Here we are. Hey, guys, welcome to a first of its kind here. We've got an inaugural live cast. So today we're gonna be doing Q1 earnings from SATO Technologies. This is one of the companies we've covered for quite some time on the channel. Really interesting developments from Romain and team that we're gonna get into, you guys. Already 20 people in the room, Romain. Full house here, standing room only, you guys. So we're gonna do 30 minutes of presentation. We've got the deck from SATO Technologies all loaded up. We'll walk through the earnings, some of the key catalysts for this company, and then we're actually gonna flip it over to a live Q&A session. So you've got Romain Nouzareth, he's the CEO of SATO Technologies. We've also got the CFO, Kyle Appleby, here to help answer some of the more financial questions.
Once we get through those, you guys, then we're gonna open it up to the floor. You can ask real-time questions live to the leadership team here of SATO to learn more about the company. So, Romain, Kyle, thanks so much for being here. We really appreciate the courage of coming on live and facing the viewers here and seeing what they have to say from their mouth.
Bryce, Anthony, thank you very much for having us, and welcome everyone who is watching live. We're super happy to do this first presentation. It was important for us to get access to the public to show what kind of project we have been working on for the past seven years, and also, more importantly, where do we go from there? So we've been working with you for a long time, Bryce. I've been on your show a few times already. I always had a great time. Anthony, we've known each other like three or even four years that we had this relation. So it's really a pleasure to be with you all today.
Should be great. Anthony, thanks so much for making it. Kyle, it's your first time on the program as well, so I just wanted to give you a quick opportunity to say hi, introduce yourself, how you kinda came into the SATO family, and then we'll get right into it here.
Yeah. Well, thanks again for having us. Yeah, I'm the CFO since going public in the company. I work for a number of small cap companies in various industries. But I've worked in the crypto business. I helped Hut 8 Mining go public. When they did, I stayed on as a CFO for them, as well as another crypto-based company called Tokens.com, which trades on the NEO Exchange. I helped them go public and also remained on as a CFO for them. Both of those companies grew to a size of needing a full-time person. I'm very excited and happy to be with SATO as their CFO and helping them grow. And happy to be here, guys. Thank you.
Excellent, and some good experience with capital markets and the crypto space as well. So we'll move right over to the presentation, you guys. I'll probably switch through the views just so everyone can see, the full slides here. Romain, are you gonna be kicking off the presentation, or will this be Kyle walking through the first one?
I will start, and then Kyle will go over for the detail of the financials for Q1.
Sure. We'll get right into it, everybody. We've got-
Good. Well, thank you again. This is a lawyer slide to start off. A forward-looking information. Everything we discuss, of course, is assumption and estimates. Of course, we are reporting audited financial results, but for everything that is in the future, that's forward-looking information. People can go online and read all of the text, if you want. Next slide, we are going to start talking about the company, what we've been doing, how we've been working for the past seven years in the industry, and more importantly, where do we go from there? We will then, and I will then, as I was saying, leave the stage to Kyle to go over our Q1 financials.
Amazing results for this quarter, again, after an amazing year for 2023. Q1, $4 million EBITDA, close to $6 million of revenues, operating cash flow positive, and CAD 7 million in cash in the company, in digital assets and in cash. So we'll go over the details, and then we will finish with the Q&A with you, Bryce and Anthony, and Anthony, again, really happy to be a first like this, doing a live cast and talking to our public and talking to our to people who are fan of Bitcoin mining. I know more and more people are really into Bitcoin mining and public Bitcoin miners.
We are a small cap, we are a small brand, but we're working hard to become one of the big companies in the next three to four years or even faster, if we can. So to start, who we are. Today, we are on 20 MW of energy from Quebec, and that represents 0.1% of the total Bitcoin network. So it means that we get 0.1% on every block reward and every transactions made every 10 minutes. We are not the biggest, I was saying, you have bigger companies, but you, as you know, in the market of Bitcoin mining, it's very much distributed. So the biggest players have 3%, 4%, 5%.
So we are in the race to go and to grow, as far as we can and as fast as we can. One thing where we are excelling at is to be efficient in our reporting and our financials, and also because we have one of the best energy in the world. In Bitcoin mining, the energy is key. It's 75%-80% of your cost. You need to have a low price of energy, but more important than the low price of energy, you need to have an energy that is stable, and that's what we have in Quebec. Not only we have one of the best price in the world, around CAD 0.043/kWh, but it's a very stable energy.
People are focusing too much on just the price of energy, but it's about how can you distribute this energy correctly into your data center to make sure that you are efficient. On top of this energy that is stable and well priced, it's an energy that is close to one to being 100% renewable. It's 95% in the grid in Quebec is hydroelectricity. The rest, it's biomass, wind, and solar. There is nothing from the carbon type of power. As you can see on the right, every years we've been showing a growth in revenues and also operating cash flow positive. A few exceptions, mainly in 2021, where we was when we went listed on the stock market. It's a CapEx business intensive. We run two type of CapEx.
We run a CapEx for our infrastructure and a CapEx for our computing power. Because we are infrastructure people and operator, we have built our own data center. We are transforming our own energy ourselves. It's a specific type of CapEx. Once these data centers or centers or mining farm, or however you call it, are built, you need to pack them with computers, and you need to use the energies that you have transformed to the maximum. That's another type of CapEx. So in order to be successful, we wanted to follow the steps that other publicly Bitcoin miners have been doing before us, which is to get listed on the stock market. And that's why in 2021, we were listed on the Canadian market, on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Our ticker is SATO, like Satoshi Nakamoto.
I'm sure we see everyone have understood. And we're also available in the U.S. on the OTCQB. Next slide. We are talking about Bryce, yeah, we're talking about the history of the company. It's a company I've co-created back in 2017. I've been running it since then. And whatever the market, whatever the price of the Bitcoin, whatever the difficulty, halving, not halving, COVID, crypto winter, you name it, we've been able to grow, and we are going to continue growing. Myself, I'm an entrepreneur for the past 25 years. Started in 1995 in France. I moved to the U.S. in 2003, 2003, and in 2017, we decided to start mining. First, it was more like a side project.
We were like, "Hey, I'm passionate with Bitcoin, of Bitcoin," and understood what it could become. It sounded that mining was simple to do, so we decided to put our money together, but also our effort together, and we started our first mining farm in Quebec, and it was working pretty well. We've been able to sign 20 MW of energy. We've been able to find and source the right type of miners, and we've been able to grow organically over the years. The key to succeed in this business is efficiency. Whatever the price of the Bitcoin is, whatever the difficulty is, focus on extracting the most Bitcoin you can from the energy you get. That's the only way to survive. Next slide, please, Bryce.
