Earnings Call Transcript - MSTR Q4 2022

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Hello, everyone, and good evening. I am Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury at MicroStrategy. I’ll be your moderator for MicroStrategy's 2022 Fourth 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, 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. I would like to welcome you all to today's webinar and let you know that we will be taking questions through the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. You can submit questions throughout the webinar, and our team will answer questions at the end of the session. Please be sure to provide your name and your company's name when submitting your questions. Now I will walk you through the agenda for today's call. First, Phong Le will cover the business results for the full year 2022. Second, Andrew Kang will cover the financial results for the fourth quarter of 2022; then Michael Saylor will provide a strategic review and discuss recent bitcoin market updates. And lastly, we will open up to Q&A. With that, I will turn the call over to Phong Le, President and CEO of MicroStrategy.

Phong Le, President and CEO

Thank you, Shirish. I'd like to welcome all of you to today's webinar regarding our 2022 fourth quarter and full year financial results. I want to start by recapping our strategy and underscoring our key highlights for the full year 2022. We have two corporate strategies: first, an operating strategy and second, a balance sheet strategy. The Business Intelligence operating strategy is how we generate revenues and where most of our operating costs are incurred, and generates our cash flows. MicroStrategy at this point is the largest independent publicly traded business intelligence company in the world. Our goal is to remain a leader in this space by being modern, open and enterprise oriented. Substantially all our employees in the company, over 2,100 people, are focused on our software business. Our Bitcoin acquisition strategy is a balance sheet strategy. As of today, we're the largest publicly traded corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world. We were the first public company to adopt Bitcoin as a primary treasury reserve asset. Our strategy is to acquire and hold Bitcoin for the long term. We purchase Bitcoin using our excess cash, and with the net proceeds of capital raising transactions. I'll address our Bitcoin acquisition strategy first. In the fourth quarter, we purchased 3,204 bitcoins at an average purchase price of $17,616 per Bitcoin. And we sold 704 Bitcoins for the first time, at an average sale price of approximately $16,786 per Bitcoin, resulting in a net increase in our Bitcoin holdings of approximately 2,500 for a net aggregate purchase amount of $45 million, or approximately $17,850 per Bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expenses. Andrew will discuss our Bitcoin transactions in the fourth quarter later on this call. As of December 31, 2022, we held a total of 132,500 bitcoins acquired at an aggregate cost of $4 billion, or an average cost of approximately $30,100 per Bitcoin. We remain committed to our Bitcoin acquisition strategy for the long term. In the fourth quarter, the broader crypto and digital assets markets witnessed significant financial distress. In addition, various prominent participants in the digital assets industry filed for bankruptcy, such as FTX, Voyager, Celsius, and Genesis. We do not have direct exposure to any of those companies. In addition, we conducted further diligence of our custodians and execution partners to assess their exposure to these companies and understand that their exposure was minimal. Since the adoption of our Bitcoin acquisition strategy, we've taken a simple approach from day one, which is to buy and hold Bitcoin. We've taken steps along the way to minimize risk, particularly with counterparties. We buy only Bitcoin in U.S.-based markets. We custody Bitcoin with institutional grade U.S.-based regulated custodians in cold storage, and we have not lent our Bitcoin to third parties for yield or any other purposes. As a result, we've been able to avoid transacting with bad actors in the space. To summarize our view on Bitcoin: First, we continue to have a high level of conviction in the value proposition of Bitcoin. We're very supportive of the Bitcoin network on a go-forward basis. Second, we continue to follow a risk-managed approach to executing our Bitcoin acquisition strategy. And third, we're long-term focused; we plan to continue to accumulate Bitcoin over time. Our core business is not impacted by near-term bitcoin price fluctuations. With that, I will now turn to our software strategy highlights from 2022. We achieved constant currency total revenue growth for 2022 on the strength of our cloud business, despite a challenging macroeconomic environment last year, with high inflation, weakening foreign currencies, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Total revenue for 2022 was $499.3 million, which increased 2% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Total software licenses, which