Acording to nicehash calc this would ROI in 60 days (at 10cents/kWh) and segwit haven't even been activated on LTC yet. Bitmain doesn't do charity and they also don't need money that desperately to sell miners for "free". 99% sure there is some hidden rock there. So i see 3 options.
1. They know/believe LTC/scrypt will drop to hole. So they get money now and mine with miners while they can. This is highly doubtful even if big hashrate increase, as there are other scrypt coins doing very well and this miner would do well even on drop because of low power draw.
2. They wanna do price demping and push out Inno completely out of market as A4 now is more expensive, hashes lower and draws more power. Even if you buy 2 L3+ and one them is dud on arrival - Bitmain style. You still get better deal than A4's. Usually they just offer better efficency for trade-off of realibility. Hashrate/$ is usualy similar or just bit better than oponents (Avalon). After Inno is out they can increase prices and do monopoly stuff like with SHA256 miners.
3. ASICBoost, makes them lose hashrate or elec. effiency. Worse case (not sure if it's possible) it completely bricks miners from LTC network. Techically no biggie as Scrypt market is not so big. But what happens here will also happen with S9/T9/A4. And if it bricks miners then there will be so many tears from China BTC miners there will new China Ocean. Because on SHA256 there is no coins where to move miners, opposite of Scrypt.
this could be a way to just get the BTC back they paid to have these miners made (overstock) for the seq witness war...now that they don't have a seq witness war they quit
that means only way to get BTC back quick is to sell these miners and assume set for a BTC take off in price ..in that they also are going to stop fighting it on btc network.
thus THEY know they are gonna allow seg witness on both camps and are holding btc and ltc becuase they know it is gonna pump in price both camps....and if truely evil corp type they will
cash out the BTC to make these miners for the seg witness war that never happened and the rest can be used to MAKE these July miners etc
remember may 15th and july 15th the miners we are giving them btc now is PRE-ORDER..this is all 'gravy train' for them
evil frigging genuis's
also they stamp out innsilicon make it sooooooo unattractive no one makes an asic miner to compete for next year or more if ever
they lock up pow mining for both scrypt and sha-256
you really want to go 'full evil' they use these profits on knowing they are gonna allow seg witness and the correspoding pump in both btc and ltc when announced and
use the profits to make an X11 line of miners and control that too....
evil..its what they do and they do it well (bitmain) (tm)
jeez...they oss in the frigging towel on all seg witness.....have inside information that you (bitmain) are gonna toss in the frigging towel on seg witness......(not even illegal inside info ..I mean its a choice right)
then act on that to lock up your whole industry.....get your $$$ back for the hedge on equip for the now no longer seg witness wars in asic land....and use the profits
for the new X11 line to control all pow mining of ANY kind so far in the asic universe
bruahahahahah (evil laugh)
Bitmain the above is CR .if you want to use my 'evil' ideas I can be bought