We are talking more about efficiency, and efficiency, again, that's the most important thing that a miner can be focusing on. You need to build for the bad time. Of course, when the Bitcoin is up and when the hash rate is not completely crazy, everyone is happy. Lots of people are making money, and that's why more people are plugging computers. But you need to think about the bad times. That's the only way to survive. And in order to survive, you need to have no intermediaries, again, between your energy and the computing power that you are producing. And that's what we do.
We run our own energy, we are transforming it, we are distributing it into our data center to make sure at the bottom of our computer, to make sure that the energy that we get is always stable at a certain number a certain level of voltage. Same thing for the temperature. We are doing our own cooling in our data center. Only 2% of our energy is used for cooling, so it's very, very efficient. We have developed our own software in order to manage our fleet of miners. Today, we have, like, close to 6,000 computers, mining rigs running into our data center. I forgot to say, we are 100% self-mining, so all the Bitcoin we make is for us. We don't rent our space to someone else.
The efficiency, to come back on this, where do we get it? So the software, the data centers, the electricity, the cooling, and also from the miners that you run in your data center or in your mining farm. It's important to have a short time idea, but also a very long-term vision with your computers, because you want your computers to run as long as you can. It's a long-tail business for some of the miners. We have close to 50% of our Bitcoin miners' rigs that are fully amortized, and we are making sure that we can increase our fleet of miners.
Recently, we are publishing, like every Bitcoin miners who are publicly listed, or most of them at least, our monthly production. It's available on our website, www.buysato.com. Anyone can go and check everything. But we announced that we bought a new type of generation of miners, S19K Pros, T21, S21, and we are going to continue doing this, because once you are efficient, grow big. And this is exactly where we are. If you wanna go to next slide, Bryce, this is where we are. We are now at the beginning. We don't say there is cycle in our industry, but in Bitcoin, usually we see a cycle around four years. And we are seeing around, like, how can we grow in the next three to six years?
It's a beginning of a new era. It's a new era for computing power in general. We started with Bitcoin mining, and like many other Bitcoin miners, we are also now looking at developing our, our expertise and experience into hosting computers and computing for AI and HPC. So we see three main phases for us. One, very short term, it's reaching a bigger exahash into our mining farm in Quebec. With our 20 megawatt of energy and the data center that we have, we could potentially reach 1.1 exahash of mining power by just adding new type of computers into our center without any CapEx or infrastructures in the data center we know, et cetera.
That would be a first goal for the company short term, is to increase our hash rate into our data center in Quebec. We are also starting for AI and HPC, and I will come back to this because this is really interesting, what is happening today in the market. We have also another differentiator, we call it BOB, or Building On Bitcoin. It's a more long-term vision on how can we make more revenues by collecting more fees in the future. The idea is to develop softwares on top of Bitcoin that people will use, and by using them, like on the Bitcoin network, they will pay fees, and these fees, we will collect them as a provider of the software. It's a longer term.
It's more of thinking about how can we be more performant for the next halving and the next halving? And that's something that is coming. But first, let's talk a little bit about AI and HPC. I know it's very a la mode. I'm sorry, can you come back? It's very a la mode. It's very the buzzword of the day. Every Bitcoin miners will tell you they are doing an AI and HPC. The thing is that we have a role to play in this new market. It's a new market, because if you look at the data center in general, you have the legacy players, the big players, data centers running hundreds of megawatt, traditional cloud computing. Then you have the hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, et cetera.
They are developing their own data centers, and of course, they have the means, and they can do everything they want to go at the speed they want, but they are going to do it for themselves, and not everyone will want to be hosted into the data center. So there is a place for a new entrant to come into the market and to deploy AI and HPC computing power. And our idea and vision is that it will work extremely well if you mix it with Bitcoin mining. Because if you look at the power level, how do you manage your energy? Bitcoin is exceptional because we can curtail. We can stop our rigs in milliseconds and give back the energy to the grid. You can't really do that with AI and HPC.
You want to make sure that you have a very, very, very high access to your computers, 99.9%, for AI and HPC. But at the grid level, at the energy level, if you say, "My Bitcoin miners are gonna be the cursors that I will be able to manage to manage electrical load on the grid that I'm on, but I will keep the AI and HPC at the same level always," I think we will win. And I think this is where we will be able to find energy that was probably unlooked or overlooked by other people who are looking to get access to the same things as us. So for us, it's a key development. It's a new development. We haven't done it yet. A lot of people are talking about it.
It's a new market. Is it gonna be four-year cycles, six-year cycles, 10-year cycles? I don't know. I think nobody knows, and honestly, and if someone pretend to know, good luck. What I know is that our knowledge, our expertise, is transforming energy into computing power, and we are going to do it for AI and HPC in the future. The way we want to address the market is to do it via, at least to start, via the infrastructure play, exactly like we did with Bitcoin mining. We started by building the infrastructure, transforming the energy, having the data center ready. Maybe we will host for someone else, but the margin are incredible in this business. You could sell easily at $0.25/kWh-$0.30/kWh for AI and HPC, something we buy for $0.04.
So it's a market that it's really so interesting what's happening, that in some, in some regard, it could make the hash rate go down. You've seen other Bitcoin miners thinking about transforming part of their energy for AI and HPC. It will be taken out of something. It will be probably on the hash rate. So it's really a new moving, a new moving play, and we want to be part of it. I believe we have a role to play. Maybe, again, not competing with hyperscalers, not trying to replace the traditional data centers, having a specific way to do it as a Bitcoin miner, as innovating on Bitcoin miner, as being efficient on a Bitcoin miner, and doing it, doing it for AI and, and, and HPC.
The second phase and the three phase, I'm not gonna take too much at this time, but the second phase for us in 2025, 2026, even if we have started yet, is to identify sites for us to go outside of our Center One in Quebec. We wanna go outside of Quebec. We are mainly looking in the U.S., a little bit north of Europe. We are also open to other countries, but it's true that this is where we know, this is where we are based, and it's also where you can really grow at scale. Mainly in the U.S., you can find different kind of energies at scale, and you can grow your operation.
So first, second step in the next 12-18 months, it's really about finding sites our size 20 MW-50 MW, and being able to work with them, acquire them, host in them, a partnership with them. If you have one, contact us. We are here to go. We are publicly listed. We can put some CapEx to play for this. Also, we think that in the design work that we will do, we will mix Bitcoin mining and AI computing power. And then for the next phase, of course, it's really to find bigger energy. The idea here would be to sign a large PPA for a large amount of megawatts.
It's more expensive because you need to buy high voltage energy, so you need to transform it yourself, you need to have substation, transformers, et cetera. It costs more money, as a CapEx for your infrastructures. Also, it takes time to build. Everyone, from Hydrogen, Tesla, anyone who's trying to get energy, everyone see the value of owning energy and transforming this energy. But by doing this, you can lower your price of kilowatt hour, because if you're buying it high voltage, you will be able to get very, very low price for your kilowatt hour, with the idea to become a computing power leader, in the next years. Again, we understand we are a small player, we are small fish, but we are getting there.