consist of total product licenses and subscription services revenues in our consolidated statement of operations, were $147.2 million, which increased 6% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. We've also made important progress in our shift towards our cloud offering, resulting in annual subscription revenues of $60.7 million, an increase of 46% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Annual subscription billings were $77 million, growing 39% year-over-year. The strong growth in our subscription revenue and billings was driven by both existing customer migrations to the cloud and new customer wins. Our customer revenue renewal rates continue to be among the highest we've ever experienced. Overall, we continue to see further global adoption of our cloud platform among our international customers. We're also seeing the benefits of being a single analytics platform in the industry that is both enterprise grade and easy to use. As an enterprise grade platform, we're benefiting from the trend of BI modernization and consolidation from enterprise tools like SAP Business Objects and IBM Cognos. As an easy-to-use platform for governed ad hoc data discovery, we are the tool of choice for corporations that have outgrown Microsoft Power BI and Salesforce Tableau, as they no longer want to be locked into a single vendor ecosystem. On the cost side, we believe in a thoughtful approach to cost management on an ongoing quarterly basis, rather than annual surges in hiring followed by mass layoffs. We continue to invest in R&D to innovate our product while being thoughtful about sales and marketing, and general and administrative cost. As a result, we saw relatively flat operating costs from 2021 to 2022. Next, I would like to discuss our key focus areas for 2023. First, we aim to launch something called MicroStrategy One, which will serve as our core analytics platform designed to meet all of an organization's analytics needs. It will be easy to use, powerful, comprehensive, and cutting edge. It's intended to be a one-stop shop for all of our business intelligence customers and prospects. You should expect to hear more about this from us throughout the first half of 2023, culminating in our MicroStrategy World event from May 1 to May 4 in Orlando, Florida. Core differentiators for MicroStrategy continue to be our enterprise analytics, embedded analytics, and cloud offerings. Our focus on these three areas has resulted in more customers choosing to decommission and consolidate legacy platforms in favor of an enterprise-wide adoption of MicroStrategy. This has led to increasing revenue renewal rates every year over the last three years. Our customers depend on these differentiating capabilities to build mission-critical applications to run their field forces, store operations, bank branches, risk analysis groups, corporate operations, and much more. As such, it's worthwhile to highlight the resiliency of our business even in the tough macro conditions that existed in 2022. We’re the only remaining publicly traded independent enterprise BI company, and the stickiness of our products and the long-standing tenure of our top customers are a testament to our resiliency. Our continued investment in research and development has enabled us to modernize our platform and enable our customers to transform how they do business through innovative analytics tools and techniques. These include personalized applications, immersive interactive visualizations, simple no-code and low-code application development with open APIs, flexibility of consumption through mobile interfaces, and innovative capabilities like hyper intelligence. We continue to see growth with customers who build MicroStrategy into the software solutions they sell to end users, leveraging our open embedded analytics capabilities. Second, not new, but even more in our focus, is growth. We're going to focus on simplifying our processes, growing our pipeline, and growing our revenues. We plan to get back in the market and in front of our prospects through in-person field events, field marketing, aggressive account-based marketing, and a revitalized partner program. Third, cloud is at the forefront when we talk about focus on growth. As MicroStrategy Cloud continues to be a growing part of our business mix, we're seeking to accelerate growth through increased cloud adoption by both new and existing customers. New customers are increasingly cloud-first and immediately reap the benefits of our managed service offering, including business agility, enterprise security, regular updates, upgrades, and cost savings. At the same time, more and more existing on-premises customers are migrating to the cloud and expanding their MicroStrategy usage to new departments and user groups. Intentional in our approach to cloud is our belief in cloud agility and independence. The power of multi-cloud hybrid and the portability between private and public clouds resonates with our customers who do not want to be locked into a single technology stack. We seek to take advantage of the best that each major cloud provider has to offer, optimizing our platform to run