MicroStrategy Chairman Michael Saylor speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, Friday, July 26, 2024. This conference is an annual event hosted by BTC Media LLC for fans of the original cryptocurrency. Photographer: Liam Kennedy/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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strategic The latest earnings release marks a subtle but meaningful shift in the company’s approach to Bitcoin. Rather than passively stockpiling Bitcoin, we intend to more actively manage our balance sheet to maximize the value of Bitcoin per share.
This is a shift from the company’s long-standing “never sell” strategy, initiated by chairman, founder and Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, and comes after the company posted a $12.5 billion net loss in the first quarter due to the slump in Bitcoin prices at the beginning of the year.
“Our ability to sell Bitcoin and buy US dollars or sell Bitcoin and buy debt is something we will look at going forward, if we see an increase in Bitcoin per share,” Von Leh, the company’s president and CEO, said on an earnings call Tuesday night.
In December, Strategy established a U.S. dollar reserve, which currently stands at $2.25 billion, to ensure it can meet its obligations to pay dividends on preferred stock and interest on outstanding debt.
The company has been financing its Bitcoin purchases by issuing new stocks and bonds.
“We will sell Bitcoin when it is advantageous for the company,” Lee said later on the same call. “We’re not going to sit back and say, ‘We’ll never sell Bitcoin.’ We want to be a pure aggregator of Bitcoin, and we want to grow our total Bitcoin volume, but more importantly, we want to grow our Bitcoin per share, because we think that’s the most accretive for MSTR over the long term.”
Shares fell 3% in after-hours trading.
Bitcoin price drop in 2026
Bitcoins per share is an unofficial metric used by the company to represent how many Bitcoins each share in Strategy represents. The higher the price of Bitcoin per share, the greater the long-term exposure for shareholders.
Bitcoin per share can change depending on whether a company buys more cryptocurrencies, issues new shares or sells Bitcoin to manage debt or buy back stock.
During the earnings call, Saylor compared Strategy to a real estate development company.
“If you buy land for $10,000 an acre, sell it for $100,000 an acre, make a profit and buy more land…or sell $100,000 an acre to pay the interest on the debt you used to buy more land, no one would say that’s bad for real estate prices, and no one would say that’s a sign that the business isn’t working,” he said.
“Real estate development companies literally exist to buy land cheap and sell it high,” he added. “We are like a Bitcoin development company.”
As of the end of the first quarter, Strategy held 818,334 BTC worth $61.81 billion, accumulated at an average cost of approximately $75,500 per coin. This accounts for almost 4% of Bitcoin’s total supply. Since the beginning of the year, we have acquired approximately 63,000 BTC.
The company also highlighted that BTC yield since the beginning of the year has been around 9%. This metric measures Bitcoin per share growth over time, or how much of the cryptocurrency a company owns relative to its number of shares. BTC Yield measures how effectively Strategy converts funds into Bitcoin exposure for shareholders.
