Buffett Munger BYD exits stake

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Berkshire Hathaway has fully exited its extraordinarily worthwhile fairness funding within the Chinese electrical car maker BYD.

In August 2022, Berkshire started to scale back the 225 million share place it had purchased in 2008 for $230 million.

That adopted a 41% bounce within the worth of the place throughout that yr’s second quarter to $9 billion.

By June of final yr, Berkshire had sold almost 76% of its stake, bringing it slightly below 5% of BYD’s excellent shares.

By crossing under that stage, Berkshire now not needed to disclose subsequent gross sales beneath the Hong Kong trade’s guidelines, so so far as we knew the corporate owned 54 million shares.

A Buffett Watch reader, nonetheless, identified that the Q1 financial filing by Berkshire Hathaway Energy, the subsidiary that held the shares, listed the worth of the funding as zero as of March 31.

A Berkshire spokesperson confirmed that your complete BYD place has certainly been bought.

Based on the funding values listed in BHE’s experiences, the gross sales continued after the stake fell under 5% final yr.

Berkshire made its preliminary buy 17 years in the past on the urging of Charlie Munger.

At the 2009 annual assembly, he advised shareholders that regardless that it appeared like “Warren and I have gone crazy,” he noticed the corporate and its CEO, Wang Chuanfu, as a “damn miracle.”

It was an unimaginable name. BYD shares elevated by roughly 3890% through the years Berkshire owned them.

Buffett has not defined intimately why Berkshire began promoting, however, in 2023, he told CNBC’s Becky Quick that BYD is an “extraordinary company” being run by an “extraordinary person,” however “I think that we’ll find things to do with the money that I’ll feel better about.”

Around the identical time, Berkshire bought virtually all the firm’s Taiwan Semiconductor stake, roughly $4 billion of inventory, just months after the shares were purchased as he “reevaluated” the geopolitical danger posed by Beijing’s declare that Taiwan is a part of China. “It’s a dangerous world,” he stated.

Warren Buffett has not been talking publicly in the previous couple of years about his typically liberal political opinions, telling shareholders in 2022 that some individuals get “sustainably mad” and “take it out on our companies,” probably harming workers and shareholders.

It is, nonetheless, cheap to imagine that he does not see eye-to-eye on most points with President Donald Trump.

But they do agree, not less than partially, on one factor: U.S. companies shouldn’t chase very short-term targets.

This week, the president posted on Truth Social that the SEC ought to enable firms to report earnings each six months, as a substitute of the present three-month requirement.

“This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies,” he wrote.

The SEC tells CNBC it’s “prioritizing this proposal to further eliminate unnecessary regulatory burdens on companies.”

Buffett, who famously favors making choices for the long term, has strongly urged firms to cease offering quarterly earnings-per-share steerage.

A 2018 Wall Street Journal opinion piece co-written by JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon says, “In our experience, quarterly earnings guidance often leads to an unhealthy focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainability.”

That occurs, they stated, when firms reduce on long-term useful spending to satisfy or beat their very own short-term forecasts when earnings are affected by outdoors components they can not management.

They argue that “financial markets have become too focused on the short term” and quarterly steerage “is a major driver of this trend.”

There is, nonetheless, an vital distinction.

Buffett and Dimon stress they aren’t in opposition to the reporting of earnings each quarter. They simply don’t love firms forecasting what these earnings can be.

Companies, they stated, ought to “continue to provide annual and quarterly reporting that offers a retrospective look at actual performance so that the public, including shareholders and other stakeholders, can reliably assess real progress.” 

In the wake of the web bubble’s deflation, Warren Buffett saw a “diminished” menace to “gullible” buyers.

Holdings are as of June 30, 2025 as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on August 14, 2025, aside from:

The full checklist of holdings and present market values is obtainable from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

Please ship any questions or feedback concerning the publication to me at [email protected]. (Sorry, however we do not ahead questions or feedback to Buffett himself.)

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Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are extremely really helpful studying. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.

— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch