraged this positive market trend and pushed sales and the delivery of mining machines and to grow the energized hash rate for our mining operations. We achieved approximately $89 million in total revenues this quarter, well above our guidance of $80 million. For the full year, we achieved almost $270 million in revenue, up 27.4% year-over-year. For mining machine sales, we focused on new product resales. The high-performance A15 series officially entered mass delivery in Q4. We sold 9.1 million TH/s of computing power, up 66% year-over-year and up 24.7% quarter-over-quarter, reaching a record high in our company's history. This contributed $73 million to mining machine revenue, up 64% year-over-year and making a two-year quarterly high.

In this quarter, we fulfilled large orders from North American public mining companies like Cipher, CleanSpark, and Hive, and received strong positive feedback. For the full year of 2024, North America became our largest regional market, accounting for approximately 40% of mining machine sales, showing the success of our expansion in the region during the past years. The rising Bitcoin price also helped us clear a prior generation's inventory. In Q4, the prior generation products remained popular in regions with energy advantages like Southeast Asia and Africa. To date, saleable inventory of traditional models like A16 and A14 has been mostly cleared, and A15 has become our main product. This completes the upgrade of our inventory portfolio. Our first consumer product, the NanoStream mining heater, continued to be welcomed by individual users around the world.

By year-end, consumers from 80 countries around the globe have ordered our products through our online shop. Since their launch, we received a total of 24,000 Nano orders, with more than 50% coming from customers in Europe and North America. This also helped increase our brand recognition in these regions. In 2025, we launched several new Avalon Home products, including the Nano3S, Avalon Mini 3, and Avalon Q. These new products are available on our website for pre-order, with small batches being delivered in Q1. As of now, total orders for these new consumer-grade products have reached 12,000 units, with a total amount of over $5 million. Some of these orders also come from distributor clients who have now established cooperation with us. Considering that the northern hemisphere will soon enter summer and indoor heating demand will gradually decline, this level of presale performance has greatly exceeded our expectations.

It also shows that many individual customers are eager to try and participate in Bitcoin mining. Our mining business also delivered a strong performance this quarter. We mined 186 Bitcoins, up 84% year-over-year. With higher online hash rates and stronger Bitcoin prices, our mining revenue reached $15.3 million, up 313% year-over-year. We continued to take advantage of low electricity costs in Africa and expanded local mining capacity. By the end of 2024, our total installed mining hash rate reached 5.4 EH/s, with 4.8 EH/s energized. Our average OEM power cost remained at $4 per kilowatt-hour. With Bitcoin price trending up in Q4, our mining gross margin increased to 42%, much higher than the 22% in Q3. Our efficient mining operations also helped grow our Bitcoin holdings. By the end of 2024, our owned Bitcoins on balance sheet reached 1,293, a new high.

The rising price of Bitcoin at quarter end also resulted in fair value gain to this asset. This gain shows the preliminary benefits of our mining operations as a long-term strategy and our decision to hold Bitcoins. As our mining business expands, we provide additional information to the capital markets as is standard with the other public miners. Starting in January 2025, we began releasing monthly mining updates. By the end of February 2025, we announced that we had seven active joint mining projects worldwide, with 6.28 EH installed and 5.73 EH energized. Our owned Bitcoin holdings had reached 1,355 by the end of February. As we previously announced, since Q1 2025, we have expanded two North American mining projects through upgraded partnerships. We are moving towards our mid-2025 goal of reaching 10 EH/s deployed in North America and 15 EH/s globally.

We expect our mining business to achieve a new high in revenue in the first quarter of 2025. Today, we are also pleased to announce that we recently signed new cooperation agreements with two partners to expand mining capacity at sites in Pennsylvania and Texas. Once these two projects gradually go online in Q2 2025, we expect to increase our operated hash rate in North America to approximately 4.7 EH/s. We have already built a strong and experienced operations and business development team in North America, and they are actively in discussions with several potential partners for joint mining. Based on our current observations, the cryptocurrency site resources in the North America market still show strong potential, which is in line with our earlier strategic assessment. The expansion of joint mining and hosted mining in North America has been progressing very smoothly.

As a manufacturer with minor research and development capabilities, we are increasingly welcomed by mining sites owners for joint mining ventures. The new U.S. administration is expected to ease regulations, provide more energy resources to the industry, and support Bitcoin mining at both the federal and state levels. Recently, our key competitor's critical affiliate company has been added to U.S. entities list. We believe we will benefit from the growing tension and rising costs in the mining hardware supply chain, and that many mining site owners will increasingly view Canaan as a preferred partner. We also hope to reinvest more of the funds raised in U.S. capital markets back to local projects and gradually build ourselves into a company with a strong mining footprint in the United States. Both our mining machine sales and mining operations rely on continuous R&D efforts.

