Billionaire Warren Buffett says the storm damage in Texas is staggering, but he isn't sure yet how much insurance companies will have to pay in claims. [...]
The investor expects that 50,000 of the roughly 500,000 vehicles Geico insures in the area will be total losses. But Buffett predicted there will also be large uninsured losses after this storm.
Buffett said Berkshire hasn't written much catastrophe insurance in recent years because prices were too low, so that will limit the Omaha, Nebraska-based company's exposure. By contrast, Berkshire recorded $3.4 billion in hurricane-related losses in 2005 when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma struck the Gulf Coast. [...]
As Category 5 Hurricane Irma looks set to make landfall in Florida after wreaking havoc in the Caribbean, The Insurance Insider looked at the most exposed primary carriers in the Sunshine State's commercial multi-peril and auto insurance markets in 2016. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway was Florida's leader in auto with a market share of 20.7 percent - equivalent to $4.1bn of premiums written. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway made good on its plan to convert warrants into 700 million shares of Bank of America common stock, the bank announced on Tuesday. [...]
Berkshire's agreement was to convert the warrants to Bank of America shares at $7.14 each. The shares closed Tuesday at $23.58, meaning Berkshire's paper profit on the stake is about $12 billion. [...]
BNSF, the top U.S. coal carrier, laid off roughly 5,000 employees from mid-2015 to early 2016. The Texas-based company and its peers faced cost pressures from plunging coal volumes as the strong U.S. dollar hurt exports of the fuel and utilities switched to burning cheaper natural gas.
BNSF brought back roughly 4,000 of those workers as coal volumes rose this year, along with high levels of grain and upticks in intermodal containers and trailers, and sand used in hydraulic fracturing, spokesman Zak Andersen said. [...]
NetJets has extended its contract as the official private-jet provider of the PGA Tour.
The agreement, originally signed in 2014, now extends through 2022. It calls for NetJets to provide flights, marketing support and charitable contributions to the tour, its tournaments and its players. [...]
Travelex Insurance Services (Travelex) and Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance Company’s Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection (BHTP) have formed a strategic relationship. This partnership brings together the financial strength, product underwriting, and claims handling of BHTP with the extensive sales and marketing and travel provider network of Travelex. [...]
Travelex Insurance Services, a leading travel insurance provider in the United States, develops and distributes a comprehensive suite of travel protection products for travel agencies, tour operators, cruise lines, vacation clubs and timeshare operators. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway's quarterly 13F statement was filed with the SEC last week, detailing the company's investment holdings. Visit Dataroma for a quick summary table of changes from last quarter.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sharply increased its bet on Apple Inc. during the second quarter, bringing its stake in the iPhone maker to roughly $1.5 billion. [...]
Berkshire reduced its holdings in discount retailer Wal-Mart Stores by 27% and cut its stake in farm machinery maker Deere & Co. by 5.7%. The firm cut its stake in Suncor Energy, Canada’s largest crude oil producer by 26%.
Berkshire continued to build its stake in refiner Phillips 66, increasing its stake by 4.3% but left its stake in pipeline giant Kinder Morgan unchanged. [...]
Who’s behind the [@rule40 Twitter] account? The Berkshire Hathaway-owned sneaker company Brooks Running, based in Seattle, which sponsors 12 athletes competing at this year’s Olympics. Brooks CEO Jim Weber says Rule 40 must change.
In addition to the @rule40 Twitter handle, Brooks owns the rule40.com domain name, and is using both to wage a PR war against the USOC.
Under Rule 40 guidelines, non-official sponsors cannot refer to the Olympics in any marketing, advertising, or social media during a blackout period that begins nine days before the opening ceremony and ends three days after the closing ceremony. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway earned about $1.2 billion in pre-tax income from the investment portfolios of its many insurance companies in the second quarter -- this represents a combination of interest and dividend income on investment assets of nearly $185 billion.
In dollars and cents, a billion dollars is something marvelous. Relative to Berkshire Hathway's massive investment portfolio, however, it's mere pocket change, and symbolic of a problem that plagues financial companies across the spectrum: Interest rates are simply too low to really move the needle. [...]
Warren Buffett, the famed CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, paid $195 million in June in order to terminate Berkshire’s final contract in which Buffett insurance and investing conglomerate sold protection against losses on bonds, according to a regulatory filing by the company Friday. That contract was initiated in 2008, and tied to municipal debt, with maturities ranging from 2019 to 2054.
The terminated contract gave Berkshire pre-tax earnings of $103 million in the second quarter and $89 million in the first six months of 2016. [...]
“There’s two things that make it [the economy] better: innovation and productivity, which are interlocked in certain ways. When you think of it, all of the products that you and I are using to make our lives better weren’t even around 30 years ago. It’s pretty extraordinary. And if you go back 100 years, every time I get in the dental chair, I think to myself, if this was 100 years ago, they’d be pouring whiskey down me and holding my arms. Now, I sit there and daydream about other stuff. So anything that improves experiences – what people want to do with the 24 hours in the day that they have. And secondly, what really counts is gains in productivity. If you go back 100 years … the farms around where I live here were producing 30 bushels of corn per acre. Now they’re producing 160 bushels of corn per acre. Well, that’s dramatic, and of course they take less people to do it as well, so, just up and down the line, you look at how many man-hours it takes to produce an auto now compared to 50 years ago. So, productivity – that’s the way the human race improves.” [...]
Mouser Electronics, a subsidiary of TTI Inc and part of Warren Buffett’s Bershire Hathaway, is expected to invest ₹90 crore to ramp up its India presence.
Speaking to BusinessLine during the company’s opening of a new customer service and back office support centre on MG Road here, Mark Burr-Lonnon, Mouser’s Senior Vice-President of APAC and EMEA, said: “The India sales trend looks good as customer traction is up 45 per cent. A major part of that demand comes from Bengaluru, followed by Hyderabad, Delhi and Pune. Online sales from Indian customers which was 57 per cent in 2015 has grown to 62 per cent in January-July 2016. Therefore, we have decided to ramp up our India team, to increase the levels of local support we offer to customers here.” [...]
Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection (BHTP) is now teaming up with TripInsuranceZone to bring BHTP’s suite of travel insurance products to the online travel insurance comparison website TripInsuranceZone.com. [...]
Using TripInsuranceZone’s unique comparison engine, travelers can research, quote, compare and purchase travel insurance from most major travel insurance providers in the United States. [...]
No stock is without risk, and Berkshire certainly isn't an exception. Here are just a couple of the reasons Berkshire's share price could go down. The stock market could drop significantly. [...] Interest rates could stay low. [...]
Either of these things could cause Berkshire's stock to plunge in the short term, and there are plenty of other economic and company-specific issues that could hurt Berkshire. It has happened before: Berkshire lost nearly half of its share price in 1974 and more recently took a 32% haircut in 2008. So, if you buy Berkshire, do it for the long term. Thanks to the incredible diversity of Berkshire's revenue stream, any weakness should be temporary. [...]
Richard Holland, the Nebraska advertising executive who helped link up one of the great partnerships in business history — between Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett and his deputy, Charles Munger — died Aug. 9 at his home in Omaha. He was 95. [...]
As one of Buffett’s earliest investors, Mr. Holland reaped gains that made him and his wife, Mary, among Omaha’s wealthiest people and most generous philanthropists. Although their net worth wasn’t public, their private charitable foundation reported assets of $158.8 million in 2014. [...]
Each year, Buffett, the billionaire investor, receives thousands of letters from people asking whether he would pay their mortgages, medical bills, credit card debt, and more. Through a unique sibling partnership, Buffett forwards the letters to his older sister, Doris, who decides which ones to fund. Over the past decade, at least 22,000 letters have crossed their collective desks, and they have given away more than $12 million.
And now, in what might be Boston’s most unusual volunteer opportunity, Doris Buffett — who moved to the city last fall — is looking for people in Greater Boston to help her read a backlog of those letters, as well as new batches that continually arrive. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway's quartery 13-F came out last week, detailing last quarter's stock transactions. Dataroma has an easy-to-understand format for keeping up with BRK's holdings.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has taken a new stake in Apple and upped its holdings in IBM, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday.
Berkshire portfolio managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who each invest about $9 billion, made the investments.
Berkshire's new stake in Apple totaled 9.8 million shares, while the company boosted its shares of IBM by 198,853 to 81.2 million shares. [...]
Berkshire also boosted its holdings in Visa by 3.6 percent to 10.2 million Class A shares, increased its stake in Phillips 66 by 22.9 percent to 75.6 million shares, and upped its stake in Bank of New York Mellon by 3.6 percent to 20.8 million shares.
Berkshire reduced its holdings in a number of big names, as well. It lowered its holdings in Wal-Mart Stores by 949,430 to 55.2 million shares, and dissolved its stake in AT&T, according to the 13F filing.
Berkshire slashed its Procter & Gamble stake by 99.4 percent to 315,400 shares, and also reduced its stake in MasterCard by 5.6 percent to 4.9 million Class A shares.
Warren Buffett is famously anti-tech, but his company, Berkshire Hathaway, has recently become a shareholder of Apple.
In this segment from the MarketFoolery podcast, Chris Hill, Jason Moser, and Taylor Muckerman explain why the billionaire investor's company bought in. Learn why Apple isn't the same investment now that it was 10 years ago and why this move is much more in line with Berkshire's investment philosophies than it first seems. To wrap-up, the team runs down a couple other moves Berkshire Hathaway announced in its most recent 13-F filing.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc Chairman Warren Buffett is backing a consortium vying for Yahoo Inc's internet assets that includes Quicken Loans Inc founder Dan Gilbert, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. [...]
The consortium is in the second round of bidding in the auction for Yahoo's assets, the people said. Buffett is helping finance the offer, one of the people added. [...]
Susan Decker, who worked at Yahoo in several senior roles between 2000 and 2009, including president and chief financial officer, is now a director on Berkshire's board.
Berkshire Hathaway has offered to be a potential finance partner for fellow billionaire Dan Gilbert's bid to buy Yahoo, Berkshire Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett confirmed to CNBC.
"I'm an enormous admirer of Dan and what he has accomplished in Quicken Loans. Yahoo is not the type of thing I'd ever be an equity partner in. I don't know the business and wouldn't know how to evaluate it, but if Dan needed financing, with proper terms and protections, we would be a possible financing help," Buffett told CNBC. [...]
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. promoted longtime reinsurance executive Kara Raiguel to run the company’s Gen Re unit, which has struggled to expand amid increased competition.
Raiguel will take over from Franklin "Tad" Montross, according to an internal memo confirmed by Gen Re. She has been at Berkshire for 15 years and was a key deputy to Ajit Jain, who runs the company’s namesake reinsurance operation and recently took on responsibility for Gen Re as well.
For Berkshire investors, the two-page memo may be interesting for more than the information it provides about Ms. Raiguel. It also offers a glimpse of Mr. Jain’s writing style, and it sounds a fair bit like the folksy, jargon-free tone that Mr. Buffett favors. Mr. Jain has long been thought by outside observers of Berkshire to be one of the leading candidates to replace Mr. Buffett. [...]
Richline Group, Inc. has the pleasure to announce the acquisition, effective June 1, 2016, of John C. Nordt, Inc. [...] a leading manufacturer and supplier of precious metal products to the jewelry industry. Founded in 1872 in New York City, Nordt has operated in Roanoke Virginia since 1984.
[...] Berkshire Hathaway has some structural advantages that are less well understood. One of them is the size of its deferred tax liabilities – a whopping $63.2 billion, based on the most recent data [...]
A deferred tax liability arises from temporary differences between a company's financial accounts and its tax accounts. [...] Because it is assumed that companies will eventually realize the investment gains achieved through the sale of their winning stocks thereby incurring capital gains tax, that future liability is reflected on the balance sheet as a deferred tax liability.
