Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.
Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has bought 28 dailies in the last 15 months.
“There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job,” he wrote.
Those purchases, which cost Buffett a total of $344 million, are relatively minor deals for Berkshire, and just a small part of the giant conglomerate.
And Mr. Buffett has begun this year with a bang, announcing last month his takeover, along with a Brazilian investment group, of the ketchup maker H.J. Heinz for $23.6 billion.
Despite the Heinz acquisition, Mr. Buffett bemoaned his inability to do a major deal in 2012.
“I pursued a couple of elephants, but came up empty-handed,” he said, adding that “our luck, however, changed early this year” with the Heinz purchase.
Written in accessible prose and largely free of financial jargon, Berkshire’s annual letter holds appeal far beyond Wall Street. This year’s dispatch contained plenty of Mr. Buffett’s folksy observations about investing and business that his devotees relish.
“More than 50 years ago, Charlie told me that it was far better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than to buy a fair business at a wonderful price,” Buffett wrote, referring to his long-time partner at Berkshire, Charlie Munger.
Mr. Buffett also struck a patriotic tone, directly appealing to his fellow chief executives “that opportunities abound in America.”
The letter provides more than entertainment value and patriotic stirrings, delivering to Berkshire shareholders an update on the company’s vast collection of businesses.
With a market capitalization of $250 billion, Berkshire ranks among the largest companies in the United States.
Its holdings vary, with big companies like the railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the electric utility MidAmerican Energy, and smaller ones like the running-shoe outfit Brooks Sports and the chocolatier See’s Candies. All told, Berkshire employs about 288,000 people.
The letter, once again, did not answer a question that has vexed Berkshire shareholders and Buffett-ologists: Who will succeed Mr. Buffett, who is 82, as Chief Executive?
He has said that upon his death, Berkshire will split his job in three, naming a chief executive, a non-executive chairman and several investment managers of its publicly traded holdings.
In 2010, he said that his son, Howard Buffett, would succeed him as non-executive chairman.
Mr. Buffett devoted nearly three out of 24 pages of his annual report to newspapers.
While Mr. Buffett has been a longtime owner of The Buffalo News and a stakeholder in The Washington Post Co., he told shareholders four years ago that he wouldn’t buy a newspaper at any price.
But his latest note reflects how much his opinion has turned. His buying spree started in November 2011, when he struck a deal to buy The Omaha World-Herald Co., his hometown paper, for a reported $200 million. By May 2012, he bought out the chain of newspapers owned by Media General, except for The Tampa Tribune. In recent months, he continued to express his interest in buying more papers “at appropriate prices – and that means a very low multiple of current earnings.”
Mr. Buffett has plenty of cash to make more newspaper acquisitions. To cover his portion of the Heinz purchase, Mr. Buffett will deploy about $12 billion of Berkshire’s $42 billion cash hoard. That leaves a lot of money for Mr. Buffett to continue his shopping spree for newspapers — and more major acquisitions like Heinz.
“Charlie and I have again donned our safari outfits,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “and resumed our search for elephants.” — New York Times News Service