In the fourth quarter, we successfully wrapped up mass production of A15 series. Working closely with our foundry partners, we carried out ongoing process improvements to boost product performance and yield rate. Looking ahead, we expect to deliver more computing power using the same number of wafers, including more high-end A15 Pro models. In addition to our standard air-cooled miners, we continue to provide customized mining solutions based on clients' specific needs and their site conditions. For example, in a previous collaboration with the public miner CleanSpark, we delivered 3,800 units of our A1566i immersion cooled miners. These machines ran stably on site, performed beyond the contract specifications, and received very positive feedback from the client. In 2024, although mining chips were generally not subject to U.S. export control restrictions at the time, we continue to proactively manage our supply chain to prepare for potential regulatory changes in the future.

In January 2025, the U.S. BIS issued new rules that suddenly imposed additional constraints on the global semiconductor supply chain. Outsource assembly and testing vendors were now effectively limited to those on an approved whitelist, drastically narrowing available options overnight. Thanks to our early planning, we were able to swiftly transition A15 chip packaging to OSAT partners within the whitelist, minimizing delays in the manufacturing process caused by the new regulations. Subsequently, through continued collaboration with our foundry partners to support license applications, we were informed this month that all our in-production wafers have received the necessary license to be released even to the OSAT without approved whitelist status. As a result, our choices of OSAT is largely no longer restricted. This put us in a strong position to scale up production and reduce costs more quickly in response to rising market demand.

It is the result of our long-standing commitment to compliance. We will continue to work to anticipate and mitigate the potential impacts of future policy changes. Additionally, we have completed the R&D on our next generation A16 mining machines and finished the tape-out process. Once again, we are pushing the limits of manufacturing technology. Due to the advanced chip design of our products, the production is very complex and time-consuming. We continue to work closely with our foundry partners to bring the ultra-performance product to customers as soon as possible. The standard air-cooled A16 is expected to reach nearly 300 TH/s. As usual, we will release the new products and the standard simple machines to customers after we finish the full system testing and obtain real-world data.

In our consumer product line, during the first quarter of 2025, we successfully launched several new additions to the Avalon Home series. This includes the upgraded Nano3S desktop mining heater, the Avalon Mini 3 Quiet Home heater with integrated mining capabilities, and the Avalon Q, our first low-noise home mining device that supports 110 volts and is compatible with major global voltage standards. Through this portable, silent, aesthetically designed, and functionally home-oriented consumer product, we aim to make Bitcoin mining more accessible to everyday users and, in the future, promote the concept of decentralization. We invite everyone to visit our official website to learn more about these products. On the operation side, we achieved significant positive changes in the fourth quarter thanks to the large-scale delivery of our A15 products, strong growth in mining revenue, and continued cost optimization.

Our gross loss narrowed sharply by 70.5% quarter-over-quarter to $6.4 million. At the same time, after excluding non-cash adjustments such as fair value changes and their prudent accounting treatment, we turned profitable at the EBITDA level. In Q4, we achieved an adjusted EBITDA gain of $19.3 million. This marks our first EBITDA profitability since the mining machines market downturn began two years ago. Looking into 2025, we will continue to push forward with the sale and mass delivery of our A15 series products. Thanks to their strong performance, the test bench of A15 products received high recognition from customers, and orders have been coming in actively. Our delivery schedule is now booked into May and June for this year. Our key focus now is to work closely with our foundry partners to ramp up production capacity and steadily increase our delivery volume.

We also aim to further improve computing power and yield rate through process optimization, which will enhance profitability, product competitiveness, and customer satisfaction. In addition, we are actively balancing the allocation of mining machines between customer orders and our mining operations. Based on real-time market dynamics, we aim to achieve better synergy between the two business segments. The first quarter is traditionally a slow season. We completed the first phase of our supply chain compliance adjustment, mostly during the Lunar New Year holiday. The impact on the chip production cycle was kept within a limited range. However, starting in February, major changes in the global political and economic environment have caused significant Bitcoin price volatility. This has negatively affected market assessment, future expectations, and especially financing activities across the markets. Given these combined factors, we are maintaining a very cautious outlook for the first quarter of 2025.

We expected Q1 revenue to be approximately $75 million. We expected that in Q2, the production capacity ramps up and our mining project deployment moves towards completion. Our performance will see a big improvement compared to Q1. We currently estimate total revenue for Q2 of 2025 to be in the range of $120 million-$150 million. We are maintaining our previously issued full year 2025 guidance, with total annual revenue expected to be in the range of $900 million-$1.1 billion. This outlook is based on the company's current market and the operational conditions. However, given the recent market volatility and the uncertainty about how long it may continue, actual results may differ.

