GameStop Corp. is set to report second-quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, with the original meme stock moving further away from its traditional bricks-and-mortar videogame business into areas such as bitcoin.
Last quarter, GameStop reported a fourth consecutive quarterly profit, despite revenue that missed Wall Street’s expectations. Meanwhile, the company’s hoard of cash and marketable securities jumped to $6.4 billion from $1 billion at the end of the prior year’s quarter. This cash, and more specifically, howGameStop CEO Ryan Cohenplans to use it, remains firmly in the spotlight.
“GameStop is no longer a retailer burning cash. It has become a lean, profitable, cash generating shell with a fortress balance sheet,” an X user who goes by @Han_Akamatsu wrote on the social-media platform. “The story has shifted from survival to optionality now,” added the user, who shows trade setups on social media.
GameStop’s stock rose 2.7% on Monday.
For @Han_Akamatsu, the key issue for GameStop is “not whether it will fail, but how @ryancohen chooses to deploy the war chest.”
Bitcoin looks set to loom large in GameStop’s future. In March, GameStop’s board unanimously approved an update to its investment policy to add bitcoin as a treasury-reserve asset, following in the cryptocurrency footsteps of Strategy Inc., formerly MicroStrategy Inc.
The Grapevine, Texas-based GameStop completed a $1.5 billion bond deal in April, and in May it announced its first purchase of bitcoin.
In June, GameStop announced a plan to raise more debt, a move that could indicate another bitcoin purchase ahead for the company.
“We made an investment of just over $500 million into bitcoin, and I look at it as a hedge against inflation and global money printing, and we’ll see what happens,” Cohen said during a rare interview in July with CNBC.
Since GameStop announced its bitcoin intentions after the March 25 close, the stock has lost 8.4%. Strategy shares have declined 3.6% in that same period, while bitcoin prices have increased 28.4% and the S&P 500 index has advanced 12.3%.
But the GameStop CEO rejected the suggestion that the company is a “mini-Microstrategy.” The Tysons Corner, Va.-based Strategy, which is technically a software company, is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world.
“We have our own unique strategy, and we have a very strong balance sheet — over $9 billion of cash and marketable securities,” Cohen said. “And we will deploy that capital responsibly, as I would my own capital, and only look for opportunities where the downside is limited and there’s a lot of upside. So we’ll be opportunistic when we see those opportunities.”
The videogame retailer is also in the throes of a store portfolio optimization review, identifying stores for closure.
“We’re a much more profitable business — smaller business, less stores, very strong balance sheet,” Cohen told CNBC. “We’ve gotten our costs under control, and we’ve changed the business from a reliance on hardware and software to a significant focus on trading cards and collectables generally.”
GameStop will not hold a conference call following its results. The company has not held a conference call to discuss its quarterly results since March 2023.
The one analyst who provided estimates to FactSet is looking for GameStop to continue its run of quarterly profits and report second-quarter earnings of 19 cents a share. Revenue is expected to be $900 million, up from $798.3 million in the same period a year ago.
GameStop shares have dropped 25.8% in 2025, compared with the S&P 500’s gain of 10.3%.
Shares of GameStop and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. famously skyrocketed in 2021 amid a meme-stock explosion fueled by chatter on the WallStreetBets subreddit and the influence of trader Keith Gill, also known as Roaring Kitty.
Last year, GameStop shares surged again after Gill made a return to social media, declaring himself a “believer” in the company. He also increased his GameStop stake. Gill, however, has been silent on social media since a cryptic post on X on Jan. 22.