NetJets, the luxury plane unit of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc, agreed to settle U.S. charges that it discriminated against immigrant workers by requiring them to provide extra documents to prove their employment eligibility.
The settlement calls for NetJets to be monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice for two years, improve training of its human resources staff, and pay a $41,480 civil penalty, the department said in a Friday statement. NetJets denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle, and cooperated in the probe.
A NetJets spokesman said the government found "inadvertent errors" in the company's processes for verifying workers' residency. "There was no intent to discriminate," he added.
Most people don’t think of Berkshire Hathaway as a hip modern brand. Warren Buffett is a conservative, patient investor who still owns a flip phone and brags he has sent one e-mail his whole life. What many might not know is that his Berkshire holding company owns a travel-insurance business that is making a mark for itself by offering high-tech, consumer-centric products and services. [...]
BHTP continues to invest in mobile technology and will be releasing a new version of its mobile app in the coming weeks. [...]
Recently, the Seattle Times published a special report in conjunction with BuzzFeed News on the business practices of Clayton Homes, a massive modular housing company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company that serves as a massive investment vehicle. The report does not paint a rosy picture of Clayton, which is the country’s largest homebuilder. [...]
The report found that Vanderbilt Mortgage, the lending arm of Clayton, lends with extremely high interest rates for minorities as opposed to their white counterparts. [...]
In response, Clayton said in a press release that the story’s allegations about loan rates are based on “raw data” that ignore factors including credit score, down payment, loan size, collateral and type of land.
Clayton said Vanderbilt’s average rate was the same for white and nonwhite borrowers with credit scores less than 600 who borrowed less than $50,000 to place a mobile home placed on private land. For borrowers with credit scores greater than 720, the average rate for nonwhite borrowers was 0.07 percentage points less than for white borrowers, Clayton said. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. purchased a Virginia newspaper and printing facility as the company run by billionaire Warren Buffett adds to its roster of publications.
The purchase includes The Free Lance-Star and Print Innovators, both located in Fredericksburg, Berkshire’s BH Media Group said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. Terms of the deal with Sandton Capital Partners, which acquired the assets in bankruptcy in June 2014, weren’t disclosed.
The Free Lance-Star has a daily circulation of 31,700, according to the statement. Print Innovators prints the newspaper and other publications in the region.
Berkshire's underperformance this year is inopportune, as the Financial Times noted yesterday:
"The underperformance comes in Mr Buffett's Golden Anniversary year at the helm, when he told investors for the first time that they should judge his record based on Berkshire's share price, rather than just the book value of the company, which had been his preferred yardstick for decades."
BNSF Railway Co. recently laid off railyard employees in Minnesota and North Dakota due to lower-than-expected demand for freight shipping, the Grand Forks Herald reported.
The job cuts — reportedly around 100 — were at the rail company's North Dakota rail yards in Grand Forks, Mandan and Minot, as well as the Minnesota yard in Dilworth.
The European Commission said on Wednesday it had approved Berkshire Hathaway's planned $32.3 billion acquisition of Precision Castparts Corp, a maker of aerospace and other parts.
The Commission said in a statement it had concluded that the proposed acquisition would not raise competition concerns given the absence of horizontal overlaps and the limited vertical relationships between the activities of the two companies.
The Des Moines-based utility’s new Green Fleet service trucks are equipped with a conventional engine and a large battery pack that operates the boom and other vehicle features. The dual system eliminates the need to have the engine idling at the job site, thereby saving fuel, reducing engine emissions and the need for engine maintenance, and minimizing job site noise. [...]
“By eliminating those four hours of idling every day, we will save four to eight gallons of gas per vehicle per day, which will add up to a significant reduction in emissions and significant fuel cost savings over the course of the year.”
MasterCard doesn’t offer a consumer P2P payment service, but it is selling the technology to businesses. It’s charging customers like Berkshire Hathaway and FreeShipping.com an undisclosed fee to add peer-to-peer payments to their own businesses. Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection’s Dean Sivley says those fees cost the company less money than printing out and mailing checks or wiring money. The insurer developed a mobile app based on MasterCard’s tech to enable its policyholders to submit a claim and receive a decision and payment in minutes.
The start of the New Year often comes with grand resolutions. But this year, Dairy Queen® restaurants [...] are kicking off the New Year with an epic resolution: beginning January 1, 2016, participating DQ® and DQ Grill & Chill® restaurants across the country vow to serve all Blizzard® Treats upside down or the next one is free. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway is known for its extreme decentralization. The company’s more than 80 operating subsidiaries have complete independence and minimal oversight from headquarters, which requires little else besides regular financial statements and the return of excess cash that is not needed to sustain and grow the business. The company does not ask for budgets, financial forecasts, or strategy documents. It has no central marketing, procurement, sales, HR, IT, or legal department. It does not even have a General Counsel. This is for a corporation greater in size than General Electric, General Motors, IBM, or Chevron.
How exactly does such a structure work, given that it defies almost every major tenet taught in business school regarding management and governance?
The Financial Times reported this morning that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is one of the companies exploring a bid for ITC. [...]
As of today, ITC Holdings has a market capitalization of $5.8 billion (enterprise value: $10.2 billion), which would make it the largest "bolt-on" acquisition in Berkshire Hathaway's history by a large margin.
However, the setup for this deal would be highly atypical for Berkshire, which generally announces agreed deals after conversations in which it is the sole potential acquirer.
Shares of Norfolk Southern rose Friday on a report that BNSF Railway Chairman Matt Rose said his company may enter the bidding for the struggling railroad.
BNSF, which is controlled by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKB), might step in to provide a competitive bid to Canadian Pacific Railway's $28 billion hostile offer for Norfolk Southern, Rose told Bloomberg in an interview.
From claims sent via smartphone to claim payments that can be made directly into the consumer’s bank or PayPal accounts, the company's technology-focused innovations are being used to attract a younger customer, says Sivley.
