Berkshire Hathaway Stock: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Holds Operating Profit Stable

Increased damage claims at the primary insurer Geico weighed on the results in the area, as Berkshire Hathaway announced in Omaha on Saturday. Operating profit in the first quarter was a good 7 billion US dollars (6.7 billion euros) at the level of the previous year. In contrast, the reinsurance business, the rail freight company BNSF, as well as manufacturing companies and retail trade were better than a year ago.

Meanwhile, Berkshire Hathaway’s net income fell by a good half to $5.5 billion. However, strongly fluctuating unrealized book profits and losses of the many shareholdings are also shown here. Therefore, the informative value with regard to the course of business is limited. Buffett advises against paying much attention to the metric. Berkshire Hathaway owns many companies. There are also blocks of shares in corporations such as Apple and Coca-Cola.

Berkshire’s cash holdings fell. However, they’ve grown well in recent years as Buffett struggled to find acquisition targets given high company valuations.

Recently, however, Berkshire Hathaway found what it was looking for again. In March, the company announced it would buy US insurance group Alleghany for $11.6 billion. At the beginning of April it was announced that Buffett and his holding company had entered the computer group HP on a large scale. He bought 121 million shares, which based on the closing price at the time, resulted in a package value of approximately $4.2 billion.

/mis/

OMAHA (dpa-AFX)

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