Espressif Systems is widely popular community thanks to their low-cost ESP8266 and ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth SoC, modules, and development kit as well as their extensive software ecosystem, and community support.
If you wonder how they did outside of the maker sphere, you don’t need to worry, as the company founded in 2008 is already profitable ($23 US million profit in 2018), and even launched an IPO on the new STAR market for science and technology sectors on the Shanghai stock market that was completed on July 9 and oversubscribed around 2,880 times.
A bank source informed me the IPO was only available to local Chinese people, and the IPO price was set to 62.60 CNY ($9.1). Listing started this Monday (July 22, 2019), and the stock has done extremely well with the price having reached 161.54 CNY at the time of writing. For reference, the stock code is 688018, but it can be challenging to buy if you live / or have bank accounts outside of China or Hong Kong.
With 80 million shares (included 20 milion listed) that means Espressif Systems is now valuated at 12.92 billion CNY or about 1.88 billion US dollars. CNX Software reached out to Espressif CEO for comment a few days ago but did not get a reply so far, so I can only imagine that with so much money, they are either too busy partying, or working on their next project(s) 😉
Thanks to Jon for the tip.
Full disclose: I do not currently own Espressif Systems shares.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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