“In 2013, when we were looking at the market and what we wanted to do, it was all geared around the fact that we wanted to do something totally different and it was actually aimed at or targeted at the Millennials,” Sivley tells Travel Agent. [...]
While its aircraft share sales have increased this year, NetJets' earnings suffered in the third quarter as the company continued to streamline its fleet with the cancellations of some older orders and the realignment with new models. In the quarter, NetJets reported a 37-percent drop in earnings from “increased nonfuel flight operation costs and increased general and administrative expenses, including fees to cancel certain aircraft purchases,” parent company Berkshire Hathaway reported.
Berkshire Hathaway often does not break out specifics on revenues and earnings for NetJets and its sister company FlightSafety International, and did not specify which aircraft cancellations eroded earnings in the third quarter. But French airframer Dassault in July reported the cancellation of a NetJets order for 20 Falcon 2000s that dated back to 2006. [...]
Buffett has built up his wealth over the years through his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. The company started out as a textile business but over time transformed into a holding company for his many equity investments. Most of Berkshire's largest holdings are minority positions he's taken in large companies like Coca Cola and Wells Fargo.
But some may not know about the privately held companies that Buffett also owns. Buffett has been known to purchase some companies in entirety if he's a fan of its business model. Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway now fully own over 50 different companies including several well known names. [...]
Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, "has never allocated capital to a start-up and wouldn't, because he's way too conservative," said Lawrence Cunningham, corporate law professor at George Washington University and author of Berkshire After Buffett. "On the other hand, the operating companies are allowed to do whatever they want pretty much."
Those companies include a variety of household names, from fast-food chain Dairy Queen to auto-insurer Geico and Burlington Northern railroad. And some of them, like furniture business CORT, are dipping their toes into the start-up realm. [...]
The quarterly 13F came out last week, detailing the changes in Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio last quarter. Dataroma has a convenient chart to visually show what changed.
Buffett told CNBC on Monday that the main reason he reduced Berkshire's stakes in Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was to generate cash for his $32 billion acquisition of Precision Castparts Corp. that's expected to close next year. [...]
Warren Buffett has seen shares of his Berkshire Hathaway fall more than 11 percent this year. Even worse, Berkshire shares have underperformed the S&P 500 by more than 10 percent.
What makes this highly unusual is that Berkshire famously tends to underperform when the S&P skyrockets and outperform when the stocks as a whole do less well, which makes sense given Buffett's long-term time frame. [...]
To me, and presumably Buffett, as well, there's a readily identifiable disconnect with IBM's very gradually declining core business and the huge discount the market has placed on the company's future outlook. For context, IBM stock currently trades at a remarkably low 9.5x its LTM earnings, and yields 3.9%. Wall Street analysts expect IBM's revenue to continue to fall into next year, but believe that Big Blue will actually return to EPS growth in 2016. That reversal alone could be enough to inject some much-needed optimism into IBM shares, even as its broader business realignment requires more time to fully materialize.
Consider Axalta Coating Systems, which makes automobile finishes and other coatings. [...] Axalta sells for a whopping 130 times its past 12 months of earnings and sports a price/earnings ratio of 22 based on future estimated profits. [...]
On paper, this would hardly seem like a stock that a vaunted bargain hunter would gravitate to. Yet Axalta isn’t the only example.
Insurance giant Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection (BHTP) teamed up with VacationGuard, a specialist provider of vacation rental insurance, this week to create customized travel insurance products for timeshares, travel clubs, resorts and vacationers.
Targeted at both property owners and vacation renters, the products protect against trip cancellation, delays, injuries and accidental damage to rental units.
Residents were evacuated from more than 70 Leetsdale homes Tuesday after a fire at a chemical manufacturing plant filled the sky with black smoke and noxious fumes.
Four workers at the Lubrizol Corp. Oilfield Chemistry site in the Leetsdale Industrial Park were adding chemicals used in gas well fracturing to a production tank about 10 a.m. when the fire exploded to life, a company spokesman said. The workers — and about 36 other employees — escaped the buildings, though five of the workers were injured.
At 32, Howard Warren Buffett, the grandson of the Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren E. Buffett, has already enjoyed a diverse career. He teaches at Columbia University, runs a farm in Nebraska, previously oversaw his family’s foundation and worked on economic redevelopment efforts in Afghanistan for the Defense Department. [...]
Now, that is changing. Mr. Buffett has co-founded a permanently capitalized operating company with big ambitions [...] The plan is for the new company, called i(x) Investments, to invest in early-stage and undervalued companies that are working on issues such as clean energy, sustainable agriculture and water scarcity. [...]
A climate activist group said Tuesday that Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s utility division favors policies that would hinder the spread of rooftop solar energy panels.
Outside Omaha’s Kiewit Plaza, where Berkshire has its offices, representatives of ClimateTruth.org and other groups gave a security guard what they said was an electronic copy of an online petition with about 100,000 signatures. The petition, addressed to Berkshire Chairman Warren Buffett, said, “End your profit-driven challenges to net metering programs in Nevada and all over the country.”
Kunhardt Films of Pleasantville, New York, is gathering information, photos and videos about the chairman and chief executive of Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
When the project airs, possibly within two years, Buffett would join a long list of prominent Americans profiled by the film company headed by Emmy winner Peter Kunhardt.
After this year, BNSF Railway Co. will be more than 99 percent finished with a second, parallel line to its 2,200-mile (3,500-kilometer) Los Angeles-to-Chicago route. Doubling up will create a rail superhighway speeding deliveries of toys, electronics, autos and other goods, because trains won’t have to yield to each other on sidings as they do on single tracks.
The goal: help the unit of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. grab cargo now going by road. [...]
The Los Angeles-to-Chicago route links the busiest U.S. container port to the biggest mid-continent rail hub, giving BNSF a leg up in the race to find alternatives to those dwindling coal cars. [...]
