저자: WarrenBuffett · 외국인
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버핑은 1962년 섬유회사 버크셔 해서웨이 인수를 '가장 어리석은 투자'로 꼽았다. 1964년 공개매수가를 두고 경영진과 갈등해 지배권을 확보했으나, 이후 20년간 섬유사업을 붙들고 있었고 이것이 버크셔 가치를 약 2배 가까이 낮췄다고 설명했다. 교훈은 좋은 경영자라도 나쁜 사업에서는 빠져나와야 하며, 싼 주식보다 좋은 사업을 적정가에 사는 것이 낫다는 것이다. 보험사로 출발했다면 지금 가치가 두 배라고 언급했다.
다듬은 글
Warren, thank you very much for joining us today. My pleasure. What we're trying to get to the bottom of is what was the worst trade you ever made and what'd you learn from it? The dumbest thing I ever did. Yeah. The dumbest thing you ever did. The the dumbest stock I ever bought uh was um drum roll here.
Uh Berkshire Hathaway. And uh that may require a bit of explanation. Uh it was early in uh 1962 and I was running a small partnership about 7 million. They call it a hedge fund now. And here was this cheap stock, cheap by working capital standards or so, but it was a stock in a in a textile company that had been going downhill for years.
So, it was a huge company originally, and they kept closing one mill after another. And every time they would close a mill, they would uh take the proceeds and they would buy in their stock. And I figured they were going to close, they only had a few mills left, but they would close another one. I'd buy the stock, it tender to them, and make a small profit.
So, I started buying the stock. And in 1964, we had quite a bit of stock. And I went back and visited the management, Mr. Stanton. And he looked at me and he said, "Mr. Buffett, we've just sold some mills. We've got some excess money. We're going to have a tender offer. And at what price will you tender your stock?" And I said, "150." And he said, "Do you promise me that you'll tender at 1150?" And I said, "Mr.
You have my word that if you do it here in the near future that I will sell my stock at 1150. I went back to Omaha and a few weeks later I opened the mail. Oh, you have this and here it is. A tender offer from Berkshire Hathway. That's from 1964. And if you'll look carefully, you'll see the price is 11 and 38.
He chiseled me for an eighth. And if that letter had come through with 11 and a half, I would have entered my stock. But this made me mad. So I went out and started buying the stock and I bought control of the company and fired Mr. Stanton and we went on from there. Now that sounds like a great little morality table tale at this point, but the truth is I had now committed a major amount of money to a terrible business and Berkshire Hathaway became the base for everything pretty much that I've done since.
So in 1967 when a good insurance company came along, I bought it for Berkshire Hathway. I really should should have bought bought it for a new entity because Berkshire Hathaway was carrying this anchor of all these textile assets. So initially it was all textile assets that weren't any good and then gradually we built more things onto it.
But always we were carrying this anchor and for 20 years I fought the textile business before I gave up. And if instead of putting that money into the textile business originally we just started out with the insurance company Bshire would be worth twice as much as it is now. So twice as much. Yeah. This is $200 billion.
You can you can figure that uh comes about because the genius here thought he run a textile business. Why [clears throat] $200 billion? Because well because if you look at taking that same money that I put into the textile business and just putting it into the insurance business and starting from there, we would have had a company that because all of this money was a drag.
I mean, we had a net worth of $20 million in Berkshire Hathaway was earning nothing year after year after year after year. And uh so there you have it. the story of a $200 billion dollar. And incidentally, if you come back in 10 years, I may have one that's even worse. If you if you had to look at a moral for that story, though, is it don't cut off your nose to spite your face?
I would say I would say that no matter whether you've cut off your nose to spite your face or whatever, if you get in a lousy business, get out of it. I mean, it it was a it was a terrible mistake just because I drifted into it in a sense. And you know, I've always said that if you want to be known as a good manager, buy a good business.
I mean, that's the way to do it. and then everybody will think you're smart. And when I'm in a good business like Seas Caddy, people think, "Boy, that guy's smart." And when I'm in a dumb business like textiles and don't know what I'm doing, you know, or shoes later on or whatever it may be, you know, and all that other if you think you're a managerial genius, just try yourself in a bad business.