on and across each. We'll continue to invest in this area to support our customers' need for flexibility, scalability, and security. In Q4, MicroStrategy Cloud for Governments, or MCG, our new cloud offering received authorization to operate under FedRAMP guidelines. MCG is a managed software as a service solution and our first generally available release of our cloud platform that is built on a modern high-performance cloud-native architecture that also utilizes containers and microservices. It delivers on sophisticated security and data privacy requirements across the public and private sectors. It opens up the possibility of migrating a large part of our federal government customers to the cloud. Our fourth area focuses on our employees. Our employees are our key assets, and we will continue to develop and promote people internally and seek to improve employee engagement. Our employee engagement survey results indicate that we have made great improvements to employees' mental wellbeing, loyalty, and belief in the company's two corporate strategies. We're also continuing to develop technical training and certifications to keep our employees up to date on the latest MicroStrategy software enhancements and soft skills training to keep our managers engaged and employees motivated. Finally, we'll focus more on innovation, both in business intelligence and on our Bitcoin acquisition strategy. On the BI innovation side, MicroStrategy Insights is 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. The insights feature accelerates decision-making, uncovers data patterns with 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 the timely insights to drive action. This is the basis on which we're combining MicroStrategy's semantic layer, hyper intelligence, and open architecture to provide the data tracking alerts, forecasting recommendations, and ultimately artificial intelligence that will be key for the future of analytics and intelligence. We believe this is something MicroStrategy is uniquely positioned to provide, and we expect to release more functionality in this area every quarter. On the Bitcoin innovation side, as indicated on our last earnings call, today I'm delighted to share a preview of MicroStrategy Lightning, our new product that we're developing, which utilizes the Lightning network, a second layer network that sits atop 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 component of the MicroStrategy Lightning platform is Lightning Rewards; it is designed to allow any enterprise to reward their employees, customers, partners, and prospects for their engagement. Companies spend vast amounts of time and money on digital marketing, driving engagement with their brand and their customers and, for some, monetizing online content. We believe a platform like MicroStrategy Lightning can enable them to drive that engagement, rewarding their customers directly for that engagement, rather than lining the pockets of online ad giants. We expect future capabilities that the Lightning platform will provide opportunities for new business models to monetize online content or minimize threats and the nuisance of 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 enterprise software delivered in the cloud. We're taking a very disciplined investment approach such that our Lightning development efforts currently occupy less than 1% of our R&D capacity. We’re currently in the initial pilot stage of the product with our early pre-release version rolled out internally to MicroStrategy employees. While our core focus remains on BI innovation, we believe we're uniquely positioned to bring value here. Mike will elaborate further on this topic. Last but not least, I'm thrilled to share again that our next MicroStrategy World will be in person from May 1 to May 4 in Orlando, Florida. Our customers have expressed a willingness and desire for meaningful in-person connections alongside virtual meetings. So we're bringing back World '23 as a bigger scale event with multiple tracks. The Business Intelligence track will be a working event designed to help modernize analytics for innovative organizations looking to transform with data. We're excited to showcase some of the world's best brands using modern experiences to break through and achieve extraordinary results. The Bitcoin track will include our third annual Bitcoin for Corporations on May 3, and a dedicated Lightning for Corporations on May 4. There will be a first-of-its-kind gathering of corporations looking to integrate Bitcoin and Lightning as a part of their corporate treasury or product offerings. The conference will also include dedicated networking opportunities, workshops, and training. Finally, MicroStrategy would not be complete without an epic party. We're hosting a theme park conference party at Universal Studios, Florida, featuring roller coasters and an evening of unforgettable fun and excitement. We look forward to your participation at the conference. Registrations are open and additional details can be found on our event website. Now I'll turn the call over to Andrew to discuss our financials for the quarter in further detail.

