Canaan's Rig Revenue Falls 96% as It Buys Back $20M of Stock
Canaan sold almost no mining machines last quarter, and what profit it booked came from holding bitcoin instead of building rigs. The Avalon maker reported mining-equipment revenue of $4.8 million for the three months to 30 September, down 96% from $118.6 million a year earlier. Its own mining operation brought in $9.5 million, roughly twice the hardware line. On 10 November the company launched a $20 million share repurchase programme and said it may sell more crypto to pay for it. Crypto Briefing had the results the day they landed; CoinDesk and crypto.news read the same release on Thursday morning.
Where the profit came from
Total revenue was $14.5 million, a 90% fall from $150.5 million a year earlier, on the reading both Crypto Briefing and crypto.news give the release. Canaan still reported a net profit of $8 million while its operating loss ran to $42.9 million. Revaluation gains on crypto holdings and financial derivatives closed that gap, helped by bitcoin's higher quarter-end price. crypto.news put the contribution at about $52 million, a figure no other account read here carries, and quoted Chief Financial Officer James Jin Cheng saying the gains were non-cash and separate from operating performance.
The two accounts do not agree on what the profit reverses. Crypto Briefing wrote that it undoes a second-quarter loss of $97.6 million. crypto.news wrote that it undoes a $27.7 million loss in the third quarter of 2025. One comparison is sequential and the other year-on-year, so both can be true of different baselines, and we could not establish which the company's own release treats as the headline figure. They do not reconcile as written.
A treasury mostly promised elsewhere
Canaan held 1,875.5 bitcoin on 30 September, and most of it is already committed. It had pledged 1,258 against secured loans and put another 100 into a fixed-term product, leaving 517.5 carried directly as crypto assets, worth $43.7 million at quarter-end. Of $72.8 million in cash and restricted cash, $50 million backs a letter of credit for infrastructure work. That leaves about $22.8 million unrestricted. The pattern is established. A September update disclosed sales of 3,952 ether and 54.5 bitcoin for roughly $13.9 million, of which $5.4 million went on buying back 13.6 million American depositary shares in late August.
The new programme sits under a $100 million authorisation the board approved on 6 November, good for 12 months, with no commitment to spend all of it. Chairman and CEO Nangeng Zhang said the shares are mispriced.
"This new share repurchase program reflects our belief that our shares are trading at levels that materially undervalue the strength of our business model and long-term growth potential," Zhang said.
The stock has lost about 75% of its value this year, measured to Wednesday's close.
Power projects and a smaller share count
Canaan mined 133 bitcoin in the quarter and is putting its planning effort into electricity. A proposed 1-gigawatt project in Duval County, Texas took a conditional classification under the ERCOT grid-connection process, which still requires further studies and approvals before anything is built. crypto.news alone reports a second proposed 1-gigawatt site in Zapata County at an early stage, and a change to the depositary share ratio from 15 ordinary shares to 375, equivalent to a one-for-25 reverse split, which the company expects to take effect around 4 December. Neither detail appears in the other accounts read here.
The part a buyback cannot reach
Zhang blamed continued weakness in equipment demand, which makes this a sector problem and not a Canaan stumble. The rest of the industry has been reporting the same squeeze: MARA and CleanSpark posted a combined $851 million quarterly loss for their own September quarter, and hashprice fell 17.54% in October while total miner revenue came to $1.215 billion. Buying back shares with coins does nothing for the order book. If bitcoin's price turns, the gains that produced the quarter's profit reverse with it, and the hardware line is the only part of the business that can refill on its own.
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