We have everything ready to get to the next step, and the next steps of our evolution. People are bigger than us, yes, but in the business, it's not the bigger who survive, it's the most efficient. That's what we've been doing, that's what we intend to, to continue doing. We'll go on the Q&A at the end. First, I'm gonna leave the floor to Kyle Appleby, our CFO, to discuss more about our exceptional Q1 results. Kyle, please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks, Romain. Yeah, I'm very pleased to present our positive results here. Just to first note, these results here that we see are all unaudited and reported in Canadian dollars. And for our full financial statements and MD&As, you can go to SEDAR +. So feel free to go there and review them. I'll present our highlights here. As Romain mentioned, our strategy is growth, growing our computing power, our brand, and maintaining efficiency. So you can see our revenue steadily growing over quarter-over-quarter, reaching almost CAD 6 million in Q1 2024, which is an increase of 51% compared to Q1 2023.
The revenue was derived from earning 83 Bitcoin during the quarter, and was helped by, obviously, the steadily price increase of Bitcoin, reaching about CAD 95,000 at the end of March. Our cost of revenues, which is mainly our electricity costs, also includes insurance and repairs and maintenance, reaching a good gross profit in Q1 2024 of almost CAD 2.7 million. So our efficiency comes through. You can see our centers earning money and maintaining efficiency. So the gross profit was 45% in 2024 Q1, compared to 28% in 2023 Q1. When you exclude depreciation, it's a 58% gross profit in Q1 2024.
Our operating income after our operating expenses, as well as our net profit and a really strong EBITDA of CAD 4.99 million. So the results of our strategy, our growth and efficiency really come through with our results, which are really record results for us and a really strong quarter. If we want to take a look at our next slide. Here you can see our compute power profit, which is really our mining profit. So you take our gross profit and add back depreciation and deduct some other income. So we had an 806% increase quarter-over-quarter, which is a tremendous growth for us. We're very proud of that.
And you can see our centers are making money, positive cash flow, EBITDA, again, almost CAD 5 million, adjusted EBITDA, CAD 2.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA is just adjusted for some, non-cash items, basically unrealized, gains, within our results. So EBITDA has increased 333%. Again, all positive, all trending in the right direction, following our growth strategy. For our next slide. You can see here our position at March 31st, we had CAD 1.3 million in, digital assets, which is primarily Bitcoin, 63 Bitcoin at the end of March. You know, we earn our Bitcoin from our revenues. We do have to sell some of the Bitcoin to cover our electricity and some of our operating costs. But with the...
You know, we have a real positive long-term outlook on the price of Bitcoin, so accumulating some in our account is great for us in maintaining that. If we wanna go now to our following slide, this is gonna show our capital structure. So our share price at the end of the quarter was CAD 0.45. Shares outstanding, almost 73 million, 40% would be held by insiders. So we have a tight share structure, and we have low dilution. A lot of our funds have been raised through debt. We're open to raise money in the future through debt and equity. So right now, it's a nice, good, tight structure, low shares outstanding.
and our tickers, as you can see, we trade on the venture under SATO, and on the OTCQB under CCPU.F. So you can take a look at those and follow us on both of those exchanges. And I'll let Romain finish us off here with the end of the presentation.
Thank you, Kyle. Look, we are at the end of the presentation. This is just to sum up. We're Bitcoin focused, but we have a potential for AI. We are an operator since 2017. We've been there, we've done that. Of course, we know that we're gonna find other things on our way to grow, but that's really our expertise that is at play here. We know how to be efficient. We've proven to be efficient. Yes, the market is difficult, it's volatile, the hash rate is going up, going down, halving, et cetera, but efficiency is key. We're focused on high performance using the energy the right way.
We publicly listed because we wanted the access to the public to really grow our operation, and again, to follow the steps of other Bitcoin miners who are now listed on the NASDAQ and very successful with multi-billion dollar valuation. They have all been at the same place we are at today in the life cycle or in the life cycle before. So now we hope it's our turn and we're ready ready for the next phase, of course. So thank you again for being with us, for listening to us, for being curious about learning about what we do and and where we're going to. Now we will we will start the question, if you want.
There you go. I'm just flipping Anthony and I off mute. Well done, you guys. Great presentation. We can jump over to the Q&A. I've seen a couple questions come in already, Romain. I know myself and Anthony have a few. So you guys, if you're watching this, you have some questions for either Romain or Kyle, please put them in the chat. We'll start off with ours, then we'll move into the live Q&A section. So I guess the first one we like to kick off here, Kyle, you talked about some of the real financial highlights of Q1. Obviously, we saw Bitcoin price very strong in the quarter. It was pre-halving, so the block rewards were still full or double what they are now. Where do we see opportunities? You talk a lot about efficiency at Sato and that growth potential.
Where do we see opportunities for Q2 and beyond, understanding that the macro environment may be a little bit more difficult? I guess that could be for Romain or for Kyle, that one.
Well, I'll be happy to go for it, except if Kyle, you want to start with it, because Q2 and Q3 and Q4 and the next year, that's where we are focusing on. It's true that the full Q1 quarter, like every other Bitcoin miners, there is a quarter with only 15 days post-halving. So we had a last quarter that was exceptional, everyone, because the price of the Bitcoin was high. The difficulty was also high. The difficulty has been going down a little since then, so it will also have an impact. What we have seen also is tremendous increase of fees on the block, mainly at the halving time, it was incredible.
At block 840,000, the reward went from six to 25 to three to 12. And at the same block, the fees were 37 Bitcoin, so it's really huge, and that's for Bitcoin miners in general, even depending on who is winning on the pool. But in general, this is what we've seen. So that's why we know it was the end of an epoch, the end of the fourth epoch in Bitcoin mining. Now we are entering into a new world, and I think it's very early to apply the ratio to understand what's gonna happen in the next three to six months. I think we need to wait a little bit more time.
As I was saying, the hash rate has been decreasing from 640- 580, but going back up to 600 exahash. It's moving. The price of the Bitcoin went from $70,000, what, all-time high, ATH, $77,000 - $62,000, now back at $69,000, $70,000. It's too early to tell, but again, focusing on efficiency, focusing on extracting the most Bitcoin you can, make us in a position to not be the first one who will unplug the miners, and this is what counts in this business. Now, how do we go from there? We have cash, we have a site who is making, who is making money, and we want to be able to use what we have in front of us to be able to increase our hash rate very, very short term.