Andrew Kang, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Phong. Before jumping into the quarterly results, I'd like to quickly reemphasize MicroStrategy’s revenue priorities. Our three-decade history of providing data analytics solutions to large and small corporations has established a long-tenured and diverse customer mix, where our platform has proven to be a critical component in running our customers' businesses day to day. Our platform has demonstrated durability through tough economic cycles and has been strategic during times of growth, and an important foundation to our revenue is through supporting our existing customers as their businesses evolve. We continue to deliver for our customers as seen in our consistently high renewal rates, over 90% for the last five consecutive quarters and as high as 95% in Q4 of last year. Second, growing cloud revenue, which for us means migrating existing customers into a fully hosted and managed cloud subscription model, which Phong talked about earlier. Winning new logos into the cloud is important, and uplifting services for existing cloud customers is also critical. We are very pleased with our performance in all these areas this past year. But keep in mind, as we migrate to the cloud, we inherently experience some offsets in areas like audit license and support revenues. However, the transition to a subscription model will establish high-quality annual recurring revenues that will allow us to scale even stronger growth in the future. In Q4 of last year, approximately 64% of our total revenue was recurring, compared to approximately 60% in the same quarter of the prior year, a trend that we expect will continue in 2023. Lastly, our consulting business has been and continues to be essential in providing expert support and solutions to our customers. They not only champion solutions, but they also drive modernization and impact growth through partner opportunities. Okay, turning to the results. Total revenues for the fourth quarter were $132.6 million, down $2 million, or approximately 1% year-over-year. However, at constant currency, Q4 total revenues were up 4% year-over-year, similar to the trend we saw in Q3. Total software license revenues were $45 million, up 1% year-over-year, and up 8% at constant currency. When we look at product license revenues and subscription service revenues together, year-over-year growth on both a GAAP basis and at constant currency continue to show the overall growth momentum of our cloud transition. Subscription service revenues were $17.5 million, an increase of 47% year-over-year and up 54% at constant currency. While product license revenues were $27.6 million for the quarter, down 15% year-over-year, and product support revenues were $66.8 million, down $2.3 million year-over-year but up 1% at constant currency. These trends are consistent with the revenue themes that I mentioned earlier. Finally, other services revenues were $28.7 million, a slight 1% decrease year-over-year but an increase of 5% at constant currency. Our worldwide consulting business, which makes up the majority of our other services revenues, saw higher bill rates globally in Q4, with particularly strong performance among our European and Argentina consultants. To add to that, we're also seeing early success and momentum in the build-out of our India workforce, where we plan to grow strategically in future quarters. Turning to slide 14, we continue to see growth in our software license and subscription billings driven by the continued strong momentum in cloud. Total current software license billings increased to $61 million in the fourth quarter, which was an increase of 10% year-over-year. Current subscription billings were $31 million, an increase of 28% year-over-year, marking our 11th straight quarter of double-digit growth. Full-year ‘22 annual subscription billings were up 39% compared to the prior 12 months, with both subscription service revenue and current deferred subscription revenue growing over 40% each year for the full year 2022 compared to 2021. We are extremely pleased with cloud growth in 2022, which has exceeded expectations in the timeline for transforming and modernizing our BI platform. 2023 will also prove to be a pivotal year as we begin to see the benefits of the scaling up of our cloud business and adoption by our customers in the past two years. Turning to costs. Total non-GAAP expenses, which exclude share-based compensation costs, were $309 million in the fourth quarter, or $50 million higher year-over-year. $51 million of the year-over-year increase was attributed to Bitcoin impairment charges in the quarter as a result of the price volatility we saw in Q4. This was driven largely by the collapse of FTX and its impact on the broader digital asset market. The price of Bitcoin fell to a low of approximately $15,460 during the quarter, which drove the additional impairment for Bitcoin holdings under the current accounting rules. Non-GAAP cost of revenues were $26 million in the fourth quarter, an increase of $2.5 million or 11% year-over-year. As a percentage of total revenues, non-GAAP cost of revenues increased 2% year-over-year, related in part to the growth of our cloud business similar to what we've seen in recent quarters. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expense decreased $3 million, or 8% year-over-year, to $37 million or, as a percentage of total revenues, lower by 2% year-over-year. This was due in part to a combination of higher net capitalized commissions this quarter, plus some favorable FX impacts compared to the same quarter in the prior year. Non-GAAP R&D expenses were $28 million in Q4, a slight increase of $300,000 compared to the prior year. In this area, we continue to prioritize vendors, as Phong mentioned, and increase their talent and resources on average for the year; but we did so intentionally and in a way that kept expenses flat by leveraging cost-efficient global delivery centers. Our non-GAAP G&A costs were $21 million, pretty much flat, with a decrease of about $400,000 or 2% year-over-year. As Phong mentioned earlier, our focus on lowering costs has been ongoing and frequent, with a strict discipline in managing efficient personnel and non-personnel costs. It's not something we just started thinking about