Buffett told Loomis he met with Precision Castparts CEO Mark Donegan for about 10 or 15 minutes and asked whether he would listen to a takeover offer from Berkshire. After taking this to his board, Donegan agreed to listen to an offer.
And so Buffett made an offer, they talked about it, and then they had a deal. At this point, Buffett said, he and Donegan had talked for about 25 minutes in total.
How does a deal like this come together so quickly? "We basically do no due diligence," Buffett said. "Our due diligence is basically looking into their eyes." [...]
The Lubrizol Corporation announces that it has acquired Particle Sciences, a leading contract drug development and manufacturing organization with a comprehensive suite of services for the formulation, analysis and production of complex drug delivery solutions. Headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Particle Sciences is a global leader in complex formulations including drug eluting device product development as well as sterile and particulate drug products. This acquisition further expands Lubrizol LifeSciences' pharmaceutical development capabilities, providing full service drug delivery solutions to the market across a variety of dosage forms.
When Goldman Sachs announces its third-quarter earnings on October 15, it is planning to do so with a release on its own website and a tweet linking to the release.
It does not plan to release its results on Business Wire as it did in the second quarter, however, according to people familiar with the matter. [...]
Billionaire Warren Buffett’s stock portfolio suffered another setback as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plunged after predicting profit would decline in its next fiscal year.
Wal-Mart fell $6.70, or 10 percent, to $60.03 at 4:15 p.m. in New York. That translates to a one-day paper loss of more than $450 million for Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which had about 67.7 million shares as of June 30. [...]
Regulators will drop proposals to hit the world’s biggest reinsurance companies with tougher safety rules, thanks in large part to the influence of veteran investor Warren Buffett, the head of one top reinsurer has predicted. [...]
Mr Kieholz said Mr Buffett’s status in US financial and political circles seemed to have helped global reinsurers fend off inclusion in the systemically important insurers list. [...]
Mr Buffett’s office denied suggestions he had directly lobbied contacts in Washington. But he has been outspoken in speeches and interviews, arguing that it would be illogical to apply a systemic label to Berkshire Hathaway, but not to the likes of Apple, ExxonMobil or Walmart.
A new partnership was announced yesterday (Oct. 14) between Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection and MasterCard that’s aimed at taking the hassle out of paying travel insurance claims.
Because those payments are traditionally made online, through EFT transaction or paper checks, there’s typically a lag of a few days — or even a few weeks. By using MasterCard Send, Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection can streamline that process by facilitating the payments for those claims nearly instantly. This solution then sends funds directly to a personal account through a debit card. [...]
Chatting with Carol Loomis, Fortune’s retired senior editor-at-large, Buffett said that activism is a profitable and "salable form," which happens to be attracting big money right now. But it’s spurred a wave of activism that may have gone about as far as it can go. "They stretch for targets, and you’re seeing that now," he said.
A famous buy-and-hold investor, Buffett compared activism—where investors push companies to make major changes to increase shareholder returns—to an old saying: "If you want to guarantee yourself a life of misery, marry someone with the expectations of changing them."
At one time, Berkshire made linings for men’s suits. Now, its various 100%-owned subsidiaries make cowboy boots, floor enamel and Ginsu knives; sell ear-piercing tools, diamond rings and encyclopedias; rent topiaries, candelabras and refrigerated trailers; provide insulated bags for pizza-delivery men, uniforms for police officers and shoulder pads for football players… and much, much, much more.
If Berkshire’s wholly-owned companies were independent, nine of them would be among the Fortune 500.
Warren Buffett was forced to defend his association with 3G Capital from the beginning of the ritual Q&A session at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting last Saturday, as a shareholder said that "he cannot make a moral case" for the Brazilian investment firm's aggressive cost-cutting programs at acquired companies. Given that Berkshire Hathaway's partnership with 3G Capital is more likely to expand than shrink over the next decade, Berkshire shareholders ought to understand its nature. In fact, 3G's methods are not inconsistent with Mr. Buffett's approach to business, which is, well, all business.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. is extending its operating improvement plans as the railroad seeks to recover from “significant service-related challenges” that the carrier and its customers have struggled with over the past year.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the railroad’s parent, said BNSF has seen its network operate more smoothly lately as it has boosted capacity by expanding lines, adding locomotives and bringing in new hires. “We plan to continue our capital expansion and operational improvement initiatives in 2015 in order to meet customer demand and improve and maintain service levels,” the Berkshire said in its first-quarter 10-Q filing late Friday.
BNSF Railway Co., owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will be among the first companies to operate a commercial drone over hundreds of miles in a U.S. research program to test the safety of pilot-less flights.
A camera-equipped drone will fly as far as 400 miles (640 kilometers) along tracks in rural areas to inspect rails, BNSF said. The Federal Aviation Administration also chose CNN and Precision Hawk USA Inc. to make flights beyond the visual line of sight of an operator in unpopulated areas, a practice that is currently banned.
The use of drones “increases the frequency of inspection. We have some very remote areas,” Gary Grissum, BNSF’s assistant vice president of telecommunications, said in an interview. “We’re looking to be able to detect very small defaults in the rail.”
A tiny central North Dakota town has been evacuated after the derailment of an oil train.
The incident displaced residents of Heimdal, sheriff's officials told local media. The accident involved a BNSF Railway train with 109 cars, five of which were burning. Six to seven cars derailed and the cause of the event is unknown, according to officials.
Investor Warren Buffett again defended Berkshire Hathaway's manufactured home unit Monday and praised some of his company's biggest investments.
Buffett discussed Clayton Homes' lending practices, interest rates, Berkshire's investments and other topics during an interview on CNBC Monday. Over the weekend, he answered questions in front of more than 40,000 people at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting.[...]
A subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will announce Thursday that it plans to build the Grande Prairie Wind Farm, which would be Nebraska’s largest wind-powered electric generating plant and increase the state’s wind energy capacity by nearly 50 percent.
BHE Renewables, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, purchased Grande Prairie from Geronimo Energy of Edina, Minnesota, which had acquired it from a Chicago developer in 2013. The other companies arranged leases, got permits and completed other development steps.
