Kumamoto Electric Company and OZ Mining Corporation to Start Mining in Southern Japan

Kumamoto Electric Power Company and OZ Mining Corporation have announced that they will start operating a crypto mining farm from August, aiming to install 14,000 mining machines and reach 90 million yen profit by March 2020.

Also read: Japan’s Internet Giant GMO Launches New Upgraded 7nm Bitcoin Miner

Kumamoto Electric Power Company to Offer Cheap Rates

Kumamoto City in the Kumamoto Prefecture are located on the Kyushu island in southern Japan. Kumamoto Electric Power Company is also set on spreading crypto mining factories throughout Japan, according to a statement, making use of the cheapest electricity price in the country, limited to KEPCO (Kansai Electric Power Company) and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company). “Since the liberalization of the electric power market took place in early 2016, there are more and more electric power companies offering lower electric fees. In the Kyushu [Southern] region, I believe Kumamoto Electric Company offers one of the cheapest rates,” a salesperson at Kumamoto Electric Company told news.Bitcoin.com.

Japanese Ex-Financiers Started Mining Business in Northern Rural Industrial Zone

A cryptocurrency related startup company run by a group of Japanese men formerly working in the banking industry installed a crypto mining factory with 500 miners in the country side of Fukui, a Japanese coastal city located on the Chinese side of the sea, in the North. Alt Design, founded in September 2017 in Tokyo, offers various kinds of services such as crypto and ICO consultancy, but its founder and CEO Yuta Funayama decided around November of 2017 to start mining crypto in Japan. “We wanted to offer our clients and investors who are mainly Japanese a possibility to see the miners with their own eyes.”

Yuya Yamamoto, a spokesman of Alt Design, told news.Bitcoin.com in an interview: “Japanese people invest in miners abroad, but they expressed some worries saying that it’s harder to check what’s going on at the miner farms, especially if they are located outside of Japan. What we offer also, is the ‘Japanese quality’ service in which we believe the management of our miners is solid.” Alt Design has been mining litecoin and ethereum since mid-March 2018. “Our employees all have a background in IT. The miners operate 24/7 and our staff rotate daily to check if everything is running smoothly,” Yamamoto said, “we believe that our expertise is to tackle any incident quickly.” And the facility can resist natural disasters, he added. The equipment generates about 200 ETH and LTC altogether a month, he said.

Also, while searching for a place to install the plant, Alt Design found an area of Japan where the local government offers subsidies for IT companies such as paying them half of the rent if they install their business in unused local factories. The municipality of Fukui offers low business settling fees in support of new businesses, including IT companies. “We offer companies which want to settle in our city to pay up to half of their rent for three years,” Hiroyasu Yoshida, who represents the Fukui Municipality said. The electricity isn’t cheap everywhere in Japan, but the tariffs are lower in the Hokuriku region, including Fukui, which is to the north of Japan’s main island, facing China.

What do you think of Japanese startups starting mining operations in the north? Share your expectations in the comments section below. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Nikkei Asian Review.

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