Strategy shifts from passive bitcoin accumulation to actively managing balance sheet to boost bitcoin per share value.

“Our ability to trade bitcoin either to purchase U.S. dollars or trade bitcoin to invest in 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 organization, noted on the earnings call Tuesday evening. This also touches on aspects of bull market.

At the end of the first quarter, Strategy held 818,334 BTC acquired for $61.81 billion, accumulated at an average cost of about $75,500 per coin.

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 organization posts a $12.5 billion net depletion in the first quarter due to the slump in the bitcoin price during the beginning of the year.

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 firm has been funding its bitcoin purchases by issuing recent equity and debt.

“We will liquidate bitcoin when it’s advantageous to the company,” Le remarked later on the same call. “We’re not going to sit back and just say, ‘We’ll never auction 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.”

Bitcoin per share is an informal metric the enterprise 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 organization buys more of the cryptocurrency, issues fresh shares, or sells bitcoin to manage debt or buybacks.

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

“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 earnings … or if you sold $100,000 an acre to pay some interest expense on debt that you used to acquire more land, nobody would say that’s poor for the price of real estate, and no one would say that that proves the business doesn’t work,” he noted.

“Real estate development companies literally exist to purchase land cheap and liquidate 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 enterprise 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 firm is holding relative to the number of its shares – over time. BTC yield measures how effectively Strategy converts capital into bitcoin exposure for shareholders.