Construction is to start this summer on the 400-megawatt project, located about 12 miles northeast of O’Neill, and be completed in 2016, adding to the state’s existing 810-megawatt wind energy capacity.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy disclosed that it recently acquired a site for solar generation development in MISO’s central region. The “site” consists of 74 individual “locations” not to exceed 1 MW each, according to the company’s quarterly property acquisition report. [...]
The company did not disclose exactly where the site is located. The company is not ready to make an announcement on the project, spokesman David Caris said. MISO is a new locale for the company’s solar portfolio. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway’s planned solar expansion in MISO’s coal-dependent central region — which includes Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and parts of Illinois — appears designed to take advantage of increased demand for renewables as a result of federal environmental regulations.
Berkshire Hathaway utility PacifiCorp will procure renewable generation from a 7MW solar installation in Oregon by the end of 2015. [...]
PacifiCorp expects that the plant will supply power to about 1,000 residents in the town of Bly, Oregon. The company serves 1.8mn customers across Utah, Oregon, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho and parts of northern California.
The 7MW plant will be built on a former 40-acre lumber mill site, with 20,000 solar panels, and will become PacifiCorp's largest operational solar facility in Oregon.
Forest River will break ground this week on a new manufacturing facility in Michigan.
The Elkhart-based company announced plans in January to build three 100,000-square-foot facilities in White Pigeon and create 396 jobs in the next three years. [...]
Forest River is investing more than $7 million in the project and is receiving substantial incentives from state and local governments.
Nebraska Furniture Mart executives told hundreds of local dignitaries, employees and others attending a ribbon-cutting Thursday that the store is finally ready to take on the throngs of shoppers it was built for. [...]
Blumkin said the Omaha-based retailer, a unit of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, had several locations to choose from, but decided on the spot along the Sam Rayburn Tollway and Plano Parkway partly because of the cooperation from local entities. It has its own exit from the tollway, for example.
John Noel, president of Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection (BHTP) and founder of Travel Guard International, MyAssist and Insure America, today is moving to an executive advisory role after being diagnosed with early stages of Lewy Body Disease.
He will be succeeded as president by Dean Sivley, who had served as president of Travel Guard–Americas and was chief e-business officer of Travel Guard’s global operations after Noel left that company in 2009, three years after selling it to AIG. Sivley most recently served as CEO of the car service GroundLink.
Dairy Queen, according to a letter written by one of its executives that was released by an advocacy group, is pulling soft drinks from its kids menu. The letter, which is dated May 11, says the company along with its franchisees had voted to make the switch. The ice cream chain said the change would take place as soon as September 1 because that’s how long it would take the company to change its restaurant menu boards. After that, only water and milk will be the only beverages on the kid’s menu at Dairy Queen restaurants.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has once again agreed to have lunch with the winner of an upcoming auction to benefit a San Francisco charity.
The 16th annual auction to benefit Glide, which provides food and services to the poor and homeless, will be held on eBay from May 31 to June 5, the charity said.
Past auctions have raised about $17.8m, including a record $3,456,789 from an anonymous bidder in 2012. Last year's winner, Andy Chua of Singapore, bid $2,166,766.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is famous for his frugality, living in the same Omaha home he purchased in 1958 for $31,500, yet his neighbors across the street have a slightly higher, and slightly tongue-in-cheek, asking price in mind for their five-bedroom house.
Homeowner Phil Huston says that though the property has been recently valued at $866,000, he and his wife are asking for 10 Class A shares of the company their famed neighbor has helmed for half a century, Berkshire Hathaway. While at first glance, this may not seem like a lot, Warren Buffett has famously never split Berkshire Hathaway’s stock, as Yahoo Homes points out. This means that each individual share of the conglomerate currently sells for $215,800 as of closing Friday, making the asking price of Huston’s home $2.158 million.
Warren Buffett is smiling about Coke again, and singing about it.
The billionaire investor made a special guest appearance at Coca-Cola’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday. Buffett was introduced with a video of him singing, ukulele in hand, “I’d like to Teach the World to Sing” from Coke’s classic hilltop commercials.
British regulators have challenged their US peers over their apparent reluctance to subject Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to tougher scrutiny as part of a worldwide push to make the financial system safer.
The Bank of England has written to the US Treasury asking why Berkshire’s reinsurance operation — among the world’s most powerful — was left off a provisional list of “too big to fail” institutions drawn up by the Financial Stability Board.
Kraft Foods Group chairman and CEO John Cahill spent St. Patrick’s Day in Munich talking with two of the founding partners of 3G Capital about what a combined Kraft/Heinz company might look like and how it could succeed.
That detail, among others, is disclosed in a recent regulatory filing describing negotiations that culminated March 25 with an announcement that two of the more historic names in the American food pantry would merge to form the new Kraft Heinz Co. as early as the second half of 2015.
The tale is of a determined suitor, Pittsburgh-based H.J. Heinz Co., pressing its case, even as the Northfield, Ill.-based company that had caught its eye moved quickly to assess its options while at the same time angling for a better offer.
Warren Buffett's company is adding a group of small Oklahoma newspapers near Tulsa to its growing group of more than two dozen small and medium-sized newspapers.
Berkshire Hathaway Media Group said Monday that it had acquired six weekly newspapers and the daily Tulsa Business and Legal News from Community Publishers Inc.
Every year, I value Berkshire Hathaway using the "two-column" approach (if you're not familiar with this approach, don't worry, I'll explain it). About a year ago, I found it to be at least 20% undervalued at $116 per B-share. Fast-forward to 2015, and the B-shares have advanced 22% to $142. So I figured it was time to sharpen up my pencil and reestimate the value.
My conclusion: The stock is just as undervalued, even at today's higher prices.
