Listening to chief executive officer Warren Buffett never gets old for the thousands of Berkshire Hathaway Inc shareholders who filled an arena on Saturday to listen to the billionaire investor at the company’s annual meeting.
More than 30,000 people came to Omaha to hear Buffett and Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger talk. The 86-year-old CEO and his 93-year-old partner have been leading the conglomerate for more than five decades, but the crowd is always listening for new nuggets of wisdom. Buffett is known for his candor and plain speaking.
Berkshire’s top two executives on Saturday acknowledged that they missed out on investing in Google years ago, but they expressed pride in the company they built through acquisitions and said they believe it would thrive for decades to come.
“In retrospect, I think we were smart enough to figure out Google early, and we didn’t,” Munger said.
Buffett and Munger avoided technology investments for most of their careers because they said it was too hard to figure out which companies would win.
Berkshire now owns 133 million Apple Inc shares, but it just sold off one-third of its 81 million IBM Corp shares, saying that Buffett had misjudged that firm.
Buffett had harsh words for Wells Fargo & Co managers who failed to respond promptly to a sales practices scandal that cost the then-chief executive officer his job last year.
The bank last fall said that its employees opened up 2 million bank accounts without customer approval to meet unrealistic sales goals.
“The main problem was they didn’t act when they learned about it,” Buffett said.
Berkshire is Wells Fargo’s biggest shareholder.
Buffett said he still believes in the long-term prospects of the bank even though Wells Fargo mishandled the scandal.
Buffett said there is no change in Berkshire’s plan to eventually replace him, adding that one of the most important qualities his successor would need is a talent for wisely investing Berkshire’s cash.
“We need a money mind as CEO,” said Buffett, who has no plans to retire.
Berkshire plans to name one of its existing managers chief executive officer after Buffett is gone and the decentralized structure of the company allows Berkshire’s subsidiaries to largely run themselves.
“We have an extraordinary group of good managers,” Buffett said.
The executives who run Berkshire subsidiaries look forward to the meeting just as the shareholders do.
Brooks Running chief executive officer Jim Weber said he is always careful about how much of Buffett’s time he takes up when he talks to him, so those conversations tend to focus just on Brooks’ running-shoe business.
The annual meeting offers one of the few times Weber gets to hear Buffett discuss other topics.
“I want to hear him talk about the economy and investing,” Weber said. “I’m looking forward to hearing him as much as everybody else.”
Dozens of companies Berkshire owns set up booths in an adjoining 18,580m2 exhibit hall to sell their products and take questions about their businesses. The event offers Geico insurance quotes, See’s Candy, Justin cowboy boots, recreational vehicles and homes manufactured by Clayton Homes.
“I think it’s a neat way to keep the enthusiasm up in shareholders,” said Jerry Meyer, who drove to Omaha with family from Coffeyville, Kansas.
Buffett is the celebrity that everyone wants to get close to at the meeting. When Buffett toured the exhibit hall, he was surrounded by a pack of reporters, shareholders and security officers. While Buffett met Mr Peanut at the Kraft Heinz booth, Miami Dolphin player Ndamukong Suh wandered about 1m away without a crowd.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day