I think it's an amazing time to buy hash rate, and proof is, we've done it last month. We bought, not a lot, we bought 17 peta hash of mining power, with our cash. We also have access to debt solutions, possibly equity. What we wanna do with equity, we wanna be smart with, with the way we use equity, because we wouldn't want to create, a dilution that are not what I call positive. And then in our business, we can create positive dilution because the money we raise, we apply it into buying more computing power, which will generate more revenues, in the future. This is really the goal for us by now, is really how can we grow organically or quasi-organically?
The 1 exahash mark is a good objective for us. I'm not sure how and when, because I can't tell you anyway, but we're really moving into that direction because we can do it in our center in Quebec with no more CapEx. I mean, truth is we have upgraded 7.5 MW of our energy to be able to host T21. T21, I'm not going too much into the details, even if I'm sure the audience would like it, but it's the new type of generation from Bitmain. It's really interesting, because the price per T is lower. However, it's more complicated to operate, because you need to put 240-volt three-phase on the miners.
Usually, it means that you need to change your PDUs and some of your breakers, depending on your situation, but you need to make an okay. But they are interesting miners, because you can buy them for price per T that is lower than S21. We also bought S21. We have a few T21, S21, S19 Cape Hose. That's kind of like the latest of the end of the latest generation. And that's a CapEx that we spent, and that two years that you can see actually now in our Q1 to upgrade this kind of the center to be able to host that. And that's really the goal.
At the same time, we are really focusing on how we can expand our energy and develop the AI and HPC. It's great to talk about it, but we don't, we are not people who talk about things, we are people who are doing things. In my life as an entrepreneur, that's always what I've done. Yes, we are at the beginning. We can tell, "Oh, yeah, I have a 3 MW or 5 MW data center running for AI." It's different type of setup. It's not the same thing. You need to have different kind of energy, redundancy for energy, different kind of cooling system. The GPUs are different, of course, than the Bitcoin miners, and the CapEx are way more expensive for developing data center for AI and HPC.
However, again, having a mix of the two, this is the first goal we are focusing on: Bitcoin mining, AI and HPC, and curtail the Bitcoin mining to make sure that your AI stays on all the time. This is where we will win. We wanna prove that, and we are working on this, and we are focusing on this. Is it gonna show results in Q2, in Q3, and Q4? It's difficult to say because, again, you have two ways to think about AI and HPC. You can find a client today and then start running it today, or even delaying in six months or in 12 months. We might do this.
At the same time, we are really focusing on making sure we can have the infrastructure to do it, and that's what we've been focusing on for the very short term. Thank you.
Yeah, as Romain mentioned, you know, short-term, fill our center, use our current cash and assets to grow, which, you know, and we have the ability to borrow money or raise equity to fill the center. You know, we have efficient costs there, so that's a short-term goal for sure, for us.
In terms of the site that you have at the moment, of the 20 MW, how much are you actually utilizing with your self-mining? And is there an opportunity to actually to get more than 20 MW at that site if you had an opportunity to expand?
So at Center One in Joliette, we are at full capacity self-mining, so we are using close to 20 MW. You never use one of 20 MW, but we have a little bit room to grow that we are using for ourself. It's part of our our expansion plan for the Régie de l'énergie . In Quebec, there is a moratorium for crypto mining. We can't, but nobody can add more energy for crypto mining. But it's not really the case for AI and HPC. So that's where, if we wanted to go in our Center One, where we could find more ways to expand in our actual center, for the very short term.
So by upgrading the fleet to the most efficient miners, you're able then to utilize that power capacity to deliver more hash rate, are you?
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And that's what Kyle was explaining. It's using what we have in front of us, equity, debt, and then cash and bitcoins that we generate. In the past, we have used our Bitcoin to buy miners. It's one thing that Bitcoin miners have in their hands to grow, because we are striving to grow again. Once you're efficient, grow as big as you can. and if we can make more Bitcoin in the future, by being bigger, we'll find any way to be able to do it.
Amazing. Hey, I'm just taking a look at the share price today, Romain, up 9%. So SATO or SATO is. Wow... currently leading the Bitcoin mining community right now, at least on the ones I track. So that's a success this morning. And obviously, coming off the backs of that strength in the financials that you talk about, Kyle, the market is really appreciating that from the signs of it. Anthony, I know you've had a chance to kind of go into the numbers. Was there anything that stood out from your perspective, maybe that we haven't talked about so far?
Yeah. I mean, I looked through the income statement and the balance sheet this morning. I converted it into U.S. dollars because I look at all the mining companies, so I used today's exchange rate and just as a conversion. But from a free cash flow perspective, which really, as a business, that determines, you know, how well you're operating. It sort of gets rid of all those non-cash costs, like depreciation, stock compensation, all the gains that you achieved with Bitcoin, 'cause it's great in Q1 when the gains come through. But if Q2, if the price hadn't achieved $70,000 on the thirtieth of June, you'd be recording unrealized, you know, losses for that particular quarter. So strip all those out there.
But you had good free cash flow, and I then did, sort of like, a percentage of your revenues, and I got 13.38% was the number I was in terms of free cash flow. And actually, when you compare that to peer miners, that sits you very well in the sort of top half of all the public miners that have already released their results. There's only a few more miners to release now. But certainly, ahead of some of the sort of of the miners in Canada, the likes of Hut and Bitfarms. So, obviously, something in the secret sauce there. Although you're, you know, in terms of hash rate, you are one of the smaller miners on the public market at the moment.
But it's like, you know, from an operational point of view, and I've been covering you, I think since June, July 2023, so getting close now to a year in my tables. And I noticed you included one of the year-to-date operational table, which highlights how productive Bitcoin miners are with their energized hash rate. So, you know, at the moment, this year, you're second, and on the sort of like on an equal par with Hive. I think you've both got the same number. If you went down to so many decimal places, you're ahead of them, but bear in mind, you know, in 2023, there's only You're in that top four group there, just behind the same again, Bitfarms, Hive, and Iren. So from an operational point of view, you're doing really well. The numbers are really good.
For me, I then take it a stage further and look at sort of like try to understand the valuations of some of these mining companies, and how the market's looking at mining companies. And you look at the big players, the Riot Platforms, the CleanSpark and the Marathon Digital, and you try to understand how the market's valuing them. Are you sort of seeing now, you know, the market likes to see, you know, the hash rate targets going to the planned hash rate targets, which these three companies and another number of other companies, but these three are really focused on delivering sort of like big numbers by the end of the year, and certainly into 2025. It seems like the market's for getting a number of the miners out there that are also operating really well. Are you seeing that from yourselves?
Kyle, you want to go, or
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we're under the radar. We're small. I mean, we're trying to get the word out there about us. As you said, you know, we're very efficient. We're small. We're growing. You know, hopefully, over the next couple of years, we'll have more, you know, visibility and traction and our name out there, so people really know who we are, because I think we're a good name in the crypto space.
