Metaplanet pitches stock buybacks after 96% mNAV decline

With its stock down 42% year-to-date and 85% over the past 12 months, Metaplanet, Japan’s largest bitcoin (BTC) treasury company, is looking to restore investor confidence.

On Monday, its CEO Simon Gerovich broadcasted, “when mNAV is below 1.0x we will strongly consider repurchasing common shares.”

The acronym mNAV refers to the premium that investors pay for Metaplanet’s common stock relative to its BTC holdings. It stands for multiple-to-Net Asset Value, a colloquial and imprecise phrase borrowed from the common use of the NAV term by managers of publicly-traded funds.

Metaplanet is the largest public company in Japan to follow the same model as Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) in pivoting to a digital asset treasury (DAT) focus.

The $1.8 billion company has amassed 40,177 BTC worth $2.5 billion.

Because the value of its BTC exceeds its market capitalization, its mNAV is below 1x. Gerovich, alongside many other shareholders, are obviously disappointed in that reality.

Read more: Jim Chanos was right about Strategy — just not patient enough

Metaplanet’s mNAV soared above 3x as recently as July 2025 but now trades at a basic mNAV of just 0.72x. Even after boosting up the metric to account for its cash and debt via enterprise value, its enterprise value mNAV is just 0.91x.

An mNAV above 1.0x means investors pay more for the company’s stock than its holdings are worth, a signal of confidence that management will use their business to accrete BTC per share over time.

A reading below 1.0x means the opposite — that investors would rather own BTC directly.

Metaplanet was once the best-performing stock in the world. Now it’s worth less than the BTC sitting on its own balance sheet. Its CEO wants to remind everyone that it’s allowed to buy back shares.

The company is carrying an unrealized loss of about $1.4 billion on its BTC holdings that it purchased at prices far above current prices: $97,593 per BTC according to BitcoinTreasuries, or as bad as $104,107 according to its analytics dashboard.

The financial pain is evident. BTC is trading at $61,600 at writing time.

Back in 2024, investors happily overpaid many times for Metaplanet stock above what its holdings were worth, treating the stock as leveraged BTC moonshot with a Tokyo listing.

Its common stock hit a 52-week high of ¥1,930 yen last June and traded at an all-time high mNAV of 22.5x in July 2024. 

Those same shares closed at ¥237 yesterday, down 87% below that peak. Its mNAV, even using today’s more generous enterprise value variant, is down 96% since July 24, 2024.

Metaplanet announced its authorization to buyback stock on October 28, 2025, alongside an authorization to repurchase up to 150 million shares, funded by a $500 million BTC-backed credit line.

June’s statement reiterated that authorization rather than expanding it. Gerovich also cautioned that the post “should not be interpreted as an indication that we are currently conducting, or will conduct, buybacks at any specific time.”

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