Warren E. Buffett, the famous investor known for his enthusiasm for underestimated shares and businesses, is feeling Bullish these days for a traditionally staying investment: Treasury bills.
The cash stock held by Berkshire Hathaway, its widespread multinational conglomerate, increased by $ 334 billion late last year, including $ 286 billion in short -term treasures. The conglomerate more than doubled its Treasury properties from a year ago, thanks to partly money created by selling a large portion of its shares in Apple.
In his annual report and letter to shareholders, released on Saturday, Mr. Buffett defended the Berkshire collection, which he said he was happy to continue to be built if or until a potentially lucrative investment opportunity was born.
“Berkshire will never prefer ownership of equivalent money assets over ownership of good businesses,” wrote Mr. Buffett.
But sustainable interest rates offered by Treasury billets helped stabilize Mr. Buffett’s empire over a year in which more than half of the 200 businesses he operates saw their income. Berkshire Hathaway had net income last year of $ 90 billion, a drop from more than $ 96 billion that generated a year ago.
Company Operating Profits – Metrica Mr. Buffett prefers because it excludes paper losses and investment profits that have not been sold – were $ 47 billion in 2024, from $ 37 billion to 2023.
The essential business line of Berkshire, Security, showed significant benefits in the income of investment and its signature. The absence of any “monster” event in 2024 was a major help, wrote Mr. Buffett, though he acknowledged that the industry would have to “unreasonably obtained our bumps” when that luck returns.
“One day, every day, there will be a truly stunning loss of security,” he wrote. “Think of fires,” he later added in a parental note, referring to fires that destroyed Los Angeles.
Geico, the Berkshire car insurance business, moved from a loss of nearly $ 2 billion to its signature business in 2022 in the $ 8 billion profits in 2024.
The company was “a long -term gem that needed great replacement,” Mr. Buffett, citing the work Todd Combs has done to fix the business. Mr. Combs is a Berkshire investment manager who became the chief executive of Geico in 2020.
Berkshire completed her holding last year in the pilot travel centers, a gas chain of gas and truck in which the conglomerate began to invest in 2017. Now he owns the company completely.
But the pilot’s income was plunged last year, dropping to $ 614 million – dropping nearly 37 percent a year earlier – as part of a wider decrease in profit in retail businesses and Berkshire services, which include Queen Queen, The Furniture Cort’s Tenant and Private Business Nets. The lower average fuel prices received a fee for the pilot, Berkshire said, and an increasing customer preference to eat at home retired to Queen Queen results.
Berkshire sold nearly 70 percent of its Apple shares last year, giving up more than 600 million shares, although Apple remains the largest holding of Berkshire capital. Profits in those sales contributed to a historic moment Mr. Buffett noted in his letter: a $ 26.8 billion tax invoice, which he called an American record and said it was equal to “about 5 percent of what paid all of America’s corporations. “
Mr. Buffett, who is 94, has run Berkshire from his hometown, Omaha, for decades, turning the textile production firm named into a multinational multinational conglomerate such as American Express and Coca-Cola. Last year, the company’s market valuation exceeded $ 1 trillion.
He called the Berkshire Railway and Services operations, the two largest areas of its business out of insurance, such as those that kept stable in 2024, but “there are much left to reach”. BNSF Railway had a $ 5 billion operating profit, a slight drop from a year ago, while Berkshire Hathaway Energy earned $ 3.7 billion, with 60 percent from a year ago. Higher profits from natural gas pipelines helped the service business line, as well as the lowest losses of fire appreciation in 2024, compared to 2023.
One place where Mr. Buffett sees the opportunity is Japan. Six years ago, Berkshire began collecting a share in five varied Japanese companies, and was soon paid: the company paid nearly $ 14 billion for shares that ended the year with a market value of more than $ 23 billion. Mr Buffett said he predicts that Berkshire will hold its Japanese properties for decades.
Mr Buffett said he plans to be on stage again this year in May for the annual meeting of Berkshire shareholders, a staggering extravagant called “Woodstock of Capitalism”. At a node of his progressive age, he wrote that “will not be long” before Greg Abel, Berkshire leader Hathaway Energy and his designated successor replaces him as the chief executive of Berkshire.
But Mr. Buffett, who has not shown eagerness to give up, included in his bulletin a long anecdote for Pete Liegl, Forest River founder, a Berkshire company purchased in 2005. Forest River grew up for Made the largest manufacturer in the country of outdoor recreation vehicles such as cargo trailers, pontane boats, buses and vans, and it contributed “too much Billions, ”said Mr. Buffett, for Berkshire’s wealth shareholders
“Pete died in November, still working in 80,” wrote Mr. Buffett with approval.