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.
Rockminer postponed their 2 PH/s mining operation because there wasn't enough margin left to pay friedcat and electricity costs let alone make a profit. AM had the idea -
"We will rent the excessive hashing power to financial and technical capable people, accepting full deposits at the market price, shipping the devices and collecting a certain PPS rate based on the theoretical hashrate." of course, AM was a little late for that game after trying for too long to sell chips that did not meet their own efficiency expectations. Sure if bitcoin price were to go higher, they might be able to get a little more mileage out of them but the chips are middle of the road as far as efficiency and a higher bitcoin price would create a higher demand ergo a higher price for
all chips. As it stands, Rockminer was selling some of their equipment below cost. It's not a friendly market right now.
If AM can incorporate the lessons learned from mistakes made with the gen 3 into a gen 4 chip and can produce it at a cost that will be profitable with today's bitcoin price, I say go for it! Order up the gen 4 chips! Otherwise, I would think there is no rush.