Your 'inside information' is either wrong or old.
can you produce or link to any data that shows the relative size of asicminer?
what about just looking at list of mining pools (blockchain.info or organ of corti). we can see where kncminer is.. we can even see where bitfury might be. perhaps we can see some of the others. we also know what bitmain says they are. if we add up the network percentages that bitfury (40%), bitmain (20%), kncminer (10%?) and a few others (15%?) say they are (and hopefully can prove it someday)... then there's not a lot of unknowns left. asicminer is a public company. did they disclose just how big they are?
Let me invite you to do some basic estimation of AM's worth.
Total dividends distributed so far are 0.5911 BTC per share.
Bitfountain, AM parent company, own 236,038 shares.
You do the math.
i dont see how total dividends in any way equates to the company's size. dividends go to the shareholders !
the total dividend doesnt equate to its revenue, nor its hashpower on the mining network.
so what that last year they made 100,000+ bitcoins in dividends. thats awesome.. but that was last year. When they were a major part of the bitcoin mining network. They were HUGE HUGE HUGE last year. we all know that. What about this year? What about next year!? they dont appear to be HUGE any longer.
Im doing the math. BitFountain 'made' 0.5911 * 236,038 bitcoins in total dividends, ever. Thats 139,522 bitcoins theyve made in profit into BitFountain. Thats not AsicMiner, thats BitFountain. And theyve done really really well last year. AsicMiner no longer has those bitcoins, theyve been dividend'd out to BF. This year, according to Havelock, the yield (dividend ratio compared to stock price) is 2%... so this year, isnt as good a year as last year (thats an understatement)
You just linked us to information suggesting they just spent several million on chip orders....