If you're picking from this list, it almost doesn't matter who the next CEO is. [...] One of the great and often overlooked byproducts of the way Berkshire operates is that it attracts and retains "world-leading" business leaders like the people discussed here. That's partly by design, as Buffett looks for great managers who will stay around when he acquires a company. But it's also a product of the culture itself, which draws executives who want to be part of something great while being given the autonomy to do great things.
How will historians write about Warren Buffett 100 years from now? Will they treat him like the magnificent Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt? Or will the 84-year-old multibillionaire play a more muted role in history books, akin to the venerated Gilded Age stock operator Henry Clews? [...]
But unlike the great business moguls of America's past, Buffett didn't invent a product or process that will live on in perpetuity. Vanderbilt gave us steamship lines, the New York Central Railroad, and New York City's Grand Central Station. Carnegie industrialized steel, paving the way for skyscrapers and the Golden Gate Bridge. Ford popularized mass production and democratized the automobile. Even J. P. Morgan, while playing a similar role to Buffett's, put America's financial sector on the map by supplanting the Rothschilds and Baring brothers at the summit of global finance.
Between 42,000 and 44,000 shareholders are expected to celebrate Warren Buffett’s 50 years of managing Berkshire Hathaway Inc. when the company holds its annual meeting in Omaha on May 2. That’s 3,000 to 5,000 more than last year’s record of 39,000 attendees, Buffett’s office said Wednesday.
The estimate is based on an increase in the number of shareholder requests for meeting credentials this year. [...] Not all credentials are used at the meeting, but the requests are a gauge of expected attendance.
Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection, part of Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, announced today that it has been honored for Best Mobile Travel App in the 19th Annual Webby Awards. Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by The New York Times, The Webby Awards, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. [...]
Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection, made history last year with the introduction of AirCare™, the first-ever low-cost, fixed-benefit flight-protection coverage. The innovative product covers travelers from everyday mishaps such as missed connections, flight delays and lost/delayed baggage. The engine behind AirCare™ is a user-friendly mobile app that allows for ease of purchase and for simple and fast claims processing. Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection is the only travel insurance provider to offer such an app.
National Indemnity Co., Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Omaha-based property insurance operation, is moving out of its home office at 3024 Harney St., its location since the building opened in 1950. The company also is leaving other space it occupies nearby.
Over the past year, affiliates of National Indemnity have moved to the Omaha World-Herald Building at 1314 Douglas St., occupying four floors with a total of 108,000 square feet of office space.
By the end of 2016, National Indemnity may move the rest of its operations to the 16-story World-Herald Building, occupying as many as nine floors in all. Those arrangements aren’t final, but the result would be an inter-company lease: The World-Herald Building also is owned by Berkshire.
If it seems like there are an unusual number of Motley Fool stories in here this week, it's because they're ramping up their annual coverage for the annual meeting. Check out and bookmark the Fool's Berkshire Hathaway 2015 coverage page.
Last week, Buffett set up a developer company in Spain called Berkshire Residential Assets 1, with an objective of buying all property types, principally dwellings put up for sale by the sector’s companies, banks and Sareb, the bad bank. Known as the ‘Oracle of Omaha’, the investor plans to include rehabiliation and building construction services in its vehicle’s activities range. The third richest man on the globe has bought Catalan firm Merquinsa and has come to an agreement with Caixabank on reinsurance of its policy portfolio valued at €600 million.
A company that operates at least 13 wind-energy facilities across three states is suing in federal court to block the U.S. government from releasing information about how many birds are found dead at its facilities. [...] Portland, Oregon-based Pacificorp, which is owned by Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, is seeking an injunction in U.S. District Court in Utah to prevent the Interior Department from releasing information it considers confidential. [...] The information AP sought was part of its larger investigation into bird and eagle deaths at wind farms and the administration’s reluctance to prosecute the cases as it advocated the pollution-free energy source. AP asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for data collected under federal permits given to companies to collect the carcasses of protected bird species, including eagles and migratory birds, found dead at their facilities.
Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection is beginning to allow customers to file claims electronically by taking photos of receipts with their smartphones. Berkshire Hathaway will then electronically deposit a payment into a customer's bank or PayPal account instead of mailing a check. When filing claims, customers do not have to send in original claim receipts. The new program is called ExactCare, and Berkshire Hathaway is beta testing it with travel agents and other industry partners. It will do a full rollout in the first quarter of 2015.
Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance (BHSI) has unveiled its Executive First Side A Difference-in-Conditions (DIC) Directors & Officers Liability Policy, which provides protection for individual directors and officers in a concise form.
Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance (BHSI) has created a Contractor’s Broad Form Coverage, which is now available to contractors with BHSI’s primary general liability practice policies. In addition, BHSI is offering contractors its Business Crisis Event Cost Coverage endorsement with these enhancements, further strengthening contractors’ ability to respond in a time of need while managing their risk.
Not to be outdone by the pumpkin flavor craze, the Dairy Queen® system, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is bringing back its popular peppermint treat just in time for the holidays. The DQ® system announced today the return of the Candy Cane Chill Blizzard® Treat as the featured Blizzard of the Month for December.
Benjamin Moore is on its third CEO in 2 years, and a combination of strategic zigzags and the dealers’ feelings of betrayal has caused the company to fall behind its main rivals. Moore’s revenues rose a cumulative 40% between 1999 and 2013, while competitors Sherwin Williams and Valspar boosted their revenues, 104% and 196%, respectively. Moore’s revenues declined in the first half of 2014 [...] Buffett says he’s comfortable with the no-big-box stance, even if it means lower sales volume for now. He emphasizes the fact that Moore is a high-end product, what he calls “the best paint out there.” As he puts it, “They’re not the paint for everybody. We’re not in, and we won’t be in, the low-priced paint set… We will not be the top ever in market share. The mass market is going to be bigger than the high-end market. But there will always be a high-end market.”
Buy Like Buffett: A Love Story is the journey of a young couple expressed through the lens of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. companies, because what says “I Love You” better than a box of See’s candy?
