The crypto investments made by tech firm Meitu lost nearly $43 million in the bear market

 Meitu was one of many publicly traded companies that bought Bitcoin at the height of the bull run last year to keep as a treasury reserve.

Meitu, a major Hong Kong IT company, made news in April 2021 after disclosing holdings of roughly $100 million in cryptocurrencies. However, since the bear market started, the IT company has lost over half of the value of its cryptocurrency assets.

Meitu recorded an impairment loss on its cryptocurrency holdings of over 300 million yuan ($43.4 million), according to a local media source. When an asset's value declines below the investment's carrying value, it suffers from an impairment loss.

The impairment loss has more than doubled from the previous quarter, which the company had expected, according to the financial report. According to the IT juggernaut, at the conclusion of the first half of the year, the company's net loss could be impacted by its cryptocurrency holdings.

Meitu declared holdings in cryptocurrencies of around 940 Bitcoin (BTC) and 31,000 Ether (ETH), bought for $49.5 million and $50.5 million, respectively, in a July exchange filing. The company's net cryptocurrency investment was estimated to be around $100 million, and due to the current bear market in cryptocurrencies, the firm had lost nearly half of the value of its investment by the end of the second quarter of 2022.

Meitu is not the only business to suffer substantial losses on its cryptocurrency investments. As of the second quarter of 2022, MicroStrategy, the leader among publicly traded corporations investing in Bitcoin, recorded an impairment loss on its BTC assets of more than $900 million.

The use of Bitcoin as a treasury reserve in place of some U.S. dollars was made popular by Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy at the height of the cryptocurrency bull run last year. The concept gained a lot of traction as BTC was setting new records every month, and more than a dozen publicly traded firms, including Tesla and SpaceX, joined the bandwagon. However, the price of Bitcoin has decreased by nearly 70% from its peak and is now trading at under a third of its all-time high.