in the second half of last year. In fact, we were fortunate to add this focus even prior to this past year when we did see higher wages and expenses, revenue headwinds due to weaker foreign currencies, and we also saw the negative impacts from the war in Ukraine. Aside from our Bitcoin impairment-related expenses, we kept our costs flat year-over-year. Looking forward, we plan to remain cost-conscious while continuing to invest in higher-end growth areas, like optimizing our talent and resources across our growing global footprint, focusing on lower cost markets. On slide 16, total non-GAAP operating loss in the fourth quarter was $177 million, while the digital asset impairment charge for the quarter was at $198 million. As I have said in past quarters, since the adoption of our Bitcoin Strategy in Q3 of 2020, the digital asset impairment charges we have incurred each quarter have always been greater than our non-GAAP operating losses, showing the significant impact it has had on our reported income. On slide 17, as of December 31, 2022, the carrying value of our Bitcoin holdings was approximately $1.8 billion, compared to approximately $2.2 billion based on the price of $16,556 as of the last day of the year. So far this year, Bitcoin prices have rallied significantly, along with the market value of our Bitcoins, increasing to approximately $3.1 billion as of the close of markets yesterday, and trending even higher since then. To touch on the regulatory perspective, we continue to be optimistic with the progress that the Financial Accounting Standards Board has made in its steps to update how companies measure certain digital assets, including Bitcoin on balance sheets. Since announcing this as an agenda item last year, the FASB has moved expeditiously and voted and agreed on how crypto assets should be presented in financial statements and what disclosures should be required under expected fair value accounting standards. We recognize that what has been completed thus far are just the initial steps in the standard-setting process. But we are encouraged that the progress up until now has been aligned with standard fair value practices. We continue to remain committed and supportive of the FASB decisions focused on improved investor transparency for digital assets. On slide 18, as of December 31, 2022, we held a total of 132,500 bitcoins, of which 14,890 bitcoins were held directly by MicroStrategy at the parent level, with the remaining 117,610 bitcoins held at the MicroStrategy subsidiary. Although bitcoins held at the sub approximately 34,600 bitcoins are pledged as collateral to the Silvergate loan, just over 82,900 bitcoins, or 63% of our total Bitcoin holdings, equivalent to approximately $2 billion at the current approximate market value of $23,800, remain unpledged and unencumbered. Regarding the Silvergate loan, we remain fully in compliance with the loan-to-value requirements, and as we have detailed in the past, we continue to have sufficient unencumbered collateral to address any foreseeable volatility in Bitcoin prices in the near term. It is worth highlighting again that if the Bitcoin prices increase and the loan-to-value ratio is less than 25%, we're able to release any excess collateral from being pledged to the loan. Our current LTV on this loan is now very close, if not at, that level. As Phong mentioned earlier, for the first time in the fourth quarter, we sold approximately 704 Bitcoins that carried a higher tax cost basis compared to the market price of Bitcoin at the time of the sale. The transactions generated capital losses of approximately $34 million, which we expect to carry back against previous capital gains. And to the extent such carrybacks are available, we expect to generate a tax benefit. Even with the aforementioned sale, we increased our net holdings by 2,500 bitcoins during the quarter. We continually explore opportunities to use our bitcoins to generate shareholder value, and we may consider pursuing additional transactions that may take advantage of the volatility in Bitcoin prices or other market dislocations that are consistent with our long-term Bitcoin strategy. We will thoughtfully consider any other opportunities in the future, and if we choose to pursue anything, we will carefully assess any potential risks and do so in a prudent manner, as we have done in the past. Turning to slide 19, our debt capital structure remains unchanged with a total of $2.4 billion of outstanding debt and convertible instruments, which carry a blended interest rate of approximately 2.1%. The convertible senior notes carry an extremely low cost of funds, with the earliest debt maturity not until March 2025. These convertible notes are very attractive in terms of costs, and with over two years remaining until the earliest of the maturities, our outstanding long-term capital remains very valuable. In Q4, we activated a $500 million at-the-market (ATM) equity offering and issued an aggregate 218,575,000 shares of Class A common stock at an average gross price per share of approximately $213.16. We raised approximately $46.6 million in gross proceeds, which leaves us with approximately $453 million of outstanding ATM capacity available under our program. We will continue to evaluate and sell equity under this existing program when we believe there's an embedded valuation premium in our stock compared to the market value of our Bitcoin holdings and our estimated value of our software business. The use of those proceeds will be for general corporate purposes, including for the purchase of Bitcoin or for other general corporate liquidity needs. As we execute under the program, we will do so with a disciplined focus on growing shareholder value, optimizing our capital structure, and maintaining adequate liquidity to run and grow our business. The overall liquidity from both our operating and financing activities remains more than sufficient to manage our ongoing working capital needs, grow our business, as well as manage our debt expense. Our outlook for 2023 remains cautious but optimistic. We are planning for the recent trends in macro and market volatility to likely persist in the near term. However, we are encouraged that even in this environment of constant change, businesses need actionable data and analytics to succeed. And open architecture to be agile and cloud capabilities to be cost-efficient and effective. MicroStrategy delivers all of these. In 2023, we will target modest constant currency total revenue growth. We will continue to grow cloud subscription billings as a percentage of total revenue and we will continue to strengthen the quality of our recurring revenue as we continue to transform our platform to the cloud. We will remain disciplined and scrutinize costs while investing in growth areas. And we will continue to execute on our dual strategy of growing our business intelligence and acquiring and holding Bitcoin. 