Earnings Call Transcript - MSTR Q1 2023

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Hello, everyone, and good evening. I'm Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury at MicroStrategy. I will be your moderator for MicroStrategy's 2023 First Quarter Earnings Webinar. Before we proceed, I will read the Safe Harbor statement. Some of the information we provide during today's call regarding our future expectations may constitute forward-looking statements.

Phong Le, CEO

Thank you, Shirish. Hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome you all to our 2023 first quarter earnings call. We're excited to be reporting live for MicroStrategy World 2023 in Orlando, Florida. We've had a successful day one of the event today, and we're excited to see our customers, partners and employees all in person for the first time since 2020 and share our passion for BI, bitcoin and innovation. The business intelligence track tomorrow will feature MicroStrategy One and features keynotes, including how we are integrating augmented analytics, artificial intelligence to drive innovative experiences. We'll also showcase how some of the world's best brands use MicroStrategy to achieve extraordinary results. This includes keynote presentations from Hilton, Sony and Amica Insurance. The Bitcoin for Corporations track on Wednesday and Lightning for Corporations track on Thursday will feature keynotes from notable institutions and industry luminaries highlighting the advantages of integrating Bitcoin and Lightning as a part of their corporate treasury and product offerings. It will be a unique gathering of corporations looking to adopt Bitcoin and Lightning strategies, and we are very excited to host this event. The conference also includes workshops, training, dedicated networking opportunities and some fun too. For those of you attending the conference in Orlando, we look forward to seeing you in person. Turning to our business results for Q1. We continue to see strong demand for MicroStrategy software, both on-premise and in the cloud. Total revenue was $121.9 million, representing an increase of 2% year-over-year or 6% on a constant currency basis. Total software licenses revenues were $36.2 million, representing an increase of 23% year-over-year or 29% on a constant currency basis. Total subscription services revenue was $18.8 million, an increase of 46% year-over-year or 52% on a constant currency basis. Our Q1 subscription billings growth was 19% year-over-year, lower than our 2022 annualized subscription billings growth of 39%. We had good overall revenue results in Q1 2023 and the durability of our enterprise BI platform and the depth of our existing customer base are a testament to our resiliency. However, it's important to note that difficult macro conditions continue to persist and they impact our revenue in the coming quarters. In addition to the revenue results, we also had a successful quarter with our Bitcoin strategy. We acquired 7,500 Bitcoin in Q1, the most in a single quarter since the fourth quarter of 2021 for a net aggregate purchase amount of $179 million or $23,900 per Bitcoin. As of March 31, 2023, we held a total of 140,000 Bitcoins at an aggregate cost of $4.2 billion or average cost of approximately $29,800 per Bitcoin. Our strategy is to acquire and hold Bitcoin, and we plan to continue to accumulate Bitcoin over time using our excess cash and the net proceeds of capital markets transactions. Our core business is not impacted by near-term bitcoin price fluctuations. MicroStrategy is the largest publicly traded corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world, and we remain committed to our Bitcoin acquisition strategy with a high degree of conviction and a long-term focus in a risk-managed approach. To conclude our business highlights, I want to highlight that in Q1, we repaid our $205 million Bitcoin back loan at a 22% discount. With this transaction, we recognized a $45 million gain on extinguishment of debt and eliminated annualized interest costs of more than $15 million per year. It has also released 34,619 Bitcoins that served as collateral for this loan and which are now unencumbered. As of March 31, 2023, only 11% of our total Bitcoin holdings are pledged as collateral for debt. Next, I would like to introduce you to MicroStrategy One. Eight years and over 2.5 million hours of engineering have resulted in MicroStrategy One, a modern, open cloud-native BI platform that can serve all the analytics needs of large enterprises. MicroStrategy One is highlighted by a modern product suite, including dossier, library, workstation and Hyperintelligence. It is fully open, built on restful APIs and Python. And because we are an independent analytics company, it works seamlessly with any data sources and clients. Similarly, our cloud platform works on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and soon the Google Cloud platform, supporting multi-cloud deployments through a container-based architecture. Finally, MicroStrategy One serves all major categories of analytics, self-service, business reporting, advanced applications and embedded analytics. We're the only analytics software company with this combination of capabilities which enable enterprises to get value from their customers. We're extremely proud of the work done to build MicroStrategy One and will actively migrate this innovative platform. The platform is intended to be a one-stop shop for all of our business intelligence customers and prospects. The next-generation platform is built to unleash new levels of efficiency and creativity for users. Organizations are looking to consolidate vendors to save costs, simplify deployment and maximize impact. That's where we stand out, providing a comprehensive solution. We enable migration off legacy out-of-support analytics tools and also provide a modern experience that offers enterprises great security and scalability, a reusable object model and open architecture to avoid vendor lock-in. Now while the one platform is a powerhouse that delivers on all core competencies of modern analytics, it's also a new way of talking about what MicroStrategy can do and how we can compete. MicroStrategy One is our most advanced platform to-date; it's a result of the immense dedication of the MicroStrategy teams that got us