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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One day we will see the code of the wifi driver 🙂
Can’t you just read out the ROM?
NEVER,wifi was ip stolen or at least referenced from ATHEROS ,some nasty guy brought out when atheros old chaos days
What code do you actually want? You’ll never get the bits that actually drive the radio and chances are you don’t want the “driver” part that drives it as it’ll be junk and/or useless without understanding the radio part.
you got the valuation wrong. there are 80 million shares. So multiply everything by 4x.
“…as the company founded in 2018 is already profitable ..”
small edit in your article:
the company founded in 2008 🙂
..
best wishes
rudi 😉
We’re not reading the total shares number right, look down below.
http://data.eastmoney.com/xg/xg/detail/688018.html?tr_zqh=1
Le Xin (Hong Kong) Investment Co., Ltd. holds 34,860,000 shares
Based on that total shares outstand is around 58,775,000. That makes the market capitalization $1.38B.
I believe the difference is whether the shares have been listed. Listed shares are tradable on the exchange. Unlisted shares are still shares but you can’t trade them until you pay the listing fee to the exchange.
The 20M number is the number of shares they have paid the exchange listing fee on.
That table is “major shareholders”.
Espressif total shares outstanding is 80M: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/688018:CH
Include 20M new shares sold in IPO.
Can read IPO reports in Chinese:
http://ipo.sseinfo.com/info/xjxx/index_xq.shtml?securityCode=688018 – number of shares is 8,000 万股
“as the company founded in 2018” – there is a typo, the screenshot shows 2008 to be the founding year
Only slightly related. I’ve just noticed Rockchip has been a publicly listed company since February 2020. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/603893:SHA