In the current mining climate (declining BTC value, exponentially increasing difficulty, fierce competition) it is hard enough for an ASIC manufacturer to survive, let alone thrive.
I would not expect anything in terms of dividends. Gen2 was vaporware and Gen3 a bit of a dud due to a design mistake that significantly increased power consumption. I think the best we can hope for is for friedcat to roll over any earnings from Gen3 to accelerate and perfect development of Gen4. Shareholders looking for short term gains will be disappointed. In the long run, I think AM is still well positioned to come out on top and worth the risk of holding shares.
I also believe that this is the way to go! The Bitcoin price is just too low at the moment, even ROCKMINER decided to postpone their 2 PH/s mining operation.... AM just doesn't seem to have enough of a margin to spend the income as dividends.
I think the best thing to do would be to order massive amounts of gen 4 chips ASAP.
That was exactly their policy with gen 3. How did that work out?
Bottom line, if they aren't paying dividends, share price will slide and slide. There is no way AM can wipe out the competition because of "lowest cost". Business ain't that simple.
Yeah, but gen 3 had two or three big problems: About half as efficient as planned, at least two months to late, focus on selling the chip when the mining market got much too saturated (in combination with higher power consumption of BE200) and wasting 2-3 months on selling the chip before self-mining. In addition we saw a steep decline of the BTC price, which AM couldn't have prevented.
That being said, if things worked out better, we'd have had a gen 3 chip almost twice as efficient, self-mining in March/April, and potentially a better price. I do see where at least half of those things wouldn't necessarily be a problem with gen 4!