Is that the lesson that you learned from it? So that and that is something that you've actually put into practice. I've actually put a line in my annual report many many many decades late uh ago after doing this and I said when a manager with a reputation for brill brilliance meets up with a business with a reputation for bad economics it's the reputation of the business that remains intact.
So that is a lesson you carried with you and yet it's one that is you're reminded of every single day. It's Bergkshire Hathaway. Yeah. And every now and then I get tempted because I started out with Ben Graham in 1950 or so and his whole idea was buying things that were cheap. You don't want to buy things that are cheap.
You want to buy things that are good. It's it's much better to buy something that's good at a fair price than something that is cheap at a bargain price. And I wasn't I didn't start out that way. Uh I was taught a different system. But but if I didn't learn it from Bergkshire Hathway, I'll never learn it.
How long did it take you to figure out this lesson? You said it was well it took me 20 years to give up on the textile business. I I had a wonderful guy running it after after Sbury Stanton. Uh fellow named Ken Chase ran it and he was terrific. Uh honest, able, hardworking and he couldn't make it go but we just kept working at it trying.
We bought another textile company called Wombbeck Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. Another mistake. It it it if you're going to be brilliant with a lousy business, why not be brilliant with a good business? But really, how it took 20 years for you to finally give up on it. When did you kind of figure, oh, this is not working?
Was it did it was it really 20 years or did you kind Well, it was No, I figured it out fairly soon, but I just kept thinking, I'm not going to give up on this. And incidentally, we had a workforce that was terrific. I mean, it was uh we weren't done in by anything except competitive dynamics. uh and I like I we buy new equipment or we would move we would add this mill in in in in uh Manchester and we'd say look at all those synergies and all that.
Nothing works. I in fact I used to have a desk in my drawer and they would keep sending me these things that if we buy this machine we'll save 14 people and if we buy this machine we'll save 12 people. I kept putting in my drawer we bought all those machines we'd save more people than we had at the start of the supposedly we were operating with zero people but it doesn't work that way.
Is there any business that you didn't get into because you thought, "Wait a second, I've been down this road before where you were tempted and you kind of pulled back." I I get calls on them every day, you know? I mean, I get calls, not every day. I mean, it's an exaggeration, but I get calls frequently on businesses that are just too tough, you know, and and people say, you know, why don't you tackle it?
You know, you got all these resources now and good managers. But the interesting thing about business, it's not like the Olympics. In the Olympics, you know, if you do some dive off the the high board and have four or five twists and everything on the way down and you go into the water a little bad, there's a degree of difficulty factor.
So, you get more points than some guy that just does a little head first dive in perfectly. So, degree of difficulty counts in the Olympics. It doesn't count in business. You don't get any extra points for the s fact that something's very hard to do. So, you might as well just step over one foot bars instead of trying to jump over seven foot bars.
You know, people will say, "Well, wait a second. You're in some businesses that some people have written off for debt. The newspaper business. How is that different? They're right. But we bought that in 1977 and and we've done very well over the years. At first we didn't do so well, but then we did very well.
But I the newspaper business of 2010 is not the newspaper business of 1977. I mean it is diametrically different. And it is true and we put it in the annual report that we run this berkshire in a way that they don't teach in business schools because in business schools they say sell off your so- so businesses and keep buying new businesses.
I call it gin rummy management. And when I if I have 50 kids, you know, and one of them isn't doing quite as well as the others, I'm not going to put them out for adoption. As unless they are going to lose us money permanently or if they have major labor difficulties, we keep the businesses that aren't as good as the others.
So, so if I'm going to follow that philosophy, I better be very careful about what I buy. Right. Exactly. What about your business partner, Charlie Munger? What would he say your biggest mistake is? Well, he would probably repeat this and I would say I've learned a lot about what I've just got through talking about.
I've learned a lot from Charlie. Charlie told me this from the first moment I met him in 1959. He said he he said exactly. I could have I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I just listened to him. But what did Charlie know? Okay, Warren, thank you very much. We really appreciate your time. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
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