In a strategy document written by SVP Brent Gale for a legal conference in July, Berkshire Hathaway Energy outlined its position on net metering, saying it should be scrapped in favor of a system that recognizes utility fixed-grid costs and utilizes distributed generation at times when it's needed most. [...] Berkshire Hathaway owns a number of regulated utilities, including NV Energy and PacifiCorp. NV Energy and Rocky Mountain Power, a power company run by PacifiCorp in Utah, are both lobbying to make changes to net metering and add fixed charges to the bills of customers getting credited for their solar power.
NetJets said yesterday that its new joint venture soon will begin offering private charter flights in China now that regulators there have granted the company an operating certificate. NetJets, which sells partial ownership interests in business jets in the United States and Europe, has been working since 2012 to gain approval to set up operations in China.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s specialty insurance business, created last year to expand into new niches, is adding sales of coverage to protect employers against misdeeds by their staffs. Brian O’Neill was hired from American International Group Inc. (AIG) to lead the push into the fidelity and crime insurance market, the unit of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire said today in a statement.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and American International Group Inc had a secret non-compete agreement in place over hiring employees for a year that has now ended, according to a recent Bloomberg TV interview. The interview revealed that American International Group Inc threatened legal action in order to encourage Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to agree not to hire additional AIG’s executives for one year. Berkshire had poached AIG executives Peter Eastwood, David Fields, Sanjay Godhwani and David Bresnahan in 2013 for what Buffett described as a “big time” expansion into business insurance coverage. [...] Benhosche didn’t indicate exactly what the executives may have done wrong, but made references to stealing intellectual property and poaching client business.
The name of the company is fairly new, but the presence of a travel insurance company led by John Noel in central Wisconsin is anything but. [...] Noel, now president of BHTP, founded Noel Group in 2006 after selling Travel Guard, a travel insurance company he founded in his basement in 1985. Today, Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection employs about 230 people in Wisconsin and Florida and is expected to grow to about 2,000 workers over the next five years. Noel said in an interview that the majority of those jobs will be located in central Wisconsin, and that he's happy to continue to provide an opportunity for people to live and work in the region.
FlightSafety International’s new pilot training facility at Port Columbus International Airport clearly is a major project at 55,000 square feet and the potential to add 90,000. But new information made public by JobsOhio shows just how big the Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.B) subsidiary’s investment is - $110.5 million. [...] FlightSafety’s $110.5 million capital investment will help it retain 137 jobs and create another 18, adding $1.2 million to its local payroll, according to JobsOhio’s report. The sister company to Columbus-based NetJets declined to breakdown those costs, but industry sources in May said its six flight simulators will run into the millions of dollars.
CenterPoint Energy, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Hunt Consolidated of Dallas are among companies that signed confidentiality agreements to explore bids for Energy Future Holdings’ Oncor electricity distributor, people familiar with the matter said. [...] Dallas-based EFH, which was taken private in a record leveraged buyout seven years ago, filed for bankruptcy in April with a plan to split off the side of the company that owns the profitable Oncor business. In July, the company — which also operates TXU Energy and Luminant — bowed to pressure from lender groups to gather bids for Oncor. [...] Oncor, which operates the largest distribution and transmission business in Texas, delivers electricity to more than 3 million homes and businesses and serves Dallas-Fort Worth. The company is prized because it’s poised to take advantage of population growth in the state and it has said it plans to invest $1 billion annually in power lines through 2018.
New accounts filed by Dublin registered FOL International - which is owned by the Warren Buffet controlled company Berkshire Hathaway - show that the firm recorded a pre-tax loss last year of €6.78m and this followed pre-tax losses of €23.49m in 2012. FOL International represents clothing manufacturer Fruit of the Loom's European operations. The accounts show that the loss last year occurred after restructuring costs of €6.35m. At its peak, iconic US brand Fruit of the Loom employed 3,500 people in six plants on the island of Ireland. Last year's restructuring comes almost a decade after the company announced in 2004 that it would shut its remaining two factories with the loss of 650 jobs in Donegal and Derry.
Warren Buffett may be feeling rotten after investing in a British grocery chain that's gone bad. His famed investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, is the third biggest Tesco shareholder, with a stake of almost 4%. Tesco is the U.K.'s leading supermarket operator. Berkshire is now nursing losses of about $750 million on the investment after the shares plunged by about 43% this year. It paid about $1.7 billion for the stake.
Similar story if you want to read more about Tesco:
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Vice Chairman Charles Munger recently summed up the past seven years of Tesco Plc, Britain’s biggest grocer, in a beat. “Tesco owned the world,” said Munger, whose firm last disclosed a 3.7 percent stake in the company. And “one day, it stopped working so well.”
What really made this deal come together was the financing provided by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. He was more than eager to do so. On the surface it may be because of the generous preferred financing that was packaged together by Buffett for Burger King, $3 billion of which yields 9%. However, when I look at the deal, Buffett is providing financing at a cheaper rate than what Burger King currently borrows for long-term financing. Why would he do that, as the company is riskier after the acquisition than before? One could argue that the convertibility factor of the preferred stock has some benefit to Buffett. However, is Burger King a company which would normally fit his investment criteria?
While the headline news will always be about what stocks Berkshire Hathaway buys and sells, it's critical to understand Buffett doesn't see those investments as the driving forces which will deliver shareholder returns. His first two points indicate as much, and instead he wants us to see that the things which will propel the value of Berkshire Hathaway forward into the future will come from the collection of operating businesses which now make up Berkshire itself.
Competitor ATCO continues their effort to derail the BH Energy purchase of AltaLink. I thought this story was over, but apparently not.
The impending sale of AltaLink to business mogul Warren Buffet’s energy arm should be subject to an oral cross-examination to protect Alberta consumers from runaway electricity rates, an ATCO lawyer argued Friday. [...] But SNC-Lavalin lawyer Bernette Ho said the reviews have already been fairly handled and accused ATCO of not being fully forthcoming during the process. AltaLink officials say ATCO has tried unsuccessfully to purchase their company.
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