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'm Michael Saylor, the Executive Chairman of MicroStrategy. First, I'd like to provide our performance review. When we think about the corporate strategy and its effectiveness, we go back to the summer of 2020 when we made our major strategic decision. On August 11 of 2020, we announced to the world that we had acquired $250 million worth of Bitcoin, along with a tender offer. On that day, our stock was about $121 to $122 a share. Today, the stock closed at $292 a share. We measure our success based on the creation of shareholder value. If we look at the performance of the company's stock since August 10, 2020, to the close of business at 4 PM Eastern Time on February 1, you can see the MicroStrategy stock is up 117%. We pick a number of different benchmarks. I think the most important benchmark is Bitcoin's performance. You can see from this chart that Bitcoin, notwithstanding the fact that it is known to be volatile, is the number one performing asset over the past 2.5 years. Bitcoin is up 98% versus August 10, 2020, which is a critical day for us. MicroStrategy stock is leveraged against Bitcoin, and through our execution, we've been able to outperform Bitcoin as an index, and we're pretty pleased with that. We can trust the performance of Bitcoin against other major asset classes and indexes, and you can see that while Bitcoin is up 98%, a diversified portfolio of high-quality companies, such as the S&P 500, is up 23% during the same time period. The NASDAQ is up 8%, while gold has lost 5%, and long-dated bonds are down 16%. Comparing Bitcoin to other options clearly shows that it has been the strongest performer. We also benchmark ourselves against big tech stocks. If we look at Google, Apple, and Microsoft, which are three effective digital monopolies and some of the strongest companies in the world, they are up 36%, 29%, and 21%, respectively, all of which underperformed Bitcoin by a factor of three to five. On the other hand, Netflix, Amazon, and Meta Group are down 25%, 33%, and 42%. This illustrates how, in the summer of 2020, investors faced a tough challenge deciding where to invest, and Bitcoin clearly would have outperformed all other options. We also benchmark ourselves against enterprise software stocks, and while Oracle has performed well with a 64% increase, it has still dramatically underperformed Bitcoin and MicroStrategy. If you're a shareholder and your choice was to choose from any of the bars on this screen, MicroStrategy is still the number one choice, and Bitcoin is the number two choice. We have many decisions to make as quarters go by, and we always try to evaluate the best path forward for our shareholders, focusing on what is most accretive for equity holders of MSTR. The scorecard illustrates that we have been effective in that and will continue to focus. This chart illustrates why we are so committed to our Bitcoin strategy. The strategy benefits our corporate brand, all our employees, our partners, our customers, and our shareholders. Regarding the macroeconomic situation, 2022 was a brutally difficult year; short-term interest rates rose sharply, resulting in a drawdown of all financial assets. I expect normalization in the coming years. The macroeconomic environment is rotating to a more beneficial place, generally for the Bitcoin community. We have always focused on Bitcoin rather than crypto. The past 12 months have seen many crypto enterprises and assets meltdown. The bankruptcies of BlockFi, Celsius, FTX, Genesis, Voyager, and more have illustrated that these were weak use cases and fragile structures doomed to fail. This has created short-term negative headwinds for Bitcoin, as it has cross-collateralized with these other cryptos. However, the rationalization of the crypto market ultimately benefits Bitcoin, which has educated a generation of investors on its value as a decentralized digital commodity. It has clarified the differences between assets with issuers and those without. The reason MicroStrategy was able to navigate this crypto winter is that we weren't directly exposed to any cryptos nor did we engage with crypto exchanges due to clear reasons; we don't believe in the value proposition of unregistered securities. We believe that Bitcoin will be the biggest winner post-rationalization, resulting in stronger institutions entering the space. The future will have fewer assets and better institutions, reducing crypto risk-taking. We see a global regulatory enthusiasm for the promise of digital assets, which will undoubtedly lead to clearer frameworks. We remain optimistic about developments from regulators. We've been disappointed by the consistent denial of Bitcoin spot ETFs, the lack of a clear framework from regulators and legislators, but we believe it's coming. The FASB's initiative to introduce fair value accounting is a positive sign, as is the bipartisan support for Bitcoin in Congress. In 2022, we saw Bitcoin's resilience and MicroStrategy's business model. We look forward to 2023 and 2024, believing most detrimental behaviors have been squeezed out of the system. Bitcoin is emerging as the premier institutional asset, and Lightning is the universal language for money transfers over IP. With that, I’d like to pass the floor back to Shirish for questions.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Great. Thank you, Michael. So we are going to jump right into the questions. And the first question is for Phong. Phong, could you update us on the progress of your cloud product and capabilities? How are customer migrations faring today? What are your expectations for cloud business growth given the different macro?