And sorry, and to your-
If you look at, I'll just take that a stage further. If you look at the value in terms of balance sheet value per exahash for these mining companies, and you know, I use the production in terms of exahash, because it's a great leveler. And if I use the valuation per exahash, it also levels out the miners as well, in terms of what value they are. So looking at sort of like at today's numbers, your valuation per exahash is coming in at $28 million, nearly $29 million. And then you start comparing that to CleanSpark, which is $195 million. You've got Cipher, $132 million. You've got Marathon at $160 million. You've got Riot, $144 million per exahash in terms of valuation.
So that sort of supports my theory that some of these miners are just not getting the same attention from the market. And, bear in mind, you know, two years ago, I started to include a small mining company called Iren in my analysis, and, you know, look at where they are now, and they're gonna deliver, you know, hopefully 30 exahash by the end of the year. So every miner starts quite small. When we first met, Romain, you know, the Marathon and the Riot were in sort of like single-digit exahash in terms of hash rate . So it's trying to pick, I suppose, which of the miners in that sort of like lower tier group, who's gonna break through and move forward.
Yeah, I think you're totally right, and this is what we've seen in the past, and we are continuing seeing it. People were all at a small-cap phase in their life. The success for them was to be listed and to be able to get access to capital at the beginning of the cycle. This is the key, and this is where we are at today. I can't agree more with what you said, Anthony. I mean, yes, if you look at the valuation per exahash, we are ridiculous. I mean, our valuation is undervalued, and we have a huge way to grow. I think it's also something that I see in the market, and I'm sure other people are saying the same thing.
Obviously, the first money is gonna go to the big market cap and the big brand listed on Nasdaq. It's normal. I mean, you would buy Coca-Cola before buying Pepsi, when it's created. But at some point, and at some time, we will see also hitters and people going into the smaller cap, and people who can maybe have 10x, 15x, 50x, of course, in this cycle, whereas the other one, we have already taken it, you know? I mean, they're already there, and maybe they go the 5x or 10x, which is already great. But maybe the smaller people, and we hope, and we are working for it, are we gonna go way more than that.
And I think this is why it's interesting, and at some point, I'm pretty sure we will start capital flowing into the small cap like us, or, you know, micro cap, if we compare. I think, Hut 8 is still a small cap in the Nasdaq grand scheme, I guess. But it's true that it's a road we want to follow. We want to follow these guys. We love what they do. They're extremely professional. It's also something that is great with Bitcoin mining and our industry of publicly Bitcoin miners. We are professionals. We are doing the right things, and we grow the right way.
Going the right way for, on, on the question of, geopolitics, America and Asia and everything, having computing power done the right way, this is what you want. And what are gonna do the U.S. and Canada? They are going to rely on their private sector, publicly, I mean, companies who are publicly listed are even better, because we are fully transparent, regulated, et cetera. So I guess, and we're kind of like seeing it recently. I mean, we see, at least in the U.S., we see a new breed of, crypto, and, like, a openness, coming from the politicians, from first from the Republicans, now from the Democrats. What does that mean? They know. I mean, everyone knows in the world, computing power is the new railroad.
If you don't have computing power for your countries in the next 20 years, you're dead. Your industries are dead, your companies are dead. Not dead, but they will be less performant. Your universities will be less performant. We need to build. It's a time to build. We have a way to do it. We have a way to do it from Bitcoin mining. We believe that merging computing power with Bitcoin mining is the way to go, because again, we can curtail. It means we can go to any kind of source of energy, use the wasted energy. If you have energy, and if you're not asking yourself: how do I use it for computing power? You're missing out, and we are an answer to that. We are not going to be the only one.
We are gonna be many Bitcoin miners, Bitcoin players, data centers, tuning into that, but the demand is gonna be so big and so much undervalued than what we think today, that I think there will be a place for everyone. So yes, our valuation, and I would not know any CEO who would say that their company is overvalued. But yeah, I completely agree with you, Anthony.
No, that's,
The other way of looking at it, Romain, is the fact that, you know, you know, it could be that you're valued at the correct level, and all these other companies are valued significantly overvalued. Just, just a point-
Yeah.
On halving and back in January, these big analyst companies were saying that the global hash rate would drop significantly post the halving by 25%. This is coming from the Cantors and the JP Morgans, these big analyst companies who speculate on what's happening in the Bitcoin global hash rate. We never saw that happen. In fact, the actual difficulty increased by 2% post the halving, and then it dropped 6% at the second difficulty. We're now seeing that difficulty looks like it's going to increase again on Thursday, at the next difficulty adjustment. Which means that the global hash rate has been increasing, because difficulty only increases when miners are actually producing blocks quicker than 10 minutes. So in terms of-
I mean
Sorry, go on, mate.
Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Go ahead.
In terms of like, sort of like conversations about miners coming off the network, is your phone ringing more now in terms of potential opportunities out there with companies with say, you know, distressed assets or not, you know, or having difficulty to continue than it was, say, pre-halving? Are you seeing any actual change in the sort of like, in the space that was expected when people were talking about this in January and even in last year? What's your, what's currently happening out there?
I would say yes, but not in a huge yes. Why? Because the Bitcoin is still at a good price. I mean, I remember, like, six months ago, I would have told you, Bitcoin will be at $70, and you'd be like: "Wow! Really? It's amazing." You know, people are at $70 for a few weeks and we don't really care, you know? So I think lots of Bitcoin miner will continue being able to run. One thing that you said, and it's true, we've seen the hash rate increasing, but it's also because we are receiving the future orders at the time.
Yeah. That's why Iris or Irene is now capable of saying, "Yeah, we're gonna do one exahash every month." It's simple. They are receiving their monthly shipping from Bitmain, probably, and they are going to rack them up monthly, monthly, month per month. So that's why we're continuing seeing about the hash rate coming up. However, it's true that it create stress on your margin and on how much money you make. Because from the block before the halving and the block after the halving, the Bitcoin did not go by two, which would have been equal for us, so we are still looking at that. And it's.
For us, it's an even better situation in a sense, because, look, don't get me wrong, I love bull market when it comes crazy and when the Bitcoin goes to the moon. But it also creates lots of bullshit-ness on the industry. Everyone wants to buy whatever they can at the price. They don't care either for energies solutions, miners, et cetera. In a market that is a little bit more structured like this, I think it's better for us to find the right opportunities and the right way to go. So yes, we have received lots of opportunities for buying sites, buying miners. The miners we bought, for example, we bought at the same price than the future order from six months ago. So it's good, and I've seen it before.
