The holding of the legendary investor Warren Buffett sits on record cash reserves of more than 160 billion dollars. The 93-year-old sees hardly any exciting investment properties at the moment. In the USA there are only “a handful” of companies that could make big leaps for his holding company Berkshire Hathaway – and he and others have had their eye on these for a long time, it said in the annual report for 2023. Buffett doesn’t see any suitable candidates abroad for the investment.
Berkshire Hathaway owns, among others, the insurer Geico, the railway company BNSF and the battery manufacturer Duracell. Last year, the insurance business was a driver of the increase in operating profit to $37.4 billion (34.5 billion euros) from $30.9 billion in 2022.
The holding company’s net profit was $96 billion after a loss of $23 billion a year earlier. But Buffett himself described this number as “worse than useless” because it is distorted by book profits and losses and only provides limited information about the economy in a certain period of time. In the final quarter of last year, operating profit increased year-on-year from $6.6 billion to around $8.5 billion.
In the letter to shareholders, Buffett also paid tribute to his long-time companion Charlie Munger, who died at the end of November a few weeks before his 100th birthday. Munger was the true architect of Berkshire Hathaway, emphasized Buffett. For himself, Munger was “partly an older brother, partly a loving father.”
