June 22, 2021: -On Monday, MicroStrategy said it owns over 100,000 bitcoins after completing another purchase round, this time spending around $489 million on 13,005 tokens.
Shares of the Virginia-based enterprise software company were down over 6% in premarket trading, mirroring a sized slide similar to the price of bitcoin on Monday morning. The cryptocurrency was down above 8% to nearly $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 a piece, which includes fees and other expenses. The holdings of the company were worth above $3 billion by Monday.
MicroStrategy has in the past year gone from relative obscurity to a famous 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 touts bitcoin on Twitter. He’s racked up above 1 million followers on the social media site.
Last week, in a CNBC interview, Saylor defended the company’s crypto pursuits, which have involved debt offerings to purchase more bitcoin. MicroStrategy also recently filed for a program to sell around $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.
“That has increased the power of the brand by a factor of 100. We just had our best software quarter in the last ten years last quarter,” he added, noting the 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 had soared from the time when the company announced its maiden bitcoin buy before the bell on Aug. 11. Shares have increased around 423% from its Aug. 10, close to the closing price of $646.46 on Friday.
The stock reached a 52-week high on Feb. 9, trading over $1,300 per share, which was its high level since the dot-com boom.
Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency of the world by market value, was still up about 11% year to date, based on Monday’s trading price.
© THE CEO PUBLICATION 2021 | All rights reserved. Terms and condition | Privacy and Policy