to this point, and it's the foundation for all of our future innovation. With the completion of the MicroStrategy One platform and focus on rebuilding much of our platform in the last eight years, we're now able to increasingly focus on MicroStrategy's hallmark product innovation. Our innovation is focused on four areas: core analytics, augmented analytics, artificial intelligence, and the Lightning network. On the innovation side, MicroStrategy's core differentiators that position us to lead the next innovation age of analytics in a modern and open business world include our semantic graph with object reusability, enterprise-grade security and scalability, and open architecture multi-cloud. We believe the future of core analytics is going to center on three key themes: empowered self-service, productivity, and data personalization. One area we've heard about a great deal from our customers is self-service. Self-service is long overdue for disruption. The notion that business users have interest, let alone time to learn that offering interface is a non-starter. End users typically have no concept of your data structures and sources or your schema. Providing end users with basic authoring tools may result in non-performing dashboards and inaccurate data combinations. The shift away from single-use analysis results in true self-service through reusable content. Governed authoring is a new way, an authoring experience, a library that allows business users to build their own dossiers by using predefined assets in a vastly simplified experience while removing the complexities of data import blending. Our AI engine will suggest additional visualizations that may be useful to users based on ones they've already selected or based on topics they are researching. It will also ensure that the assets they are combining and their design are compatible and performing. Next is innovation in augmented analytics. MicroStrategy Insights released in September 2022 was our first set of products released in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment more traditional reporting capabilities and provide contextual and immediate insights. Now integrated with MicroStrategy One, the insights feature accelerates decision-making and uncovers data patterns of automated alerting and library applications. The alerts are based on machine learning models, working behind the scenes to proactively detect data trends, outliers and anomalies, equipping users with timely insights to drive action. This is the basis on which we are combining MicroStrategy semantic layer, Hyperintelligence, and open architecture to provide data tracking alerts, forecasting, and recommendations. We believe this is something MicroStrategy is uniquely positioned to provide, and we expect to release more functionality in this area every quarter. Next is further innovation and generative artificial intelligence. MicroStrategy, with our semantic graph, including our metadata and platform analytics, is well positioned to leverage AI-driven technologies like chatbots to drive productivity across all personas. How AI is leveraged to integrate in organizations will become the business differentiator. Generative AI can use the semantic layer to better understand the data and its relationships, resulting in more accurate predictions, better data quality, and faster actionable insights. On the Bitcoin innovation side, MicroStrategy Lightning is a new product we are developing, which utilizes the Lightning network, a second layer network that sits on top of the Bitcoin network. We envision MicroStrategy Lightning as an enterprise platform designed to leverage the power of the Bitcoin Lightning network to enable new e-commerce use cases and tackle modern cybersecurity challenges. The first use case in the MicroStrategy Lightning platform is Lightning Rewards. Lightning Rewards is intended to allow any enterprise to reward their employees, customers, partners, and prospects for their engagement. Companies spend vast amounts of time and energy on digital marketing, driving engagement with their brand and their customers and for some, monetizing online content. We believe a platform like MicroStrategy Lightning will enable them to drive engagement by rewarding their customers directly for that engagement rather than aligning the pockets of marketing or financial intermediaries. We expect future capabilities as the Lightning platform will provide opportunities for new business models to monetize online content or minimize threats from bots and other malicious actors. While we envision MicroStrategy Lightning as an independent product offering, it builds on our core strengths and deep experience in building highly available, easy-to-use software delivered in the cloud. As mentioned in the last earnings call, we're taking a very disciplined investment approach such that our Lightning development efforts currently occupy less than 1% of our R&D capability. While our core focus remains on BI innovation, we believe we are uniquely positioned to bring value here. We will talk about MicroStrategy Lightning further in our Lightning for Corporations event on Thursday. These incremental areas of product focus and inhibition will drive MicroStrategy's strategy of being at the forefront of analytics. I cannot be more excited about our product roadmap, which we will share more about tomorrow at MicroStrategy World. Last but not least, I want to take a moment to recognize our former Chief Technology Officer, Tim Lang, who retired after 8.5 years from the position of CTO with MicroStrategy. It's been my privilege to work with him over the past seven years, and we wish him the best. With Tim's departure, we'll be splitting his former responsibilities as CTO into two distinct organizations within our technology team: Product and Engineering, both of which I will oversee. Leading our engineering organization will be Cezary Raczko, our Executive Vice President of Engineering. Cezary has been with MicroStrategy for 24 years, starting as a software engineer and growing to lead teams that have built much of our platform. I'm excited for Cezary to step into this leadership role and focus more on customer satisfaction as well as product innovation. I'll now turn the call over to Andrew to discuss our financials for the quarter in further detail.