Phong Le, President and CEO

Thanks, Shirish. Cloud growth is going very well; in 2022, it grew on a revenue basis 46% constant currency and on a billings basis up 39%, which both represent a bit of an acceleration in 2022. I think we'll be able to see that same pace of growth, or something a little faster, will be our goal in 2023. I don't think the macroeconomic headwinds will slow our cloud growth. If anything, we might see a slowness of cloud growth because we're getting into bigger and bigger customers. Now, we've moved at this point, about 20% of our recurring revenue to the cloud. We have moved a good amount of medium-sized customers, but MCG, MicroStrategy Cloud for Government, will help us with large banks that require FedRAMP certification to migrate. Those will take longer to migrate. But I think that's the next phase we will go after. But I'm excited about where cloud growth is going; it is becoming the standard way we sell our software.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Thanks, Phong. Next question is for Andrew. Can you please provide more detail about your sale of Bitcoin in December? Do you intend to make any further sales?

Andrew Kang, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Shirish, for the question. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we sold 704 Bitcoin in December, which generated a capital loss, which we expect to carry back against the capital gain from 2019, which was through an old domain name sale. Apart from that sale, we have not sold any other Bitcoin. In fact, I think the main takeaway should be that we have continued to increase our total Bitcoin holdings each quarter since inception, including Q4. We don’t stop exploring opportunities and ways to increase shareholder value related to our Bitcoin. In the future, we may consider additional actions that may take advantage of market volatility or be opportunistic in the market. Either way, anything we do, we'll do it consistently, within the construct of our long-term Bitcoin strategy, which is to buy, hold, and grow.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Thanks, Andrew. Next question is for Michael. In light of the recent crypto market events, what do you think are the key catalysts for more adoption of Bitcoin by corporations?

