Strategy breaks from ‘never sell’ bitcoin approach

Strategy’s latest earnings release marks a subtle but meaningful shift in the company’s approach to bitcoin: Instead of passively stockpiling bitcoin, it’s going to more actively manage the balance sheet to maximize value of bitcoin per share.

That’s a reversal from the company’s longstanding “never sell” strategy, which originated with chairman, founder and bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor – and it comes as the company posts a $12.5 billion net loss in the first quarter due to the slump in the bitcoin price during the beginning of the year.

“Our ability to sell bitcoin either to buy U.S. dollars or sell bitcoin to buy debt if it’s accretive to bitcoin per share is something that we would consider doing going forward,” Phong Le, president and CEO of the company, said on the earnings call Tuesday evening.

In December, Strategy established a U.S. dollar reserve, which now holds $2.25 billion, to ensure it can meet its obligations to pay dividends on its preferred stock and interest on its outstanding debt.

The company has been funding its bitcoin purchases by issuing new equity and debt.

“We will sell bitcoin when it’s advantageous to the company,” Le said later on the same call. “We’re not going to sit back and just say, ‘We’ll never sell the bitcoin.’ We want to be net aggregators of bitcoin – increasing our total bitcoin, but more importantly, increasing our bitcoin per share because we think that is what is going to be most accretive long term for MSTR.”

Shares were lower by 3% in after hours trading.

Bitcoin per share is an informal metric the company uses to represent how much bitcoin each share of Strategy represents. The higher the bitcoin per share, the more exposure shareholders get over time.

Bitcoin per share can change depending on whether the company buys more of the cryptocurrency, issues new shares, or sells bitcoin to manage debt or buybacks.

On the earnings call, Saylor compared Strategy to a real estate development company.

“If you bought land for $10,000 an acre, and you sold it at $100,000 an acre, and then you bought more land with profit … or if you sold $100,000 an acre to pay some interest expense on debt that you used to buy more land, nobody would say that’s bad for the price of real estate, and no one would say that that proves the business doesn’t work,” he said.

“Real estate development companies literally exist to buy land cheap and sell it expensively,” he added. “We’re like a bitcoin development company.”

As of the end of the first quarter, Strategy held 818,334 BTC for $61.81 billion, accumulated at an average cost of about $75,500 per coin. That accounts for almost 4% of the total bitcoin supply. Year to date it has acquired about 63,000 BTC.

The company also highlighted a BTC yield of roughly 9% since the start of the year. This metric measures the growth in bitcoin per share – how much of the crypto the company is holding relative to the number of its shares – over time. BTC yield measures how effectively Strategy converts capital into bitcoin exposure for shareholders.