In the first half of the year, the mining company Argo Blockchain posted a net loss of $18.8 million and reduced its debt to $75 million.
As of the end of June 2022, the company’s debt stood at $143 million.
In July 2023, the firm raised $7.5 million in a share issue. This funding allowed debt to be reduced to $72 million.
For the first six months of the year Argo generated revenue of $24 million. Compared with the same period last year, the figure fell by 31%. The company attributed this to the decline in Bitcoin’s price and rising mining difficulty.
The firm mined 947 BTC in six months. A 1% increase in production and a 21% reduction in operating costs enabled losses to be more than halved from $39.6 million a year earlier.
Argo improved the mining profitability to 42% from 33% in H1 2022. One factor was the signing of a fixed-price electricity purchase agreement at the Helios facility in Texas. In Q2, the company received $1.1 million from the provider for grid demand balancing.
The company ended the half-year with $9.1 million in cash and 46 BTC on its balance sheet.
Argo’s hash rate during the period rose to 2.6 EH/s, helped by the deployment of 1,242 BlockMiner units at its own facility in Quebec. The launch of a further 1,628 miners in the coming months is expected to lift the firm’s capacity to around 2.8 EH/s.
In 2022 the company posted a net loss of $240 million.