completing another purchase round, this time spending roughly $489 million on 13,005 tokens.
Shares of the Virginia-based enterprise software company were down more than 6% in premarket trading, mirroring a similarly sized slide in the price of bitcoin Monday morning. The cryptocurrency was down over 8% to around $32,200 per token as reports surfaced that China was ratcheting up its crackdown on bitcoin mining.
MicroStrategy said the average purchase price of its 105,085 bitcoin trove is $26,080 apiece, including fees and other expenses. The company’s holdings were worth more than $3 billion as of Monday.
MicroStrategy has in the past year gone from relative obscurity to a well-known force on Wall Street and in the crypto community, thanks to its aggressive bets on bitcoin and the evangelizing from Chairman and CEO Michael Saylor, who routinely touts bitcoin on Twitter. He’s racked up over 1 million followers on the social-media site.
In a CNBC interview last week, Saylor defended the company’s crypto pursuits, which has involved debt offerings in order to buy more bitcoin. MicroStrategy also recently filed for a program to sell $1 billion worth of additional stock, proceeds from which can be used to acquire bitcoin.
“We rotated our shareholder base and transformed ourselves into a company that’s able to sell enterprise software and to acquire and hold bitcoin, and we’ve done it successfully with leverage,” Saylor said.
Microstrategy’s Michael Saylor on the company’s bitcoin future
“That has increased the power of the brand by a factor of 100. We just had our best software quarter … in the last 10 years last quarter,” he added, noting total revenues were up 10% year over year. “The bitcoin business is driving shareholder returns. I think the employees are happy. The shareholders are happy.”
MicroStrategy’s stock has soared since the company announced its maiden bitcoin buy before the bell Aug. 11. Shares have risen around 423% from its Aug. 10 close to Friday’s closing price of $646.46.
The stock hit a 52-week high on Feb. 9, trading above $1,300 per share, which was its highest level since the dot-com boom.
Bitcoin has suffered a rough trading stretch in the past two months after hitting its all-time high near $65,000 in April, around the time of Coinbase’s blockbuster direct listing.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value, was still up about 11% year to date, based on Monday morning’s trading price.