Andrew Kang, CFO

Thank you, Phong. It's great to be my first MicroStrategy World. There's a ton of energy and buzz here, and I'm definitely looking forward to meeting many of our customers as well as those interested in learning more about Bitcoin for Corporations. But let me get to our financial results. Our first quarter enterprise analytics business results were strong, showing total year-over-year revenue growth. This was in light of persisting macroeconomic headwinds, as Phong mentioned earlier, which reflects our deep customer base and the durability of our platform during economic volatility. GAAP total revenues for the quarter were $121.9 million, up $2.6 million or 2% year-over-year and up 6% year-over-year at constant currency. Total software license revenues, made up of product license revenues and subscription services revenues, were $36.2 million, up 23% year-over-year and up 29% at constant currency, outperforming last year's Q1 year-over-year results. Subscription services revenues, reflecting recurring revenues from our cloud business, were $18.8 million, an increase of 46% year-over-year or an increase of 52% at constant currency. Product licenses revenues were $17.4 million for the quarter, up 5% year-over-year, which reflected strong performance in our international business. Product support revenues were $65.5 million, down $1.7 million year-over-year, but were flat at constant currency. Renewal rates have remained high at over 90% in Q1, and for the last six consecutive quarters. Finally, other services revenues were $20.2 million, an 11% decrease year-over-year or an 8% decrease at constant currency, primarily due to a decrease in our consulting revenues. On Slide 15, total current software license billings were $28.7 million in the first quarter, a slight increase of 2% year-over-year. Current subscription billings were $13.7 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year, our 12th straight quarter of double-digit growth. We continue to focus our efforts on transitioning customers to our cloud solution, which includes converting existing on-premise customers and selling incremental cloud licenses. Incremental licenses will continue to come from new deployments by existing customers as well as new licenses purchased by customer prospects. We are also increasing our focus on partnerships with hyperscalers that will drive incremental cloud license opportunities in the future. In 2022, approximately 2/3 of our total revenue was recurring, and we expect this trend to improve in 2023. The transition to a subscription model will help establish high-quality annual recurring revenues that will allow us to scale and continue growing our business. Turning to Slide 16. Total non-GAAP expenses, which exclude share-based compensation costs, were $125 million in the first quarter compared to $275 million in Q1 of 2022. Our total non-GAAP costs this quarter were significantly lower compared to the same quarter last year, primarily due to higher Bitcoin impairment charges in Q1 of 2022. For this quarter, Bitcoin impairment charges were $19 million, in contrast to $170 million in Q1 of last year. Non-GAAP cost of revenues was $27 million in the first quarter, an increase of $2.2 million or 9% year-over-year. As a percentage of total revenues, however, non-GAAP cost of revenues increased approximately 1% year-over-year, primarily due to the increase in cloud hosting costs, which is a result of increased usage by new and existing cloud subscription services, partially offset by favorable currency exchange impacts. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses increased $2 million or 7% year-over-year to $31 million. As a percentage of total revenues, non-GAAP sales and marketing costs were higher by 1% year-over-year. You may recall that in Q1 of 2022, we capitalized certain commissions, which resulted in lower variable compensation costs last year. That being said, we are closely managing our headcount and salary costs, and we also revamped our sales commissions plan this year, which may shift costs to later in the year based on meeting and beating sales targets. Non-GAAP research and development expenses were $27 million, a decrease of $2.8 million or 9% year-over-year. The cost savings we are realizing now represent the benefits of investing in lower-cost global delivery centers last year, such as in India, Poland, Argentina, and China. Through those strategic initiatives, we are now able to further optimize spend without sacrificing technology, talent, or product development. Non-GAAP G&A costs were $20 million, a modest decrease of $500,000 or 2% year-over-year. On Slide 17, total non-GAAP operating loss in the first quarter of 2023 was $3 million, of which the loss on the digital asset impairment charge was $19 million for the quarter. The digital asset impairment charge continues to be the primary impact driver when reporting our operating results. I have highlighted in the past that today GAAP accounting policy treats our Bitcoin holdings as indefinite-lived intangible assets, which results in continuing to recognize impairments each quarter if there is any decrease in the fair value at any point during the quarter below our carrying value. Late last year, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, unanimously voted to recommend the adoption of fair value accounting for measuring certain digital assets, which includes Bitcoin. We have only recognized impairments regardless of whether the price of Bitcoin increases as it did in Q1. However, when fair value accounting is finalized and we are able to recognize both decreases and increases in the fair market value of Bitcoin, we believe our reported earnings will be far more transparent to investors and far more relevant in how we report changes in the market price of Bitcoin and its impact on our reported quarterly results. As of March 31, 2023, the carrying value of our Bitcoin holdings was approximately $2 billion compared to approximately $4 billion in the market value of our holdings based on the Bitcoin price of approximately $28,500 as of the last day of Q1. As Bitcoin prices have continued