From Beijing to Singapore to Silicon Valley, from delivering the first ASIC miner to going public on NASDAQ and launching Home Series mining machines, Canaan has been probing ahead on the path of decentralization. Looking back at the past year, we remain firmly committed to R&D and to delivering high quality, high performance, and customized Bitcoin mining solutions. Our A15 series has been embraced by demanding customers by the North American market. Our Avalon Home series, which combines Bitcoin mining and home use functionality, is designed to meet the needs of a diverse global customer base. We have continued to strengthen our global presence. We need orders from and building our strategic partners with leading publicly listed miners in North America, thus raising our brand awareness and the market share in the region.

As a NASDAQ-listed company, we are impressed by, inspired by America, empowered by America, and dedicated to America. We have actively leveraged the strength of U.S. capital markets to support our growth, and we are rapidly advancing heavy assets projects such as mining operations in the U.S., which is now beginning to take shape. At the same time, we continue to push forward our global strategy. We are optimizing our strategy for R&D, supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics. We are exploring local production to adapt to the evolving compliance environment. We remain confident in the long-term potential of Bitcoin. We will stay focused on innovation, operational excellence, and reinforcing our role as an important player in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you, everyone. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, James. Thank you. Thank you, NZ. And good day, everyone.

James Jin Cheng (CFO)

This is James, CFO of Canaan. I'm very glad to share our Q4 financial results with you today. As Ng stated at the start of the call, in quarter four last year, the trends of Bitcoin price and total network hash rate were relatively favorable for miners. We fully leveraged this positive market trend, leading to increased sales and the delivery of mining machines and to the growth in energized hash rate of our own mining operations. Let me give a quick summary of our financial performance for the fourth quarter. First, the computing power sold reached 9.1 million TH/s, breaking our previous record. Total revenue reached approximately $89 million, beating our guidance of $80 million and resulting in year-over-year growth of approximately 81%, as well as the highest quarterly revenue in the past two years.

Secondly, through the increased deployment in our mining operations, our mining revenue reached $15.3 million in this quarter and increased approximately 313% year-over-year, exceeding the pre-halving level in 2024. We mined 186 bitcoins in this quarter and increased of 84% year-over-year. As we've reported in our monthly production updates, in quarter one, we continued the trajectory of accumulating more bitcoins. In the end of February, our total bitcoin holding reached 1,355. We are steadily advancing towards our target of achieving 10 EH/s in North America and 15 EH/s globally by middle of 2025. As announced today, we further expanded our North America mining capacity by signing agreements with two new partners in Pennsylvania and Texas, which will add 4.7 EH/s to our North America mining capacity.

This will bring our global deployed mining capacity to have potential to grow to 11 EH/s with 6 EH/s in North America. Next, we completed the upgrade cycle of the product portfolio of our mining machines, and the A15 series is now our main sellable product, leading to $73 million of machine sales revenue. More than 17,000 units of the A15 series were delivered in quarter four, of which over 80% came from the large orders of public mining companies, including Cipher, CleanSpark, and Hive. These results demonstrate that our North American focus, which began just over two years ago, is having a positive impact on our business. On the consumer front, our first Home Series consumer product, the Avalon Nano 3, continued to gain adoption by individual users globally.

In 2024, the total orders for Avalon Nano 3 reached approximately 24,000 units and contributed $2.7 million to the full year revenue. At the beginning of 2025, our Avalon Home series was further expanded, and to date, the orders for the new products reached more than 12,000 units valued at $5 million. Finally, thanks to the significant narrowing of gross loss and the upward Bitcoin price, we achieved a gain of quarterly adjusted EBITDA of $19 million for the first time since the start of market downturn two years ago. Additionally, our cash flow from production and operations turned positive, contributing $17 million in this quarter, strengthening our cash balance and allowing us to end the year with $96 million. Moving to our profit and loss for the quarter, total revenue was approximately $89 million.

As I mentioned earlier, mining revenue contributed $15.3 million in Q4, an outstanding year-over-year increase of 313%. We mined 186 bitcoins in the quarter, year-over-year increase of 84%. This increase was primarily driven by more computing power installed for our mining business, which reached 5.4 EH at the end of this quarter, resulting in a historical high. As announced today, we have recently expanded our North American mining footprint by 4.7 EH/s through two new projects in Pennsylvania and Texas. When fully operational, these additions will bring our worldwide mining capacity to have the potential to grow to around 11 EH/s, with 6 EH/s in North America. We will continue to disclose the operational progress in our monthly mining report. Now turning to product revenue. Revenue from machine sales was approximately $73 million, an increase of approximately 64% year-over-year.

