MicroStrategy gets about three-quarters of its revenue mainly from product support (approximately 60% total revenue) and other services around 20%. Product licenses generate nearly 20% of revenue with subscriptions accounting for some 5%.

Geographic Reach

North America is the Virginia-based company's largest market, accounting for about 55% of its revenue. Europe, the Middle East and Africa accounts for some 30%. The rest of sales are scattered around the world.

Sales and Marketing

Marketing its products worldwide, MicroStrategy targets a variety of user types. In addition to large and medium-sized enterprises and government customers, the company also targets advertising agencies and systems integrators that cater to those clients, as well targeting independent software vendors that want to incorporate MicroStrategy's tools. The company primarily uses a direct sales force, but it also distributes through indirect channel partners that include value-added resellers, system integrators, and OEMs.

Total advertising costs were $0.9 million, $7.1 million, and $5.7 million for the years ended 2019, 2018, and 2017, respectively.

Financial Performance

The company revenue has been declining over the past five years. And after a net income of $106 million in 2015, it started to decline for two consecutive years before arresting the slide.

Revenue decreased by 2% to $486.3 million after revenue from product licenses and subscription services decreased by $0.8 million, and product support and other services revenue combined for $10.5 million decreases.

Net income, however, reported a 53% increase to $34.4 million in 2019. The increase was due to lower operating expenses and the $28.4 million from Other income.

Cash at the end of the period was $457.8 million. Net cash provided by operating activities was $60.9 million and investing activities added another $353.7 million to the company coffers. Financing activities used $66.2 million for purchases of treasury stocks.

Strategy

MicroStrategy sells its platform in two basic ways. The first way is to sell product licenses to customers for them to deploy the platform on their infrastructure either on premises or in the customer's cloud environment. The second way is to sell customers MCE, a cloud subscription service, so they can access its software in a cloud environment that is hosted and managed by the company. Revenues from product license sales comprise product licenses revenues, and revenues from cloud subscriptions comprise subscription services revenues. Currently, the vast majority of its product sales are license sales.

MicroStrategy sells through its dedicated enterprise sales force and channel partners to increase market coverage in both domestic and international markets.  It provides financial incentives for its channel partners to market and distributes its offerings.  In addition, it offers a wide range of services that provide support in the discovery, planning, development, and deployment stages of a MicroStrategy offering.

The company continually seeks to increase its brand awareness by focusing its messaging on the possibilities for value creation, the benefits of using its platform, and competitive differentiators. The channels it uses to communicate with these constituencies include digital and social media, user conferences, advertising, direct email, free and evaluation software, industry events, media coverage, mobile application downloads, channel partners, and word-of-mouth and peer references.