to rally this year, as of market close on Friday, April 28, the market value of our 140,000 Bitcoins has increased to approximately $4.1 billion. That is a difference of $2.1 billion between the carrying value of our total Bitcoin holdings and the fair market value of our holdings, which could be recognized under a fair value model. On March 23, the FASB issued an exposure draft for comments that would cause in-scope digital assets, which includes Bitcoin, to be measured at fair value. The deadline for comment on the exposure draft runs through June 6. MicroStrategy is fully supportive of the newly proposed rules and the improved investor transparency it brings. We plan to provide a response to FASB during the comment period, and we encourage others to voice their support as well. As the largest publicly traded corporate holder of Bitcoin, we believe we have a responsibility to share what we have learned since embarking on our Bitcoin strategy to make it easier for other companies to diversify their balance sheet with this important and innovative asset class. We remain committed as we have in the past to supporting these efforts and supporting other companies with a playbook and shared experiences to leverage Bitcoin as a treasury asset and to continue and support its adoption as a store of value for corporate balance sheets. Turning to Slide 19. In Q1, we repaid the $205 million Bitcoin backed loan at a 22% discount, recognizing a $45 million gain on the extinguishment of that debt. In addition to reducing the Company's leverage, we eliminated our highest interest rate debt, which had floated up to an annualized rate of 8.26% just prior to repayment due to the rapidly rising interest rate environment last year. By retiring the debt, we also released all of the bitcoins that were pledged as collateral securing the loan. This was an important and strategic transaction for us and our liability management goals. We now have a total of $2.2 billion of outstanding debt in convertible instruments with a blended, weighted interest rate of approximately 1.6%. This is compared to the prior blended weighted interest rate of 2.1% as of the end of 2022. The convertible senior notes carry a very low cost of capital with the earliest debt maturity not until December 2025. These notes are the most attractive in terms of cost, and with over two years remaining until the earliest maturity, our outstanding long-term capital continues to be valuable and accretive to our shareholders. Lastly, our now fully fixed annualized interest expense is $35.5 million compared to over $50 million of annualized expense before the end of Q1. This strengthens our overall liquidity position. As of the end of the first quarter, we had $94 million in cash on our balance sheet, and our overall liquidity remains robust to manage our ongoing working capital needs as well as our debt service expense. Also in Q1, we continued to execute on our at-the-market or ATM equity offering and raised approximately $339 million in net proceeds through the sale of Class A common shares. We issued an aggregate of approximately 1.35 million shares of Class A common stock at an average gross price per share of $252.85. Since then, we terminated the prior $500 million ATM program, of which approximately $112 million of capacity remained. Today, we announced a new $625 million ATM program. With the prior program, we may use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, which include the purchase of Bitcoin or for debt repayment or redemption. We will continue to opportunistically raise capital and use those proceeds in a way that we believe will be the most accretive to our shareholders. No shares have been issued under this new program to date. Our asset liability management efforts have pushed our earliest debt maturity from Q1 2025 to December of 2025, with no debt maturities coming due in the next two-plus years, giving us more flexibility in managing our liabilities with additional time to navigate the challenges in the macroeconomic environment as well as the price fluctuations in the Bitcoin markets. In Q1, we increased our net Bitcoin position by 7,500 Bitcoins. As of March 31, 2023, we now hold a total of 140,000 Bitcoins on our balance sheet. Of our total Bitcoin holdings, 14,890 Bitcoins are held by MicroStrategy the parent and are pledged as collateral securing our 2028 secured notes. The remaining 125,110 Bitcoins are held at the MicroStrategy subsidiary, all of which now are fully unpledged and unencumbered. At the end of the quarter, 89% of our total Bitcoin holdings were unencumbered compared to 63% at the end of 2022. It's worth mentioning again and reinforcing that we only buy Bitcoin in U.S.-based markets. We only custody Bitcoin with institutional grade, U.S.-based regulated custodians in cold storage, and we have never lent out our Bitcoin. Since the adoption of our Bitcoin acquisition strategy, we have taken a simple approach to buy and hold Bitcoin. We conduct due diligence on all of our custodians and execution partners and we take steps along the way to minimize risk and ensure the highest level of compliance. We only buy Bitcoin in U.S.-based markets. Turning to Slide 22. Our outlook for 2023 remains optimistic but with a cautious eye. We anticipate modest total revenue growth this year. We expect to continue to grow cloud subscriptions as a percentage of total revenue and strengthen the quality of our recurring revenue as we continue to transform our platform. We remain disciplined on costs while investing in growth, and we will continue to execute our dual strategy of growing our business intelligence software business and acquiring Bitcoin for the future. As Phong mentioned, difficult macro conditions continue to persist, which may impact our results this year. However, we are extremely encouraged that even in this environment, MicroStrategy continues to serve its customers with an agile one-stop analytics platform with open architecture and modern cloud capabilities. Thank you for your time today and for your continued support of MicroStrategy. I'll now turn the call over to Michael for his remarks.

Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman

Thank you, Andrew. I would like to start with a quick review of our Bitcoin strategy. As you know, in the third quarter of 2020, we embarked on a strategy and an analysis to determine what we thought would be the best treasury reserve asset. We adopted a Bitcoin strategy at that point, believing it to be digital gold, but without any of the liabilities or imperfections of gold, and with compelling characteristics of a dominant tech network. We were looking for a Google, Facebook, or Apple of digital gold, and we looked at all possibilities: bonds, silver, and gold, investing in big tech, real estate or collectibles. Our conclusion was that the fundamentals of Bitcoin were superior to all these asset classes. If we wanted a non-sovereign store of value asset that is provably scarce and scales as technology improves—Bitcoin was the best choice. Bitcoin has outperformed all competing assets over this time period. It has outperformed all major enterprise software stocks and, importantly, it’s a dominant digital network without dilution. There’s never going to be more than 21 million Bitcoin. As the world gets educated about Bitcoin, they are becoming more aware of its value proposition. We are proud to say that our stock has outperformed Bitcoin—after starting our capital structure exposed to Bitcoin, we managed to get full Bitcoin exposure and actually outperform the underlying Bitcoin. Acquiring and holding Bitcoin in a prudent fashion is a good strategy. We do not feel the need to pursue higher risk strategies. Our disciplined approach and focus in both enterprise software and Bitcoin strategy have yielded significant results. The retirement of the Silvergate loan dramatically improved our balance sheet, and our cash position continues to improve. We will pursue balance sheet opportunities and financial opportunities as long as they are deemed accretive. Bitcoin adoption continues and the regulatory environment is improving. This is not the case for the entire crypto industry, but as capital flows out of the crypto market, it moves into Bitcoin. Investors exiting cryptocurrencies like stable coins are expected to convert and invest that capital into Bitcoin. As the regulatory environment around crypto becomes clearer, it creates a tailwind for Bitcoin. Increased awareness of Bitcoin's value proposition as a store of value and the demand for transactions on the Bitcoin network continues to grow, evidenced by increased transaction fees, which benefit Bitcoin miners. There’s a strong trend of capital flowing from the crypto industry into Bitcoin. The second major trend is the flow of development efforts from the crypto community onto the Bitcoin network. Developers are increasingly interested in smart contracts, NFTs, and other applications being built on the Bitcoin protocol. With the introduction of layer two protocols, such as the Lightning protocol, we see potential for Bitcoin to support billions of transactions, and we are excited about the opportunities MicroStrategy Lightning presents. The turnout for this week’s Bitcoin and Lightning for Corporations conference reflects the significant interest from various companies and Lightning application providers. Lightning is emerging as an open, permissionless, secure transaction protocol for the world, with the potential to integrate various authentication and value exchange mechanisms. We are enthusiastic about the MicroStrategy Lightning offering and will continue to explore these opportunities in a disciplined manner. The demand for Bitcoin as an asset, as well as for the underlying technology driving transactions and applications, is very encouraging. Thank you, and we look forward to the coming year with optimism.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Thank you, Michael. As we did not complete the full Safe Harbor statement at the beginning, I will read it before we begin the Q&A. The Safe Harbor statement indicates that some of the information we provide during today's call and what we provided regarding our future expectations, plans, and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to various important factors, including the risk factors discussed in our most recent 10-Q filed with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of today. Also, during today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations showing GAAP versus non-GAAP results are available in our earnings release and presentation, which were issued today and are available on our website at microstrategy.com. Now we'll jump into the questions.