I've seen it before. When the market goes up, people buy future at future. If you don't know exactly for sure when your electricity will be ready, it's very difficult to manage, because six months later, the price per hash rate is not the same, the valuation is not the same, the price of Bitcoin is not the same. You can always find spot mining rigs, with the right type of people and the right knowledge of the market. So this is what we've been doing. But to also continue on this subject, which is really interesting for us, Bitcoin mining, I think this is also why AI and HPC is interesting, because it gives us another cycle.
There is no halving, there is no volatility on the price of the Bitcoin. And for us, it's a second line of business that will even make us stronger in the future. But again, it's not changing our business model. It's really working together because we're believing in Bitcoin, we're believing in Bitcoin mining. The fees are increasing. Even so, they are not as big as before. I mean, during the halving, the fees are really increasing, and we can find more ways to get fees with developing software like we do. But more and more people are using Bitcoin in general. The valuation of Bitcoin is going high up. And I think it's Bitcoin mining is still an amazing business.
And again, it's by mixing it with AI and HPCs that you can win and explore the energies the right way, where it's available.
Hey, Romain, really good job unpacking that, and we're starting to get some good questions in here, so I wanna jump over. We're now at all-time high concurrent viewers. We've got some good questions coming in. One thing you mentioned there, though, you talk about adoption, the Republicans, the Democrats in the states starting to use Bitcoin as an election platform. What are we seeing here in Canada from the political... You mentioned there's that moratorium in Quebec on new mining. Are we seeing any political positioning here in Canada that may help or hinder you?
Sure. Yeah, Canada, in every province, they have difficulties each with Bitcoin mining. And overall, even in the U.S., we have issues. You probably saw in the U.S., by executive order from Biden, he put a halt on a Chinese farm in one of the states in the U.S., I forgot which one. So everywhere, Bitcoin mining is under scrutiny because for the past 10 years, we had the same kind of story coming again about how much energy we use, how bad we were for the environment, and we have debunked all of these kind of things. And now we can really show the benefit of running a data center or Bitcoin miner in the grid. When you look at the local level, we win.
We use energy that is wasted. We bring more revenues, more margin for this energy provider who can now sell it. We have employees. True, we don't have lots of employees in our data centers, but we pay them higher than the average of the median salary range in the region where we operate. We also work with lots of external contractors, electricians, constructors, et cetera. We probably spend, like, what, CAD 4 million-CAD 5 million just for people like this. We participate in the art, and by giving Bitcoin to the museum.
There is a museum in the city where we are at, where we give every year, we give some Bitcoin, and it's great for them because they've been able to keep it from one year to another year, and then sell it and make more money. So it's at the local level, we are really winning, and people are starting to realizing this. And it's not only us. Same thing, another Bitcoin miner you mentioned, which we really like, CleanSpark, they have the same approach in Georgia. They work with the municipalities, they work with different kind of towns. We are working, we are forced to use something that was unused before, and we do it well. We will always have people who will say, "You know what?
It's bad for the environment, we should stop it." But then where do you stop? At Bitcoin mining, at Netflix, at YouTube? Where do you stop using the energy? What we think is that to succeed as a nation is to be efficient in managing your energy and developing computing power. Let's do it well, let's do it efficiently. I'm not saying we are the only one doing it, but this is really the key to approach. And I think doing it in Canada and in the U.S. will work, but it's true that we will have different kind of issues. So in Canada, to come back to your questions, we had a pressure point. We have our pressure point, like a choke point, like they have in the U.S., mainly from the CRA.
The CRA being the IRS in Canada, and they kind of, like, modified the rule on which we can claim back the interest of the ITCs in Canada. It's been for the past two years, Bitfarms, a few weeks ago, announced that it was resolved for them in their favor. So the means for them, and again, every Bitcoin miners is under the same scrutiny from the CRA on that matter. We have not resolved our case, but you can see in our financial results, we have a provision of CAD 4 million of ITCs that we could claim back. Bitfarms, they announced it two or three weeks ago that it was resolved in their favor.
I think they are going to receive close to CAD 25 million. But more importantly, this is for the past, more importantly, it means that our cost in Quebec comes back to 15% less because we can claim back TPS, TVQ, in Quebec. So it's where we see some kind of like issues, but we'll see where it's going. With the energy, we are also seeing, like, the moratorium in Quebec. I think other provinces are also discussing about it. Probably in BC, they have some kind of things. It will probably happen in the short term, my guess is, but long term, it's going to open. They have to open.
The government will realize they have to open their energy to data centers to be efficient, and there will be a reverse of mentality, and they will ask us to come and to use this energy the right way. I don't know when. Quebec is an amazing state, and an amazing province, in order to go. They have one of the best energy in the world. It's 100% non-carbon emission, or close to 100% non-carbon emission. And they have energy that is non-used. One of the issue, as you know, and, even more in the U.S., it's not the production of the energy, it's the transmission, and we are missing transmission line.
But we, Bitcoin miner, we can go and be behind any energy producer in the U.S., and curtail the energy when we can with Bitcoin mining and use it with AI and HPC, and we don't need these transmission lines right now. We can really be a transition between when it's built and when it will be monetized. Right now, we can monetize your energy right now. It's not in five years or in seven years. No, it's today. And this energy that is unused and produced, it's lost forever. Last forever. I mean, except if you put in the batteries, but then it's different.
Yeah, very interesting. I've not heard, partnering with power plants before the transmission lines are in either, Romain, so that's interesting. Now, I've moved myself to the bottom corner here. We can put the questions over my face instead of yours, you guys, if there are large questions. First and foremost here, love the format. So you guys, this is the first time we've ever done this on the channel. I know they are, companies do do live earnings broadcasts, but I've never seen one with this level of engagement with the audience, so I'm glad you enjoyed it. Next question from Raj, talks about, and this is actually something that came up in some of our other interviews, with BTBT this week, Sam Tabar, talking about margin compression on the HPC front. So you talk about these margins, Romain.
Their margins were in the neighborhood of about 70%, so very healthy as well. But he did say the rate card or rate per card may come down next quarter as there's more entrants into the HPC space. We're starting to see competition and margin compression. Kyle, maybe this is a good one for you. Do you see this as a risk, or do you feel the HPC landscape is fairly stable? And I guess compared to Bitcoin, it's very stable.
Yeah, I mean, it is, for sure, stable compared to Bitcoin. I mean, I think that just presents like, another opportunity for us, right? 'Cause we have different focuses that we can go towards. We have our main Bitcoin operations, and then there's the HPC or AI front, which we can supplement our revenues and grow in these different ways, right? So we have the Bitcoin margins, which right now are strong and healthy. It's obviously, very variable and uncertain in this business, but then we can go and seek like healthy, pretty consistent margins on the other fronts.