We delivered a total computing power sold of 9.1 million TH/s, representing a year-over-year increase of 66% and marking a record high quarterly sales volume. The average selling price, or we say ASP, remained stable at $8.1 per TH/s compared to $8.2 per TH/s in the same quarter of 2023. With the destocking of our A13 and A14 series nearly completed, we expect the average selling price to return to a more reasonable level in the first quarter of 2025. More than 17,000 A15 mining rigs were delivered in Q4, of which nearly 80% were delivered to the public mining companies in North America, including Cipher, CleanSpark, and Hive.

Turning to the revenue from our Avalon Home series, by end of 2024, we received orders for approximately 24,000 units of our Nano products, reaching customers in 80 countries and contributing revenue of approximately $2.7 million since their launch. Our newly launched Avalon Mini and Avalon Q have also attracted significant attention to this consumer product line. To date, we have received orders for more than 12,000 units of these new Avalon Home products, with a total amount of $5 million. For our mining machine costs, we accrued $13.6 million for inventory write-down in the quarter. With the successful clearance of pre-year generation product inventory, inventory write-down decreased 76% year-over-year. The non-cash write-down is made on the U.S. GAAP rules, impacting our gross profit but with no impact on our cash balance. Excluding the above write-down, our mining machine sales would have breakeven for this quarter.

Leveraging the rising Bitcoin price and our efficient management of mining operating cost, our direct mining margin improved to 42%. Please note that direct mining margin is calculated by subtracting our mining operation cost for energy and hosting from our mining revenues, but without the depreciation of deployed machines. Demonstrating our robust top-line growth and our effective cost optimization measures, our gross loss for the fourth quarter was $6.4 million, a substantial reduction of 88% year-over-year. Turning to the expenses, our operating expenses totaled $49.3 million, increasing $10.1 million year-over-year. This rise was primarily driven by our global business expansion and our risk mitigation activities, including staff costs, professional service fees, and R&D expenditures. We recorded $9.3 million for one-off expenses in the quarter, including share-based compensation cancellation, one-time R&D expenditures, and consulting fees. If these one-off expenses were excluded, operating expenses would have been $39.8 million, remaining stable year-over-year.

As mentioned in quarter one 2024, we chose to adopt the FASB new accounting rules on cryptocurrency assets on January 1, 2024. These new rules allow cryptocurrencies to be carried as their fair market value. In the fourth quarter, the price of Bitcoin increased to around $95,000 at the year-end of 2024 versus around $63,500 on September 30, 2024, contributing to an aggregate gain on crypto assets of $39 million during this quarter. All things above considered, our adjusted EBITDA was a gain of $19.3 million. Mainly driven by the solid revenue growth and significant narrowed gross loss, as well as the upward Bitcoin price, this is the first time we achieved quarterly EBITDA profitability since quarter one 2023. In quarter four 2024, we recorded a valuation allowance against our deferred tax assets, as well as unrecognized tax benefit liability.

This follows the conservatism principle in accounting and resulted in a non-cash income tax expense of $85 million. When we generate profits in the future, these deferred tax assets can still be used to offset our income tax expenses. In the quarter, we issued 30,000 Series A1 preferred shares with a gross proceeds of $30 million. The third tranche of the Series A preferred shares issued in quarter three 2024 was still recognized as a convertible liability at fair value as of the year-end. This financing incurred an excess of fair value over proceeds received and fair value changes. This non-cash accounting treatment hit our Q4 bottom line for a total of $4.8 million. In order to represent our performance more accurately and more comparably, we excluded the impact of this accounting treatment from our non-GAAP measures.

Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow, at the end of quarter four, we held cash of $96 million on our balance sheet, an increase of around 34% compared to the end of Q3. During the quarter, our cash flow from production and operations turned positive, generating $17 million. A cash outflow of $71 million for production and operation was offset by a cash inflow of $82 million from sales and $6 million from export VAT refunds. In quarter four, we received $30 million from our preferred shares financing, and we paid $22 million to secure our waiver supply. With stable cash flow and the fourth halving completed, we have leveraged strategic financing tools to secure product capacity through prepayments. These activities will allow us to capitalize on the upcoming bull markets while preparing for long-term mining demand despite short-term volatility of Bitcoin price.

At the end of 2024, we entered into an ATM agreement. From the end of 2024 to February 19, 2025, we utilized the ATM for fundraising with net proceeds of $42.5 million at an average price of $2.08 per ADS. We did not utilize the ATM after February 19, 2025. In early March, we closed the first tranche of new Series A1 preferred shares with net proceeds of $99.7 million. Total proceeds of approximately $145 million will be used to fund the expansion of our production scale and manufacturing or investing in our mining operation in North America. At the end of Q4, the aggregate balance of inventory and prepayments and other current assets was $185.5 million, a decline of $40.6 million compared to the end of Q3. This decline was driven by the clearance of pre-year generation product inventory and upgraded inventory composition.

