Major equipment manufacturers for mining, such as Bitmain, Canaan and Ebang, can suffer from recently imposed U.S. sanctions against Chinese goods.
According to the newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP), the Office of the U.S. trade representative (USTR) has changed the classification of mining equipment, and is now subject to higher import duties.
In June, USTR has classified ASIC miner Bitmain Antminer S9 as “an apparatus of electrical equipment”, the tariff for the imports of this category amounted at that time to 2.6%. Prior to this, the miners belonged to the “machines for data processing” and the trade rate was zero.
But the change of classification has led to the fact that the mining hardware already in the list of Chinese goods in respect of which has been introduced an additional 25 percent tariff, which came into force in August. As a result, Chinese producers of ASIC miners are now faced with rate of 27.6% in the supply in the United States.
As told SCMP Ben Gagnon (Gagnon Ben), co-founder of LuTech developer of equipment for mining cryptocurrency, it is likely to change the tariff code will apply to all Chinese manufacturers mining installations which will fall under the new tariffs the United States.
According to the publication foreign sales in 2017 from Canaan and Ebang was 8.5% and 3.8% of the total. Much more onerous new trade tariffs the US can be for Bitmain — according to the IPO prospectus, the company’s sales abroad in 2016 was up 51.6% last year 51.8 per cent.
According to Mark Lee (Mark Li), senior analyst firm Sanford C. Bernstein, a new trade tariffs, the U.S. will make China mining equipment less competitive in the U.S. market. However, in his opinion, Bitmain should rather worry about high fees, and the technical gap. Companies such as Canaan and GMO Internet release a more advanced mining chips and more productive equipment than Bitmain Antminer S9, added Lee.
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