I think it's also a very difficult question to answer at this time. But if you are looking like precisely at the market, I think we will see two things. We will see the margin for the compute, for the power and the margin for the computing power. And the margin for the power that is transformed for computing power will probably stay steady because we will need more and more of those megawatt to be able to transform computing power. For the cheap, for the GPUs, yes, for sure, after the H100, we will see the Z100 or whatever they will name it, and then it has probably been announced already.
So we will see more and more people plugging solutions, more and more competitions, but also more demand. And not everyone can really do it at scale for what needs to be done. It's not simple. I mean, we usually, I mean, what you need, you need at least a 100 kW rack for, yeah, an HPC. That's what kind of, like, data center you wanna build on, which traditional data centers don't have. They have, like, 20, 30 MW, 30 kW racks. So they still need to make some improvement. Will we see compression on in the next five years? I'm not sure.
I mean, I think the market is going to continue growing for the demand of hosting computers for anyone we need to have more computing power. It's again our efficiency as humans, as companies, as working together into creating more value for the world.
No, Romain, quick question. Is there a moratorium on HPC, how using that? You've already mentioned about the Bitcoin mining.
In Quebec now, the way it works is that if you want over 5 megawatts, you need to work with the government. They are favoring companies from Quebec, like us, but also they have like particular industries they like, like hydrogen or batteries, for example. It's possible, and also it's possible to do it, at least to show a proof of concept of data center working with both, and from there, being able to expand in many-
Ironically, those could be your customers.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Yeah, good point, Anthony. Hey, and I, I cover a lot of lithium and precious materials and EV battery metals and that on the channel as well, and there's a real push right now to bring a lot of the production of that stuff onshore into North America. As you talk about energy and the ability to have energy infrastructure, I can see that really becoming a key kind of competitive advantage around the world for nation states as well. Hey, Romain, and that's where you talk about that HPC revaluation coming into play, eh?
Yes, also for Bitcoin mining. I mean, at the chip level, there will be a shortage, or there is already a shortage, because as you said, the minerals you need to build it, they are finite and difficult to extract, and every nation state who has it try to keep it and/or sell it for more expensive, from uranium to whatever you want. And for the chips particularly, yes, it's going to create a compression. Mainly, most of the chips today are made in Taiwan, even for Bitcoin miners. But I know that in the U.S., the first plant is designed for end of 2026, I think. So we might see more chips being manufactured in the U.S.
We're also seeing for Bitcoin miners, it's interesting, we are seeing new type of Bitcoin miners going into the market, Bitfury, for example, the new company, I forgot his name, the name, who are doing their own chip, I don't know, I have Bitfury in my mind. There are more manufacturers going into the market with releasing ASICs for Bitcoin miners. On the AI HPC front, it's mainly NVIDIA's. I don't know exactly who is their foundry. Could be TSMC in Taiwan, maybe. You have also for Bitcoin miners, you have a little bit of Samsung. And I know a few projects were getting there.
But, it's interesting because if there is a shortage, it will also mean that we will see a resurgence of the old generation miners coming back into play. And we've seen that in the past. At some point, the old S9, we call them the Kalashnikov of the rigs. They work at all time, but they were worth close to zero, but after six months, or I don't remember exactly the time frame, but they were worth again, two or three hundred dollars. So if there is a shortage, having the chip and having the ASICs will be key. After that, it's very dependent to the world order. I mean, and that's not something we control, unfortunately.
Fair enough. Now we're getting a flurry of questions here, so I'll try and get through them. I know we're over an hour here, guys, so we'll try and get through them in a rapid fire. Next one, so this looks like it was pulled from the deck, 806% year-over-year mining profit. I think, Kyle, you had said that was Q1 2023 versus Q1 2024, this, the-
That's correct.
Well, that'll be a nice number to see if you can top that one next year, eh?
It would be.
There you go. We've got one about the 9% increase today, so share price still moving. It looks like the Bitcoin sector overall is picking up. Now, this is interesting. So Chase says, "Small but mighty," which is definitely the sentiment that I think a lot of people have on SATO. We then have Rachel saying, "Exahash growth, please," on the other end of the spectrum. So I guess the question here: how would you position this, Romain? Because we've got two camps, and I know, Anthony, you've brought this up a few times as well. We've got the smaller miners, that it's a struggle right now to raise enough capital to meaningfully grow the exahash. On the other side of the spectrum, Romain, like you've said, you guys are one of the top-performing miners in terms of efficiency.
You don't have to be the biggest in terms of scale to make a lot of money, and you've got all these other nice opportunities ahead of you. What would you say to the debate between exahash growth and efficiency, small but mighty?
I would say go step by step. First, go efficient, then go bigger. Once you are, grow as big as you can, and that's where we are at right now in terms of our time frame. The thing, boys, being a publicly listed company and even more in Canada than in the U.S., I would not be able to tell you we are going to have five exahash, 10 exahash, 20 exahash in X months if I don't show that we raised or that we have the money to do it. What I can only tell you is that, of course, we wanna grow our exahash. We are striving, and we are living in the business to grow our exahash, to grow our mining power, our computing power.
What we are doing, as we explained before, we are using what we have in front of us, which is our cash, our Bitcoins, and, to some extent, equity and debt, in order to do it the right way. It's. at this point in time, we need like for Bitcoin, we need to extend our vision of the time frame. Yes, it's difficult to raise equity for Bitcoin miners today, but what is it gonna be in two months, in six months, in two years? We don't really know. What we know is that we're going to be here, and we're going to be able to extract, the right type of capital in order to build the kind of ideas that we have, that we have in mind. So we'll, we'll.
Short term, we said in our center, we could potentially reach 1 exahash of mining power, and after that, it's gonna be as big and as fast as we can, and it all depends on how much capital we can deploy. If we raise 10x more, it's in our business. If we raise 10 x more, we will probably be able to build 12 x bigger, because of economies of scale of what you build. And it's a race. We are in the race. We are the size we are in today. We don't pretend to be bigger than the bigger, than the biggest. But we are just playing into, into the race of growing and do it right and doing effectively for competing power. It's just, it's just, the best I have. I'm having the best time of my life.
I'm glad you are. We're enjoying the Bitcoin space, too. And the thing you say, Romain, that's so true, and we've heard Rob Chang from Griffin say the exact same thing. The Riot, the Marathon, the CleanSpark, they were exactly where you guys were only a couple of years ago. This whole industry is not even a decade old, really
in terms of publicly traded markets. And Rob also said it took him about two years to go public. So the fact that you guys are already in that position at the start of a bull run is obviously very, very nice. Now, we have Cody say, "An undiscovered gem, Canadian Bitcoin miners, get on board." Right on, Cody. This one came up by two people, Romain. So KG initially said, "When would you be ready to host the HPCs?" And then we have, I'm not even Z in real life, saying, "Same question as KG, timeline on infrastructure to install HPCs.
