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hello martin weegan bethesda maryland stockholder for myself my family and other small business owners i want to thank you for the annual reports they help a lot in helping us make business decisions and life decisions my question is many people come here many many people come here to listen to you and to cut and to copy and understand your investment philosophy but why don't more people in your opinion try to copy your investment vehicle a corporation that pays no dividends well i don't really think if there were i think there are other things that are probably better to copy about berkshire but they don't get copied either it was always interesting to me how few people everybody read grams and and they didn't really disagree with them they just didn't like following him because it didn't it didn't promise enough in in a sense i mean people people really wanted something very quickly in terms of not paying dividends we don't pay dividends because we think we can turn every dollar we retain into more than a dollar of market value the only reason for us to keep your money is if it becomes worth more by us keeping it then it would be worth if we gave it to you and if we can create more than a dollar a market value for every dollar we keep you're better off whether you want to take that dollar out by selling a little piece of your stock or whether you continue to leave it in that's the test if we come to the conclusion that we can't do that and we could come to the conclusion sometime then we should distribute it to you the interesting thing is we're in certain businesses for example sees candy being one we don't have a way to intelligently use all of the money that sees generates within the sea's candy company so seas were a standalone company it would pay very large dividends not because it you know just had some dividend poll paying policy it would be simply because we wouldn't have a way of using in this case 30 million dollars a year intelligently in expanding that business the buffalo news is the same way we don't have a way of using money within that specific business intelligently to use the money it generates we hope that in the overall berkshire hathaway scheme of things that we can intelligently use the money that the companies in aggregate uh generate for us and we think so far we have and we think the prospects are reasonably good that we can continue to do that but dividend policy should really be determined by that criteria also bearing in mind the possibilities of repurchase of stock too but they should be determined by whether a dollar left in the business is worth more than uh to the shareholder than a dollar paid out someplace like coca-cola you know it if coca-cola had paid no dividends and simply repurchased shares and developed the bottling system and done the things that they have the shareholders probably would have been even better off they've been sensationally well off as it is but they're probably even better off um than they have been with the dividend policy they have had and that's gillette and disney and companies of that sort that have got these terrific opportunities to use capital uh within the business or to repurchase shares of a company that simply can't be replaced if that usually is the best use of capital it's probably better than dividends and uh you know we have written some about that uh martin but it uh people usually keep doing what they've been doing it it's they're hard to change charlie well it's interesting that you take that simple standard you should retain money if you if you can make it worth more than it is by retaining it that is not the standard thing that's taught in the corporate finance departments of our major universities why do we have this simple idea and they have another one time after time we find that so i i've tried to understand why they think the way they do and i have great difficulty with it i've just concluded that they're wrong and but that isn't enough there has to be a reason why so many smart people are that wrong and uh that's a story for another day but but there are things gravely wrong with with american education that i hope that berkshire hathaway is slowly helping to fix can you imagine if the pick any one of you here and let's say the two of us were in a business together you know i was earning a hundred thousand dollars a year how would we decide whether to leave the hundred thousand each year and we'd be exactly what we've talked about here if we thought the hundred thousand would translate into a present value of more than a hundred thousand by some action we'd leave it in and if it didn't we take it out and it doesn't seem to register generally and incidentally in our own case we'll probably go too long before we come to the conclusion that we're not really using it that effectively because there'll be a certain denial we'll go through and we'll say well that was just temporary last year but but that will that is our approach and we'll we'll do our best to apply it
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