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MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor speaks at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, a crypto-currency conference held at the Mana Convention Center in Wynwood on June 04, 2021 in Miami, Florida.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

MicroStrategy was founded almost 35 years ago and existed for most of its history as a little-known software company focused on business intelligence.

But in 2023, the stock has soared 337%, making it one of the biggest gainers in the U.S. among companies valued at $5 billion or more, topping Nvidia’s 234% rally and Meta’s 194% surge.

Unlike its tech peers, which rely on revenue growth and market share gains to fuel their stock prices, MicroStrategy’s investor appeal is almost exclusively due to bitcoin. The company began buying the cryptocurrency in mid-2020 and has since amassed roughly 174,530 bitcoins, worth about $7.65 billion as of late Friday.

Wall Street is so enamored by the story that the stock has about doubled bitcoin’s gain this year.

“It’s really bitcoin,” said Joseph Vafi, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity who has a buy recommendation on the stock. “All the other stuff is healthy and doing a good job, they’re not neglecting it. It’s doing well, it’s leading software in its sector. But it’s basically something we don’t have to worry about.”

MicroStrategy’s market cap is $8.5 billion, meaning 90% of its valued is tied directly to its bitcoin holdings. When bitcoin plummets or soars, so does MicroStrategy. In 2022, bitcoin’s 64% drop pushed MicroStrategy down 74%. Even after its huge pop this year, MicroStrategy shares are still below where they were trading at their high in 2021, during peak crypto.

The bitcoin strategy dates back to July 2020, when the company said it would start putting some of its cash towards alternative assets, including digital currencies. At the time, MicroStrategy had a market cap of roughly $1.1 billion, built on a software business that had been shrinking since 2015. Annual revenue was just under $500 million, and profit was minimal.

At the halfway point of 2020, MicroStrategy had just over $530 million in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet. Co-founder Michael Saylor, who was CEO at the time, saw that money sitting virtually idle on the sidelines due to low interest rates and wanted to put it to work.

From there, he had to decide whether equities, precious metals or bitcoin would be the best use of funds.

“The reason we decided to buy bitcoin is because bitcoin represents a form of digital gold,” Saylor said on the first earnings call after the company announced its strategy. “It’s harder than gold. It’s smarter, it’s stronger, it’s faster than gold.”

Saylor’s decision created a way for investors to have stake in bitcoin through routine purchases of stock, rather than having to buy the coins directly. Saylor, who stepped down as CEO last year and assumed the role of executive chairman, told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan last week that he expects the bull market in bitcoin to continue next year. He said 99.9% of the capital in the world is invested in real estate, stocks, bonds and commodities, with only 0.1% allocated toward bitcoin.

“People, as they get educated on digital assets, are realizing that they ought to be allocating more and more of their capital to this digital asset and so they’re moving from .1 to .2%,” said Saylor, who co-authored a book about bitcoin last year titled “What is Money?”

Bitcoin will continue to move forward in 2024, says MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor

Novel use of cash

MicroStrategy isn’t the first company to put some of its cash pile into alternative investments, and it’s not the last to look for ways to generate outsized returns on that money. Earlier this month, GameStop gave CEO Ryan Cohen, who gained minor celebrity status as an investor, permission to use company cash to purchase stock.

But MicroStrategy is unique in that it’s become viewed almost exclusively as a bitcoin holding company.

“Michael Saylor’s kind of a visionary,” said Vafi. “He saw this as an opportunity to really exploit the fact that they had a lot of cash and a pristine balance sheet and start this bitcoin treasury experiment. And it’s worked out well and so they’re continuing down that path.”

In analyzing why MicroStrategy’s stock has so dramatically outperformed bitcoin this year, Vafi described it as a “scarcity premium,” because there are limited ways for equity investors to tap the market.

That’s potentially changing in the new year, as investors gear up for a flurry of bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Currently, there are bitcoin futures ETFs, which are comprised of contracts to buy and sell bitcoin but not of the cryptocurrency itself. And investors can buy into the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, a fund that owns bitcoin and trades over the counter rather than on a major exchange.

Grayscale sued the SEC last year after the regulator denied its application to create a spot bitcoin ETF on concerns about investor protections. In August of this year, an appeals court ruled in favor of Grayscale, a decision than many in the industry viewed as paving the way for a new crop of ETFs. Asset managers, including BlackRock, Fidelity and Invesco, have filed with the SEC for their own products. 

Vafi said the prospect of competition poses little threat to MicroStrategy.

“I call it right now a very high-class problem to a certain degree,” he said. “If a bitcoin ETF gets approved, the price of bitcoin is probably headed higher and potentially materially higher.”

MicroStrategy also presents more than just a bet on the direction of bitcoin. While ETFs are passively managed, MicroStrategy has the option to put its bitcoin holdings to work, using them, for example, as collateral to create more business opportunities.

“MicroStrategy is encouraged by the continuing maturity of the regulatory environment around bitcoin as well as the increased institutional demand that we are seeing today,” Shirish Jajodia, the company’s vice president of treasury and investor relations, told CNBC in an email. “We do believe it will have a positive impact on the adoption of bitcoin by mainstream investors as well as corporations.”

MicroStrategy’s software business is a big plus too, Saylor said on the company’s most recent earnings call. It’s a proven cash flow generator, enabling the company to buy more bitcoin, he said.

For the many investors betting against MicroStrategy, it’s been a tough year.

As of early December, crypto stock short sellers were down $6.1 billion for the year, with the rally in Coinbase hurting them the most, according to S3 Partners. In the first three quarters of the year, short sellers spent $2.19 billion covering their bets, the firm said, with the majority of the buying in Coinbase and MicroStrategy.

