The CEO of KNC has given an interview in swedish:
http://digital.di.se/artikel/knc-miner-grundaren-kina-har-fordelar-som-vi-inte-kanner-tillAnd there is this choice comment in it:
"We have tried to calculate the amount of money that the Chinese have invested in mining, we estimate it to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even with free electricity we cannot see how they will ever get this money back. Either they don't know what they are doing, but that is not very likely at this scale or they have some secret advantage that we don't know about"
the sand wouldn't have cost them that much neither would the labour,
and if the electricity is properly sourced ahead of time in bulk supply
it to will be very cheap, their sale of mining units would have paid for
their own equipment, also exchange market cap is much higher than
the BTC price which is 8 Billion unleveraged,