Now turning to our Bitcoin assets, Bitcoin held as our own holding asset increased in this quarter, reaching a record high of 1,293 Bitcoins as of December 31. This is 81 more than 1,212 at the end of last quarter. On December 31, 2024, the fair market value of our owned Bitcoins totaled around $123 million, and our hold-on strategy gain was approximately $66 million, higher than the original value of the Bitcoins that we gained from mining or other operations. As of February 28, our total Bitcoin holdings increased to 1,355, as already disclosed. By the end of 2024, we pledged 600 Bitcoins for secured loans with an aggregate carrying value of $24 million, which we believe is a reasonable interest level. The secured loans enable additional liquidity for our production expansion and operations. We also transferred 100 Bitcoins into a fixed-term product with a guaranteed minimum annual return.

In the future, as part of our hold-on strategy, we will explore more ways to increase capital liquidity through our owned crypto assets. Please note that Bitcoin pledged or transferred into fixed-term products are recognized as cryptocurrency receivables in our balance sheet, and the classification between current and non-current assets is consistent with the periods of corresponding secured loans or fixed-term products. In the first quarter of 2025, as CEO mentioned, we anticipate the revenue of $75 million due to the seasonality of our business compounded by the uncertain economic environment, as well as the volatility of Bitcoin prices. Based on our current visibility on orders and waiver capacity, we anticipate revenue of $120-$150 million for the second quarter of 2025. This concludes our prepared remarks. We are now open for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. As a courtesy to other investors and analysts who may wish to ask a question, please limit yourself to three questions at a time. If you have any follow-up questions after the Q&A session, the investor relations team will be available after the call. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, if you wish to ask your question to management in Chinese, please immediately repeat your question in English. If you would like to ask a question, please press star, one, and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star, one, and one again. Thank you. We will now take our first question. This is from the line of Nick Giles from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Nick Giles (Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. NZ and team, congrats on the progress here more recently. My first question is, can you give us an update on any site acquisition activity or how you're approaching procuring power infrastructure in the current environment? Curious if you've observed any changes or challenges here in 2025 as demand for power assets remains very strong.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks very much. Morning. Let me take questions. I think we have been actively looking for the sites in energy-rich regions across North America. Our corporation model is very flexible. We can do fixed-rate hosting, joint mining with profit sharing, or even acquire and build our own sites. Right now, the site resources we've secured are high, actually more than enough to support our current deployment plan, which targets its 10 EH in the first half of the year. Since the shift of our focus to the U.S. from last year, we have seen more opportunities than we originally expected.

Recently, due to some changes in U.S. policy, it seems that new power generation capacity may become available in the near future, which would benefit us even more. We have also noticed that some institutional players in North America are thinking about allocating part of their power resources to AI or HPC hosting. We truly hope those efforts succeed. AI and HPC business can bring more predictable cash flow for our customers, which in turn could attract more institutional interest and raise the overall valuation of their operations, would help broaden their business, including having more power and capital available than they can go to Bitcoin mining to consume their electricity. While Bitcoin mining has much lower CapEx needs than AI or HPC, it consumes far more energy. On the other hand, AI and HPC offer very stable cash flows.

That's why we believe these two sectors are actually complementary in the mid to long term. I hope we can see both Bitcoin mining and AI applications grow side by side going forward. Yeah, thank you.

Nick Giles (Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you very much, NZ. My next question is just on overall demand. Obviously, your 2Q guidance is a nice improvement from the 1Q guidance. I was wondering if you could give us a sense for what the second half could look like. Is demand still improving? Your annual guidance does imply a stronger second half. Wondering if you could comment on how you're seeing demand today, and particularly on the pricing side, and how that translates to your annual guidance.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Okay. I will say something, and maybe James will add some numbers to your question. I think look at our actual sales performance in Q4. It was quite good. We sold 9.1 million TH of computing power. It's already achieved our best. Yeah, it's already achieved our best result, historical result. It included the deliveries to North American listed companies like Cypher, CleanSpark, and Hive. Yeah, this reflects the success we have had in expanding our presence in the North America market. In fact, customer order volumes at the end of the year are driven by the rise in Bitcoin price starting in November. Yeah, as a result, we clear our inventory. We start to build our new inventory. Most of the waivers will come out start from Q2 to Q3. The machines will come out majorly in Q2 and Q3. We can foresee that from Q2, the number will be much larger than Q1.

For the second half, I think the key is maybe about the Bitcoin price or the economic environment, which is really hard for us to predict today. What I can say is if the Bitcoin price rises, we do not need another historical high. Maybe only $100,000 is very significant for us to achieve our annual target.

James Jin Cheng (CFO)

I will add some color, Nick. I think from our guidance on Q1, it has already showed in 2025, quarter one, the revenue is more than double of last year, same quarter. The demand was strong. As we both know, our orders and the revenue are highly correlated with Bitcoin prices. Recently, the turbulence in Bitcoin prices definitely has an impact on the speed of accumulating more contract orders and also the trajectory of the price increases.

It looks like our customer orders are still quite strong from the market. We also have our North America mining sites building up on target. That is why I think we are still confident to work towards the full-year target. I think we are working on that. NZ just shared the capacity perspective. From the demand perspective in quarter three or quarter four, we definitely need the macro environment to turn to be more positive and Bitcoin price to climb to a new high. At that time, the demand could be strong and the price trajectory could be favorable to us. We will try to maximize our revenue for the full year. Currently, I think we are still sticking to the annual target, and we are working towards this target. Thank you, Nick.

Nick Giles (Senior Research Analyst)

NZ, James, thank you so much for all the comments, and keep up the good work.

James Jin Cheng (CFO)

Thank you.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you. Have a nice day.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We'll now take our next question. This is from the line of Kevin Cassidy from Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.

Kevin Cassidy (Senior Research Analyst)

Yes, thanks for taking my question, and congratulations also on the great progress. Just as we're talking about the full-year revenue, can you say what your ASIC orders are with your foundry partner that may not be accounted for by customer orders just yet? How far out are your orders with the foundry versus what's your backlog?

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you. Yeah. Let me see. I think it just comes from bear markets. In bear markets, we typically produce based on sales orders, which helps the company control the risks about the product inventory. Currently, we are just out of the bear markets and at the early stage of full market for mining machines. Maybe this month, we are in the turbulence of the full market. Yeah. We are gradually increasing our production, but we are not placing orders at maximum capacity. When order waivers, we must consider many factors, including, but not limited to, our cost, how tight the supply chain is, and what is the miner's expected profitability about hash price and the competitive landscape in the market for the next, say, 6-12 months. For commercial confidential reasons, we are not disclosing the exact number for how many waivers we already ordered at this time. It appears that the machine production will continue through Q3. If the market demand does not increase significantly, it should be sufficient to meet both ourselves and our own mining operations.

If demand increases, we still have time. We have room to place additional orders to up a few tenths of a percentage of our capacity to fulfill the additional orders. If the demand weakens, we can increase the allocated number to our own mining operations. I think for the current capacity in the production line, it shouldn't be a major issue for the inventory. Thank you.

Kevin Cassidy (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks. You announced the A16 ASIC is 300 TH/s. That's a great improvement. Is there anything more than besides going to the better or lower process node? Any architectural changes that you're making to the ASIC that's giving you this improvement?

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

I think the A16 indeed is using the very cutting-edge technology, like the GA technology, and even smaller transistor sizes compared to A15. It is not simply a straightforward part of our previous generation. I think if you're looking back into the history, every generation of our products has often achieved much more significant performance improvements. Many different generations of our mining machines are in one-node process or even one-node process upgrades or even using the same process. These performance gains are far greater than the percentage improvements indicated by wafer manufacturers during each process node iteration. This is because our designers are doing their innovations, and many technical advancements are going. Also, come to this stage, besides process and design, we are already at the DTCO, the design technology core optimization stage, to even increase the performance even more. Perhaps you can notice that each generation of our product shows about 20-30% of the improvements.

What I must say is there isn't a magic number there to give us such a big improvement. It's more likely that we have 50-80 individual technical improvements. Every contributes less than 0.5% to lead to the, then they collectively together lead to the overall result. As we move to advanced nodes, each new generation of technologies also needs a cycle time to improve. I think the performance of ASICs and the GPUs on the same new process may also vary significantly. As a design company, we need to spend a lot of time in the early stages now to reduce these uncertainties and minimize the risks of the tapeouts. Maybe your question is maybe why there's many newcomers, even when they try to hire key technical talents from the industry, but still struggle to produce competitive products. Yeah. Sorry for saying I say too much. Thank you.

Kevin Cassidy (Senior Research Analyst)

No, thank you for the details. And just one other is the 300 TH/s is for traditional or air-cooled. Do you have an estimate of what it would be for immersion or just liquid-cooled?

