Editor’s Note: Related tickers: Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A), Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (NYSE:LEE), H.J. Heinz Company (NYSE:HNZ), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), Energizer Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:ENR)
It’s no elephant, but Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) +0.37% has purchased the remaining 20% of a metal-working company for $2.05 billion. The price values IMC International Metalworking Companies at more than $10 billion, double the value Warren Buffett paid for the first 80% back in 2006. The deal is somewhat typical Buffett: He’s buying out a family he has been partnering with for some seven years and paying them a healthy amount to do it. “As you can surmise from the price we’re paying for the remaining interest, IMC has enjoyed very significant growth over the last seven years, and we are delighted to acquire the portion of the company that was retained by the Wertheimer family when IMC first became a member of the Berkshire group of companies,” Buffett said in a statement.
Lee Enterprises refinances $94M in debt with Berkshire Hathaway, avoiding interest rate hike (WashingtonPost)
Newspaper publishing company Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (NYSE:LEE) said on Tuesday that it has refinanced $94 million worth of debt with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A), avoiding an interest rate increase that would have gone into effect next year. As part of the debt financing deal, Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (NYSE:LEE) added as collateral its 50 percent stake in TNI Partners, which publishes the Arizona Daily Star and azstarnet.com. Lee said the refinancing reduces the interest to a fixed rate of 9 percent, down from 11.3 percent, and extends the maturity from December 2015 to April 2017. The interest rate was set to rise to 12.05 percent in January 2014 and to 12.8 percent in January 2015.
Berkshire Hathaway size, Warren Buffett age cloud annual gathering (ET)
Warren Buffett may be on safari for major acquisitions, which he likes to call elephants, but shareholders may wonder if his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) has become the biggest elephant in the room. Berkshire has grown to look more and more like corporate America, as Buffett expands outside its core insurance business into such areas as energy, industrial products, newspapers, and in February ketchup, when he teamed up with Brazil’s 3G Capital investment firm to buy H.J. Heinz Company (NYSE:HNZ) for $23.2 billion. Few of the 35,000 or more people who will this weekend make a pilgrimage to Berkshire’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska for the company’s annual shareholder weekend, which Buffett calls “Woodstock for Capitalists,” are likely to criticize that strategy.
The Biggest Mistake of Warren Buffett’s Career (CountingPips)
Warren Buffett is a hero to many investors, myself included. His record speaks for itself: 18.3% annualized returns in Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A)’s book value over the past 30 years compared to just 10.8% for the S&P 500. And his returns in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was running a much smaller hedge fund, were even better. …Everyone assumes that Buffett’s decision to buy Berkshire Hathaway was a typical Buffett stroke of genius. Nothing could be further from the truth. We like to think of Warren Buffett as the wise, elder statesman of the investment profession, but Buffett too was young once and prone to the rash behavior of youth. And Berkshire Hathaway was not always a financial powerhouse; it was once a struggling textile mill.
WHITNEY TILSON: Why I Have Attended Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Meeting Every Year For The Last 15 Years (BusinessInsider)
The Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) Annual Meeting is happening his weekend. It’s a famous event in Omaha where Warren Buffett (and his partner Charlie Munger) answer a bunch of questions from shareholders, who are also there to shop, eat, and party. Value investor Whitney Tilson, who runs Kase Capital, has only missed one of Warren Buffett’s highly-anticipated annual meetings in the last fifteen years. Tilson told us the main reason he goes to Omaha, Nebraska year after year is to learn. “Even though I have been to so many of these, I find that while many of the questions have been asked over the years, the answers sometimes change and hearing a repetition of things I’ve already heard is good to reinforce a lot of the principles of sound investing,” he told Business Insider in a telephone interview, adding, “There are always new questions and new topics that get addressed.”