Phong Le, CEO

Thanks, Shirish. I think as everyone saw, our cloud revenue results continue to progress in a pretty good direction with growth nearing 50% on a year-over-year basis. As far as our product evolution, big highlights this year, we've launched on AWS and on Azure. Second half of last year, we launched our FedRAMP cloud, which we brought on our first customer this quarter in Q1. Later in the year, we plan to offer Google Cloud Platform in MicroStrategy Cloud Enterprise too. We're doing a lot on the automation side. We're continuing to work on microservices and our container-based strategy. But it's a big area of continued innovation. Our multi-cloud strategy is very attractive to large enterprises. Looking forward to continued growth, we had a little bit of a slowdown in cloud billings, with 19% year-over-year growth in Q1. I think that speaks a little bit to the macroeconomic environment and a little bit of slowdown in some deals, but I do anticipate cloud to be a big driver of growth going forward.

Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman

In light of the recent events in the broader crypto market, I think the FASB fair accounting determination will be an important catalyst for institutional adoption of Bitcoin. There are many conservative corporations that may hesitate to put significant amounts of Bitcoin on their balance sheets as long as they have to rely on the current indefinite intangible treatment. When there is a regulated national securities exchange trading Bitcoin, that will also be a big milestone. All the uncertainty in the banking environment is driving awareness of Bitcoin's value proposition. There are mainstream investors who have not fully understood Bitcoin until recently, but they are starting to realize its significance as a non-sovereign store of value asset. The problems of unreliable banks and currencies in places like South America and Africa are becoming more understandable to American investors as banking crises occur domestically. All of this awareness could drive adoption.

Andrew Kang, CFO

Shirish. You should give me the fun one, I guess. Sure. The general accounting and tax concepts are not easily understood as they exist today, which is why we welcome anticipated changes in the accounting rules that Michael just mentioned. That being said, I'll try to walk you through some high-level math. We had a deferred tax asset on March 31, which was $653 million and is mostly based on the tax effect of cumulative impairments taken on our Bitcoin holdings. At the end of last year, we recognized a large valuation allowance of about $500 million because coin prices were low. Fast forward to March 31, as Bitcoin price increased, we released about $456 million of that valuation we took at the end of last year, driving the large tax benefit line item in our Q1 income statement. This reversal illustrates how recognizing influences based on Bitcoin price fluctuations can be beneficial.

Phong Le, CEO

Yes, I think it would be premature to anticipate any direct revenue attribution for our innovations. We are doing a lot in core BI, augmented analytics, artificial intelligence, and Lightning. As we release these products, we'll clarify how we're going to price them, but it's a little early right now to attribute any innovation directly to revenue. However, in the next 6 to 12 months, we may answer that question better. Yes, it's hard to say exactly what's happening from a macroeconomic side. But if you look at our financials, there's a couple of indicators. We're seeing our services revenue slow down, indicating potential financial belt-tightening by IT groups and companies. There was also a slowdown in cloud growth, which may indicate delayed sales cycles, but it's hard to predict the rest of the year.

Andrew Kang, CFO

As for timing on the FASB decision, we certainly can't speculate when the rule will become final, but the comment period ends in early June, and we expect this to take place before the end of the year. We have our fingers crossed because it will provide more transparency and encourage companies to consider Bitcoin on their balance sheets.

Phong Le, CEO

I want to thank everyone for being with us today. I appreciate your support. For those who are here with us at MicroStrategy World, live in person. I look forward to meeting those of you in person as well. We're enthusiastic about our enterprise software strategy as well as our Bitcoin strategy. We wish you a good quarter and look forward to seeing you again in 12 weeks. Thanks, everyone.