This represents more than half of Berkshire Hathaway’s stock portfolio, which exceeds $300 billion in total value. Below, we look in detail at five of the company’s biggest acquisitions. In addition, warren buffett company name we list the top five holdings in Berkshire’s $353.8 billion stock portfolio, which Buffett considers to be partial acquisitions.
What Are Five Companies Berkshire Hathaway Owns?
In addition to owning private companies, Berkshire also has a large investment portfolio of stocks in major public companies, such as Apple (AAPL), Bank of America (BAC), and United Parcel Service (UPS). As of December 31, 2022, Berkshire’s public market equity portfolio was valued at more than $346 billion. While financial news outlets rarely showcase dividend data the way they do stock price and price movement figures, dividends provide one of the surest measures of a company’s vitality. After all, management will hand cash over to shareholders only when operations turn a large enough profit to make said payments feasible. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that Buffett has pursued dividends along with value investing.
Buffett attempts to do this by buying companies that are out of favor with the market. He values a company by assessing its fundamentals, such as return on equity and profitability. Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1930 to Howard and Leila Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha’s father was a stockbroker, which gave him an early introduction to the stock market. Buffett purchased his first stock at age 11; he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred for $38 per share and sold them at $40 per share.
There are many interesting things about Berkshire Hathaway, and one of them is how rapidly it has grown over the years — since the 1960s, that is, when Buffett took over. In Buffett’s last letter to shareholders, he reported an overall growth from the mid-1960s to 2019 of 2,744,062% — equal to a compounded annual gain of 20.3%. Compare that with the S&P 500, which averaged a respectable 10% annual growth rate over the same period, for a total of 19,784% growth.
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It also shows Berkshire Hathaway does not reveal the diversity of the company by race, gender, ability, veteran status, or LGBTQ+ identity. As mentioned, Berkshire also owns major equity stakes in large U.S. companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars in total. The success of its « Lubri-Zol » motor oil led it to change its name in 1934 to Lubri-zol, eventually dropping the hyphen. Lubrizol went public in the 1960’s and expanded into a variety of chemical businesses around the world before being bought by Berkshire in 2011. In 1963, Franklin Otis Booth Jr. invested $1 million in the company and in 1968, David Gottesman invested in the company.
- To invest in Warren Buffett’s company, you must buy Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRK) shares.
- With 32,500 route miles traversing 28 states and three Canadian provinces, it’s one of North America’s largest railroad companies.
- Some investors look for value and then purchase shares of companies that fit their criteria.
Berkshire Hathaway Automotive
Holders of class A stock are allowed to convert their stock to Class B, though not vice versa. Buffett was reluctant to create the class B shares but did so to thwart the creation of unit investment trusts that would have marketed themselves as Berkshire look-alikes. Buffett accumulated his wealth mainly through stock market investments, with a particular interest in blue-chip companies.
In essence, financial institutions collapsed, climaxing with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, and signaling a global banking crisis. Warren Buffett had decided to skip college altogether and go straight into business, but his father overruled him. He attended the University of Nebraska, then the University of Pennsylvania, only to return to the University of Nebraska, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. Buffett is also among the ten richest people in the world, with a net worth of over $122 billion. Suffice it to say that you don’t have to be Warren Buffett to have Buffett-like investing success over the long run.