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Yes. I think for today, the immersion version of the machines is more common in the market, not constrained to the U.S. market. Many different markets we already observe this. Yeah, I think maybe the reason is many machines are now built with much higher energy density and need better energy efficiency. This will bring more strict environment control needs. Liquid cooling can help to manage heat more effectively. Another reason may be the many hardware now must stay in use longer than old days. This makes it worthwhile to invest more in the side setup to improve the stability and uptime. Yeah.

Kevin Cassidy (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We'll now take our next question. This is from the line of Kevin Dede from HCW. Please go ahead.

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

Hi, NZ. Hi, James. Thanks very much for having me on the call. I think firstly, I'd just like to congratulate you on managing your supply line and deliveries to the U.S. in light of the regulatory changes. I just thought that was very savvy of you gentlemen and the team. First, I was hoping you could offer a little more detail on how customer service has changed over the years. I've been following you for a long time, and I'd just like to understand what you think you're doing better now in the U.S. in winning customers.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Hi, Kevin. Yeah. I think in recent years, as Bitcoin mining has become more global, the company has to provide maintenance and support service in a way that's closer to our customers. In addition to our standard one-year warranty for mining rig orders, we have now 26 service stations or spare parts warehouses worldwide. This helps shorten the parts delivery cycle time and allows us to provide more time maintenance and parts replacement services for our customers. We also adjust the location of our service points based on customer distribution to further improve service efficiency. Additionally, based on customer feedback, our products have shown strong operational stability, particularly in very high temperature and humid environments, where they continue to run effectively and very reliably. Also, the return of the repair is actually very low now, especially for the A15 models.

We also offer on-site customized mining solutions based on customers' specific needs, such as emerging liquid cooling and code development for some systems. This ensures that our products and services can be closely aligned and adaptable to our customers' diverse needs. We are receiving positive feedback. Thank you for recognizing our success, but we're still striving for improvement. We believe we can do even better, and we aim to outperform two of our Chinese competitors in the following areas. First, we want to keep the failure rate of our products below the industrial average, which comes from better design and high-quality control during the production process. This approach particularly benefits for the high labor cost regions like the U.S.. Second, we aim to ensure our North American team and management in Singapore work as one cohesive unit.

Myself, along with our CFO and R&D and the supply chain leaders, are all committed to ensure high customer satisfaction. Finally, from the very beginning, we have been a company driven by the value of decentralization. Therefore, we remain open to all customer requests, evaluating them only based on whether they make business sense and benefit the industry development. We do not want to limit customers' options proactively. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

NZ, can you talk a little bit about your North American customer pipeline and what the sales funnel looks like? The press release alluded to a new customer for the A15 XP. Can you talk about that a little bit and maybe give us a little more comfort regarding where or how you see the second half coming together?

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

I think last year, we actively expanded into the North American market and secured several major clients like Cipher, Hive, and ThinkSpark. North American customers' orders now represent about 40% of our product sales revenue in full year 2024. In Q4, with the large-scale delivery of A15 orders to North America, sales from the region reached a historical high. I think in our, yeah. Also, we are in the second half of this year. Our sales system now is increasing their global market coverage. Last year, we had nearly 200 professional offline customers. Following, we launched the Avalon Home series. We attracted a large number of retail customers, resulting in exponential growth in customer numbers. In 2024, the total number of customers who have placed orders reached about 2,000. Now, the company continues to go globalize.

We have established special teams in regions such as South America and South Asia, creating a multi-layered and comprehensive sales team that reaches customers worldwide. Currently, the number of new customers is substantial, and they generally have strong competitiveness and high purchasing intention. However, I think large orders from new customers typically take some time to settle down. If the global political and economic situation, along with the Bitcoin price influenced by these factors, continue to rise steadily, I think this process will certainly accelerate. In Q2 and Q3, our inventory, I think our capacity, I mean, the machines will come out majorly in Q2 and Q3. I think the capacity issue happens, especially in Q1, will be much satisfied. Yeah. I think personally, I'm quite optimistic in Q2 and Q3. Yeah.

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

Last question for me, NZ. You mentioned that the A16 is now taped out. I'm wondering when you start placing orders for wafers for those machines.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

We start to place orders back to I think our first big batch is in October to November last year, and we have a second batch for those in December. The wafers will continue to come out from Q1 this year, and we are in the wrap-up stage. The major part will come out in Q2 and Q3. Yeah.

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

Okay. Thank you very much, gentlemen.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Sorry. I think that your question is about A16?

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

Yes. A16.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Or A15.

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

Right.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

Yeah. No, no. Okay. Yeah. I was just wondering about the tapeout and orders.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Okay. The A16, we will send the single machines to our customer in Q I think it's in Q3. We will follow the risk run and our first mass production batch at that time. Yeah. This is our schedule.

