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Warren Buffett opened Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting on Saturday with an optimistic assessment of the U.S. pandemic recovery, saying business was “very good” in some parts of the economy.
In his annual speech to Berkshire shareholders, the 90-year-old dean of the investment world said American capitalism “has worked incredibly well”.
“This has been a very unusual recession,” Buffett said. “Right now business is really good in many segments of the economy. . . but there are still problems if it is in some types of business that have really been decimated ”.
Berkshire itself, worth about $ 631 billion, is currently among the most publicly traded companies. The value has been bolstered by the growth of the dozens of businesses it owns and by an increase in the value of its stock portfolio, which was worth $ 282 billion at the end of the first quarter.
But the company’s lack of trading in recent years, and the fact that it was a net seller of shares during the first quarter, raised several questions for investors, with a shareholder telling Buffett that “he sat down to hands ”during the crisis.
Buffett said the company could have gone out and reached an agreement, but that before the Federal Reserve intervened last March, Berkshire was primarily focused on maintaining and financing its own businesses.
Berkshire Vice President Charlie Munger added that it would have been “crazy” to expect the company to have made an acquisition at the lowest point in the crisis.
Buffett added that the company had it exhausted from his air stakes partly last year, because he did not believe that companies, which included Americans and Delta, would have received the same government funding if they had a wealthy shareholder like Berkshire on their shareholder register.
“Imagine if Berkshire had 10% of the airlines and them [the government] He said, “Get it from Berkshire,” he said. “It is possible that you did not get the same result and I think they would not get it. The headlines were visible ”.
He spent the first part of the meeting before opening up to questions by directing shareholders through lists of the 20 most valuable global companies, both in 2021 and 1989. The list in 2021 is filled with American groups. such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
“We had a map for the future, an aspirational map that somehow now only 232 years later leaves us with five of the six largest companies in the world,” he said. “This is not an accident and it’s not because we were much smarter or stronger, or anything like that.”
But he warned that “the world can change in a very, very dramatic way,” as he pointed to the 1989 list, which was dominated by Japanese groups.
The day is a departure from what Berkshire shareholders could have expected before pandemic forced the company into a virtual format. Buffett and Munger joined the stage Greg Abel and Ajit Jain, the two men nominated by shareholders as possible successors.
The event was a moderate affair, without the crowd of investors flocking to Omaha for the annual meeting or video for investors with stars which in the past has included TV’s Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul Breaking Bad and Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute from the American version of The office.
Investors still have hours to wait before knowing the outcome of the most important agenda items of the day: how shareholders have voted two shareholder proposals this would drive Berkshire to reveal its efforts to combat climate change and diversity and inclusion in the workforce.
The Berkshire board of directors has advised shareholders to reject both proposals, drawing reproaches of some. California Public Employees Retirement System and asset manager Neuberger Berman have said they will retain votes from several directors on Saturday for re-election to the company’s board.
Others, including one of the company’s largest shareholders, Norges Bank, have approved the two shareholder proposals. Still, the proposals face an uphill battle, given the company’s dual-class structure and Buffett’s large share of its high-voting shares.
Ron Olson, director of Berkshire and partner at law firm Munger Tolles & Olson, told Yahoo Finance on Saturday that he hoped the two proposals would be defeated.
Earlier in the day, the company said yes he made a profit of $ 11.7 billion, or $ 7,638 per Class A share, for a one-year loss before $ 49.7 billion, or $ 30,653 per share.
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