Canaan’s shares on Nasdaq closed 3.83% lower at US$2.51 on Wednesday after the cryptocurrency mining rig maker reported an 82% year-on-year drop in revenue on Tuesday for the fourth quarter of last year. The company cited “lackluster market demand” for mining machines as the price of Bitcoin fell.



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Fast facts




In the fourth quarter of 2022, the Nasdaq-listed company booked 391.9 million yuan (US$56.8 million) in revenue, down 60% from the third quarter and a slump of 82.1% from the same period in 2021.



Canaan’s revenues for the entire year came in at 4.38 billion yuan, down from 4.99 billion yuan in 2021, mainly “due to the decline in total computing power sold,” the company said.



Canaan reported a net income of 658.2 million yuan in 2022, compared to a net income of 2 billion yuan in 2021.



“We went through a tough fourth quarter as the further sinking bitcoin price during the quarter led to lackluster market demand for mining machines as we expected,” Nangeng Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of Canaan, said in the report. “To mitigate demand risks during the market downturn, we have been diligently improving and developing our mining business.”



The mining rig maker said it has been developing its own Bitcoin mining business “as the second engine to capitalize on the Bitcoin ecosystem” on top of its mining machine sales.



As of the end of February, Canaan had installed computing power totaling 3.8 exahashes per second (EH/s) for its mining operations in Central Asia and North America, and it is ramping up the computing power with a target range between 5 EH/s and 5.5 EH/s by the end of the first quarter of this year, according to the report.




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