We don't have a precise timeline on when we can deliver. I know that if we started the construction, which we have not started the construction for, it will take at least a good six months before we can say, "Okay, we're ready for a 2 MW-5 MW type of installation," that we could potentially do. But we don't have a date. I can't give you a date at this point. Again, we are at the beginning of the cycle. Lots of people are talking about doing this, doing that. We say that it's on our strategy, it's on our roadmap. We are doing it, we want to do it, but we'll announce it when it's really ready for when we have a date.
Sure. Now, next one for you, Romain. Very timely again, KG. We just talked about this with Sam Tabar as well. So Sam was expressing some frustration over valuation, Romain, in terms of, of share price. Sounds kind of similar to where SATO is coming from. He was even going as far to say, if the market doesn't properly value these components of his business, he may look to spin some out, in terms of an HPC, a mining. Is there any discussion at all at SATO Technologies about a potential subsidiary, a spin out, restructuring, any of that kind of stuff?
We are open and opportunistic. Right now, we want to keep the value for our shareholders where the company is listed. So we are working more into doing it under SATO Technologies, but we are open also to the market, to different options.
Amazing. And probably last one we'll have time for here today, you guys, from Z in real life again, and I know we talked about CapEx allocation growth strategy a little bit earlier, but Z, you had mentioned you weren't here for the start of the call. How do we see this CapEx split, continuing throughout the year? It sounded like it's very much based on market opportunity for you guys. Right, Romain?
Yeah, also, I would say, for the remainder of 2024, we still have, like, about Q3 and Q4. Q3, probably not a lot of percentage of our CapEx will be on this. Q4, maybe more, probably more. Now, what I don't know also over 2024, 2025, 2026, I don't know what will be the percentage of Bitcoin mining we will run versus AI and HPC. Let's say we have 200 MW of energy. Is it gonna be 150 MW for Bitcoin mining and 50 for HPC, or the opposite? I don't have the answer today.
I think it might be depending on the energy we get and the kind of curtailment we get at the energy source, and that we should balance the mix between AI and Bitcoin mining. But if you speak particularly about the cost of building for AI and HPC, I can tell you, for Bitcoin mining, infrastructure plus computers, we are about around $1 million per megawatt. For AI and HPC, it's closer to $5 million-$7 million per megawatt, maybe you can go higher. So it's a different kind of, like, a CapEx-intensive business, but it's the same job, transforming energy into computing power.
Yeah, great answer, and we've heard that from, from everyone in the space. The HPC CapEx is a lot more, but you've got the margin benefit on the back end. Anthony, I know we're basically at time here. We've got through our questions. I wanted to give the mic back to you for any closing thoughts, then we'll let Romain and Kyle wrap it up. Great success here today, you guys. We got some good questions, great presentation, took the full hour. Anthony, anything burning on your mind?
No. So, the results were good this morning. I went through them this morning. I looked at the presentation, you know, free cash flow is a key for any business to operate, and they have significant amount of free cash flow from the results in Q1. The challenge for all miners in Q2 is that the Bitcoin price maintain a level where it's still profitable to mine, because, you know, we see all these analyst companies coming out with their sort of like cost to mine for all the mining companies post-halving, and it's sort of the It changes so many times.
Yeah.
I'm not even sure, you know, what's going. It's so difficult, to be honest. In fairness, it is difficult, because you're dealing with so many variables. You know the. Yes, you've got hash rate, so you know, but you don't know what the global hash rate is going to be. You don't know what the difficulty adjustment is going to be. You don't know what the Bitcoin price is gonna be, and if you're on a sort of like a market level for energy costs, that is also variable. So add all those together, and it's a challenge to determine.
So, and the price increasing, if Bitcoin price increasing, it provides another issue, because it means that other miners may be going back on the network with less efficient machines, because they can still make an element of profit, or in my terms, as an accountant, an element of contribution. Because if you're bringing a contribution in towards your overheads, then some mining companies will continue to buy. If you're not delivering any contribution, then Kyle, you'd be switching your machines off, because it's just, it's just not, it's just not worth it. All you're doing then is you're gambling on the price of Bitcoin really excelling in the future to recover some of those costs that you're incurring at the time.
So, you know, I'm a management accountant, and so I look at costs on a, sort of, like, a daily basis, hence why my analysis always is always thinking in the reverse. I don't tend to sort of give any forecast going forward about Bitcoin price. I leave that to all those YouTube experts out there who tend to sort of have all these wonderful graphs and lines and everything like that. But I certainly look at all the previous stuff to sort of gauge from performance, from financial performance, operational performance, link it into the monthly updates, and have an understanding of where each of the companies are. And when I look at Q1, you score well on your homework, so, you know, good, good, good Q1.
Certainly in comparison to, you know, to all the miners that I've listed, there is at the moment, you certainly don't stand anywhere near the bottom of those results. But the factor for it is, I think, remains articulated. It's the challenges with growing and doing it. You know, you've learned to get efficient. You know your numbers now, month- by- month. You're in that sort of top three or four miners on a monthly basis in terms of production by exahash. It's now. I think everyone's now thinking: Where's the growth? We've seen these other companies, you know, putting in orders that would just drown most of the miners, and it's just sort of eye-watering. But, you know, opportunities are out there, whether there's some merger and acquisition opportunities.
We saw the benefits of USBTC merging with Hut 8. Both wanted exactly what the other had. So USBTC had very little financial any money, but Hut 8 had the liquidity of a great balance sheet, but they had the access to power and facilities in America. And so it was, in terms of combination, that's quite a good combination. They both sorted each other's problems out, and maybe something down the line for you guys is, you know, if something comes along that can ease equally get you to that next stage, I think that's what that's what shareholders would be keen to see. But yeah, that was my closing thoughts.
Appreciate it, Anthony. Just taking a look, you guys, Bitcoin and the miners continuing to move. Romain, you guys are up double digits, so that's-
Wow!
Gotta feel good in the $0.30 range you're getting.
That's the broadcast effect.
Well, we have a. It's always good, but we have also long-term vision on what we're building and where our market cap will go, and yes, we go up one day, we go down another day. That's life. We wanna make sure that we create long-term value for our shareholders, and it's true that if you enter in that time into our company, we also hope to find people who can understand what we are building on the long term.
Exactly, with that long-term vision and, and very fruitful horizon in terms of HPC. So Romain, Kyle, thanks so much for your time here today, you guys. Excellent presentation. Congrats on a phenomenal Q1, hopefully the start of things to come this year. I'll kick it back for any closing thoughts. Really appreciate your time.
Thank you very much, Anthony Bryce , and Kyle, for being with me today.
Yeah, thanks, guys. Hope you have us back one day.