Kevin Dede (Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst)

Okay. Okay. Thanks, NZ.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you. Have a nice day.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We'll now take our next question. This is from Joe Flynn from Compass Point Research and Trading. Please go ahead.

Joe Flynn (Senior Research Analyst)

Hi. Thanks for the question. I was hoping if you could just touch on the ramp of A15 in a little more detail. I was curious how much of the initial capacity was ultimately covered by North America's upfront deposits, and is there any balance on those going forward? Ultimately, what's ultimately the strategy of managing the liquidity risk given the six-month lead times, and what approaches are you ultimately going to continue pursuing from that end?

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

I think our A15 orders, I think we can deliver most of them in May. Yes. Yes. They are pre-order. Pre-order.

Joe Flynn (Senior Research Analyst)

I'm sorry. I was talking about the upfront deposits from the North American customers as it relates to securing fab capacity.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

I think mostly it comes from North America. Yes. And most of them is prepaid for about 50%. Yes. Down payment.

Joe Flynn (Senior Research Analyst)

Yes. Yes. What's ultimately kind of the approach to funding the additional fab capacity six months out as they'll start to roll off? Given the kind of liquidity risk of the lead times.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

I think the production for the machines is about, I think today is about five months, but usually, our customers cannot wait for five months from the first payment to receive the machines. Usually, we will keep our pipeline in about three to four months. That means our customers will pay the first down payment, like 40%, 45%, 50%, and then pay the other 50% before we ship the machines or they receive the machines in three or four months. Yes.

Joe Flynn (Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks. That's helpful. Most of my questions were asked when they go in different directions. Just curious if there was any portion of the R&D still dedicated to the RISC-V A6 because there's a lot of reports out there that expect to see a huge increased demand in China. I was wondering if there was anything that came about of the partnership with Alibaba a few years ago and if you guys ultimately have the opportunity to compete in that market at all.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. I think it's a very sensitive question. I think given the tightening regulations environment we've observed recently, especially from middle January, what I can say is we are staying very, very cautious about developing anything related to AI now. Yes, that side, we are actively prepared for the future. Over the next two years, our plan is to invest more in building out our infrastructure in the U.S., what I already mentioned tonight. I mean, personally, I think this is our way to hedge against the risk of missing out the AI phase in the next maybe two or three years. If one day AI and HPC becomes the mainstream computing use case, replacing mining, we want to be ready with the power and the sites and all infrastructures and technologies there. We're already in place. We will be in a very strong position to pivot quickly into the new direction. Yeah. This is what I can say today. Yeah. Thank you.

Joe Flynn (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We'll now take our next question. This is from the line of Bill Papanastasiou from KBW. Please go ahead.

Bill Papanastasiou (VP)

Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. NZ, may you share some color on your progress of reaching self-mining hash rate growth targets and how this may impact external sales of hardware? Can internal production of mining equipment sustain self-mining growth targets while also ramping your external sales to grow market share? Thank you.

Nangeng Zhang (Chairman and CEO)

Hi. Hello. Yeah. In the end of February this year, our company operations we have seven active mining partnership projects globally with a total deploy hash rate of more than 6 EH, and the power is close to 6 EH/s. In Q1, we further expanded two existing North American mining projects through upgrades to increase their capacity. We are keeping our target 10 EH in North America in the first half of this year. In the first quarter, I think our North American self-mining business will be very close to 5 EH/s. Yeah. I think currently, the company's operation is very smooth, and we will build our self-mining, follow our cash flow, and keep our cash flow remain healthy. I think the U.S. government is implementing a series of policies supporting the cryptocurrency industry. The trend toward a Bitcoin bull market remains intact despite short-term price fluctuations since the advanced process capacity required by our industry must be deployed in advance. We have chosen using financing tools to fund raising to lock production capacity and fulfill our machine sales and self-mining.

For how to expand our market share, we are a nested Singapore company. Alongside with two private Chinese companies, our market share is still small compared to our major main competitors. For us, we have opportunities, and we must focus on how to gain market share. We can have much higher revenue. Historically, I think our major competitors have the industry-leading products and early forward advantages in North America. They expand their influence with global Chinese.

Operator (participant)

Participants, please do stand by while the speaker reconnects. Participants, please continue to hold the line. We're just waiting for the speaker to rejoin. Please continue to stand by whilst we wait for the speaker to rejoin. Thank you.

Leo Wang (VP)

Hi. This is Leo Wang, Vice President of Capital Markets and Corporate Development. I think NZ is offline because of technical difficulties. We are more than happy to take your questions after this. I suggest we conclude this session.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. In that case, I will turn the call back over to the company for any closing remarks. If there were no further closing remarks, then we can conclude the call today. Thank you, everyone, for attending, and you may now disconnect.