Short sellers this year have lost $4 billion on Coinbase and $1.4 billion on MicroStrategy, according to data provided by S3 last week. Some 23% of MicroStrategy’s shares available to the public are shorted, S3 said, which is second highest among crypto companies, behind only bitcoin miner Marathon Digital. The average for U.S. stocks is 5%.

MicroStrategy shows no signs of slowing down when it comes to snapping pu bitcoin. The company said it purchased roughly 16,130 bitcoins in November for over $593 million, even with the price continuing to rise. That’s more bitcoin than it’s bought in any full quarter since the first three months of 2021.

— CNBC’s Kate Dore contributed to this report

WATCH: Bitcoin bounces back above $43,000

Bitcoin bounces back above $43,000: CNBC Crypto World

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Tencent reports profit beat on games growth, touts AI benefits

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Tencent reports profit beat on games growth, touts AI benefits

Chinese tech company Tencent is a gaming giant and the parent company of WeChat, the ubiquitous social messaging app in China.

Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Chinese social media and gaming company Tencent on Wednesday reported better-than-expected profit in the third quarter, spurred by growth in games, advertising and cloud services.

Tencent reported profit attributable to shareholders of 53.23 billion yuan ($7.37 billion) in the third quarter, compared with a LSEG estimate of 46.18 billion yuan over the period.

The company’s revenue came in at 167.19 billion yuan, short of the 167.82 billion yuan analyst forecast.

This breaking news story is being updated.

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China is catching up with the West on tech, Microsoft president says

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China is catching up with the West on tech, Microsoft president says

'In many ways China is close to or is even catching up,' Microsoft's Brad Smith says

The West shouldn’t assume that China is lagging behind the U.S. and Europe on tech developments, Microsoft’s president and vice-chairman warned.

U.S-China tensions in the past few years have centered on the battle between the two nations for tech supremacy, culminating in a slew of export controls on critical technologies. Late last year, China’s Huawei surprised the market with the release of a smartphone whose reviews indicated downloads speeds associated with 5G, sparking speculation of an apparent chip breakthrough that defied U.S. tech sanctions.

Speaking at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Tuesday, Microsoft’s Brad Smith told CNBC that “in many ways,” China is close to or is even catching up on technology.

“I think one of the dangers, frankly, is that people who don’t go to China too often assume that they’re behind,” he told CNBC’s Karen Tso. “But when you go there, you’re impressed by how much they’re doing.”

He predicted that Chinese and American companies will be competing on technology into the distant future and urged U.S. and European companies to collaborate to grow economies and bring new advancements like artificial intelligence to the rest of the world.

Microsoft CEO Brad Smith participates in a meeting at The Westin Palace Hotel, on 20 May, 2022 in Madrid, Spain.

Cezaro De Luca | Europa Press | Getty Images

Microsoft has operated in China since 1992, according to the company’s web page, including through its largest research and development center outside the U.S. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year that the firm wasn’t focused on China as a domestic market, but that it provides services to Chinese companies and has a more visible presence locally than do many other U.S. tech giants.

Asked about whether trade and tech transfers — or the movement of data, designs or innovations — with China will get more challenging as Washington transitions between the administrations of U.S. incumbent leader Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump, Smith it was too early tor know.

“The truth is, as an American technology company, we can do business in China only when we are offering a service that the Chinese government wants to have there, and the U.S. government wants us to bring there,” he said, adding, “And in some cases they look at, say, a data center to support a Mercedes or a Siemens or a Starbucks or a General Motors — there seems to be a level of comfort. In consumer services, not really.”

He predicted that we’ll live in a world where some technology will move to China, and it won’t be the tech firms that decide.

—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this article.

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Startup CEO says humans won’t be needed for translation in 3 years as it launches AI app

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Startup CEO says humans won't be needed for translation in 3 years as it launches AI app

Vasco Pedro, co-founder and CEO of Unbabel, on the first day of the 2023 Web Summit at the Altice Arena in Lisbon.

Miguel Reis | SOPA | Lightrocket | Getty Images

LISBON — Unbabel on Wednesday announced a translation service powered by artificial intelligence, adding another rival to a highly competitive space — with its CEO warning that humans may not be needed for translation at all in three years.

Widn.AI is Unbabel’s new product and is based on the company’s proprietary large language model (LLM) called Tower. An LLM is an AI model that underpins applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Unbabel’s LLM allows AI translation in 32 languages, Vasco Pedro, the company’s CEO, told CNBC in an interview at the Web Summit in Lisbon.

“When we started in Unbabel 10 years ago, AI was not at the stage that it is now, and so we were very much focused on creating hybrid solutions that would combine AI and human,” Pedro said.

“But I think for the first time, we believe that translation is now fully in the realm of AI capabilities, and that you can do a lot of things without needing humans at all in the case of translation.”

Unbabel’s traditional product was one that combined so-called machine learning, a type of AI, to translate words, but with human editors to check the final product.

Pedro said Widn.AI will not require humans.

“I think humans still have a slight advantage in very hard use cases. But that advantage right now is so razor thin that except for really the … most difficult use cases, we believe AI is getting really there, and it’s hard for me to see right now how three years from now, you will need humans to be translating anything,” Pedro said.

“There’s still going to be humans responsible for making sure that things get translated and are delivered in the right places,” he added.

Widn.AI is the latest product in an increasingly competitive market which includes Google Translate and products from German startup DeepL.

Those companies see translation as a key area in which LLMs can be used effectively and have trained models specifically to tackle various languages.

Pedro acknowledges that the revenue per translated word is going to “drastically reduce.” But he said there will be an increase in the amount of content translated which will sustain the company’s growth.

Unbabel is speaking to investors and is looking to raise between $20 million and $50 million in funding to fuel the growth and development of Widn.AI, according to Pedro.

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