Andrew Kang, Chief Financial Officer

I think fair value accounting will be a significant plus for corporate adoption, as the gap volatility from indefinite intangible accounting is a negative for CFOs. The rollout of Lightning for corporations will also be another big catalyst because the ability to build Bitcoin into play-to-earn models or Bitcoin rewards programs is going to be an exciting benefit for Chief Marketing Officers, CEOs, and heads of sales. Additionally, payment networks are currently inefficient, slow, and expensive. As companies figure out how to monetize their applications and move small microtransactions around frictionlessly at zero cost, we will see interesting solutions emerge. Lastly, any regulatory clarity that comes from Washington DC regarding the digital asset ecosystem will be a considerable driver. We believe Bitcoin, as a universally acknowledged digital commodity, will be the biggest winner if a digital assets framework is introduced.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Thanks, Michael. Next question is for Phong. With respect to competition and demand, have you seen any changes in the competitive environment as customers look to bring down cash burn? What is the impact of macro on demand with respect to sales cycles and cloud migration?

Phong Le, President and CEO

Yes, the first item: the biggest trend we’re seeing is customers trying to bring down their software costs by consolidating vendors. In the BI world, there really are two credible choices for consolidation right now—MicroStrategy for a full enterprise solution or Power BI for a point solution that integrates well with Microsoft. What we've seen in the last six to 12 months is that as more companies are using Microsoft—whether it be Azure, Power BI, or otherwise—they're realizing the limitations: there’s not a common semantic model, no reusable objects, it’s not scalable, and it’s not as secure. Customers are also realizing that free Power BI with their Office 365 Enterprise license often means they end up paying more than with Azure costs. We see many customers consolidating on MicroStrategy, so while there may be a reduction in overall spend, we get more of the pie. I’m excited about that. Regarding the macro environment, Q4 was more difficult, especially internationally, as customers were trying to spend a bit less with that said, we still had a reasonable outcome in our Q4 financials driven by our move to the cloud, and I believe 2023 looks a little better in terms of companies needing to spend to improve their data and analytics environment. So I remain optimistic about growth potential in 2023.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Thanks, Phong. Next question is for Andrew. Can you please provide your thought process on how you plan to address the 2025 loan maturities coming up?

Andrew Kang, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Shirish. There has been some volatility in our bond prices recently, which we've seen clearly. We've also seen a significant rebound in prices here in January over a short period. Given that backdrop, we are comfortable with our outstanding debt levels. We are confident that when it comes due, we will be able to either refinance it, advertise it, or pay it off. We have many options available to manage those maturities, and we still have a lot of time left to do so in the next two-plus years.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Thanks, Andrew. We'll take this one last question for Phong. What is your margin outlook for 2023? How are you thinking about balancing revenue growth versus margin preservation?

Phong Le, President and CEO

Both are important; we're going to focus on driving revenue growth and profitability or margin growth in 2023. A big driver of that will be our acceleration of conversions to the cloud, allowing us to see an uplift in cloud revenue and overall revenue from hosting term licenses and support fees. On the cost side, Andrew mentioned we kept our operating costs relatively flat from 2021 to 2022. Our goal is to do something similar or even reduce costs slightly while excluding the impact of Bitcoin holdings. I’m talking about non-GAAP costs here. If we can grow revenues and keep flat or reduce costs in 2023, then we should be able to grow margins. If the macroeconomic environment improves faster, we can do that even quicker in 2023.

Shirish Jajodia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Great, thanks, Phong. That brings us to the end of today's webinar. Thank you everyone for the questions. This concludes the Q&A portion of the webinar, and I will now hand over the call to Phong for closing remarks.

Phong Le, President and CEO

Thanks, Shirish. I want to thank everyone for being with us today. We appreciate all of your support. We are enthusiastic about both of our strategies, our enterprise software strategy and our Bitcoin strategy. I wish you all a good quarter, a happy spring, and I look forward to seeing you again in 12 weeks. Thanks!