One of a half-dozen or so posts on Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting at Yahoo Finance, May 7:
OMAHA, Neb. — After a volatile week, stocks closed lower with the S&P 500 shedding 0.8%. The index is now up 7.7% year to date, up 15.6% from its October 12 closing low of 3,577.03, and down 13.8% from its January 3, 2022 record closing high of 4,796.56.
As we’ve been discussing on TKer, one of the biggest concerns in the stock market has been the expectation by many that earnings growth could go negative in 2023.
On this near-term matter, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett doesn’t have good news for you.
"In the general economy, the feedback we get is that perhaps the majority of our businesses will actually report lower earnings this year than last year," Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual shareholders meeting on Saturday.
He reflected on the widespread supply chain disruptions everyone has faced since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was an extraordinary period,” he said. “And that period has ended.“
During that period, however, many companies, including those under Berkshire’s umbrella, over-ordered and now sit on excess inventory that will have to be cleared out at unattractive prices.
“It is a different climate than it was six months ago, and a number of our managers were surprised,” Buffett added. “Some of them had too much inventory on order, and all of a sudden it got delivered, and people weren’t in the same frame of mind as earlier.”
While the prospect for lower prices might be welcome news for customers struggling with inflation, it’s bad news for corporate profitability.
“We'll start having sales at places where we didn't need to have sales before,“ he said.
With a market value of $719 billion, Berkshire is one of the largest companies in the world. The diversified conglomerate’s massive portfolio of companies includes dozens of businesses[*] across almost every imaginable industry, employing over 382,000 as of the end of 2022. Its well-known brands include GEICO, BNSF Railway, Fruit of the Loom, Precision Castparts, Benjamin Moore, Duracell, and Dairy Queen....
....MUCH MORE
As we mentioned in Sunday's "The best wit and wisdom from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting" (BRK)", CNBC and Yahoo Finance seem to do the most comprehensive coverage of the meeting. Here are more of Yahoo's offerings:
Berkshire Hathaway 2023: Warren Buffett says managers were 'surprised' by the economy
Buffett: 'Catastrophic' to let SVB depositors lose their money
Charlie Munger on AI: 'I think old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well'
Warren Buffett on investing: 'Be a no-emotion person' in matters of business
Buffett: Taiwan Semiconductor is 'one of the best-managed' and most important companies in the world
Buffett: The biggest investing opportunities are 'other people doing dumb things'
*Here are BRK's operating companies:
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.
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