저자: 미상 · 외국인
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멍거는 소프트웨어 등 기술 기반 사업을 자신의 역량 범위 밖이라 보며, 기술 정체 산업(항공기·제약 등)과 비교해 불확실성을 강조한다. 미국 상위 기업 약 400개 중 대부분이 기존 강자이며, 고성장 기대를 반영한 고평가 하이테크 기업 다수는 기대를 충족하지 못할 가능성이 크다고 주장한다. 버크셔의 목표는 내재가치 성장과 장기적 정보에 밝은 주주 기반이며, 분기 실적이나 주가 관리에 신경 쓰지 않는다고 말한다. 일본의 장기 침체를 자산 버블·회계 부패·규제 실패의 교훈으로 제시한다.
다듬은 글
the software business is not within my circle of competence and I don't think it's within Charlie's Charlie. Well, I certainly agree with that. I think there are interesting questions too about how far the whole field can go. Uh take jet airplane travel below the speed of sound. It's been pretty static in terms of the technology for a long long time.
uh you know the big Boeing airliner is much the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago and uh and I think it's a lot of these businesses are quite dependent on the technology continuing to gallop and do more and more for people. Take pharmaceuticals. If they never invented any more pharmaceuticals, it would be a terrible business.
uh and I don't know what happens once you get unlimited bandwidth into the house and way more options and at a beyond a certain point it strikes me that there might be a surfet of anybody's interest in the field I don't know where that point is whether it's 20 years out or 30 years out but it it would affect me a little the dilly bar is more certain yeah to to be here in 10 years than any any software application that we know but that's maybe because we understand dilly bars and not not software uh in the whole United States which is you know is by far the most prosperous company in the country in the world the whole United States there are probably around 400 companies 400 total companies that are earning $200 million a year after tax of those 400 you you can name them I mean you can start you know if you say bank, you can say group and Chase and Wells Fargo and you can name 10 or 15 of them.
If you name consumer goods, you can say Proctor and Gamble and Coca-Cola and Gillette and you can name a whole bunch of them. You can almost of those 400, you can probably name 350. If five years from now, instead of 400 being on that list, there'll probably be 450 on the list, maybe 475. A lot of those will be companies that are earning between 150 and $200 million now.
So there'll probably be 20 some number like 20 that call it come from nowhere. Now if you look at the number of companies that are selling today at a price which implies 200 million or more of earnings right today you will find dozens and dozens in the high-tech arena. Uh and you know a very large percentage of those companies are not going to fulfill people's expectations.
I can't tell you which ones, but I know there won't be dozens and dozens and dozens of those companies make a couple hundred million dollars a year. And I know they are now selling at prices that require them to be making that much money or more. It just doesn't happen that often. You know, biotech tech was all the rage uh some years back.
How many of those companies are making a couple hundred million a year? It just doesn't happen. Uh it's not that easy to make lots of money in a business in a capitalistic society. there people that are looking at what you're doing every day and trying to figure out a way to do it better and and to, you know, underpric you or bring out a better product or whatever it may be.
And and a few companies make it. But here in the United States, after all of these decades and decades and decades of wonderful economic development, we've got about 400 companies that have hit the level that would be required of a company that would have a market cap of $3 billion. And some companies are getting three billion dollars of market cap the day they come out virtually.
There's some you want to think about the math of all this. Over the last couple of years, I've read both of you quoted as uh not following the stock price on a day-to-day basis, not being terribly concerned about whether Berkshire is up or down. You now have analyst coverage. Uh perhaps you requested it or perhaps you acquiesced to it.
Uh but my question is whether this reflects any change in your attention paid to the stock price or your philosophy about investor relations uh and whether you think the uh analyst coverage is going to have any impact on the stock. We are concerned about building the intrinsic value per share of Birkshire at the highest rate we can consistent with a couple of other principles that we've set forth.
And we hope very much that the stock price stays in a zone that is not too wide around intrinsic value. There's going to be some zone of some sort because intrinsic value itself is not precisely calculable. And in addition, you wouldn't expect it to track it penny for penny. We don't want it to go crazy in either direction in relation to intrinsic value.
Uh when we uh made the deal with General Reed, that attracted more u analyst attention and institutional investor attention because General Reed's shareholder base was overwhelmingly institutional. So uh institutions had to decide whether they were going to continue uh with their investment or uh clean it out.
And we knew we would end up with more institutional ownership subsequently. Um Alice Schroeder asked me uh prior to the to the merger meeting. Uh she said they were a group of institutions that were coming to the meeting which I liked. I mean the fact that they were serious enough about their investment to come and see what Bergkshire was all about.
uh and a few of them even had a requirement I think from their own boards that they at least have sat down with management. So we spent or I spent an hour or so with a group that she had put together and that came to Omaha, but that's the last contact I've had with with any institutional investor. Um and we will have no special meetings with institutional investors or anything.
I mean they are absolutely welcome to attend this meeting to get all of the information that's dispensed. I think it's very useful uh frankly to have an analyst or two that that uh uh is well-versed in Bergkshire and that uh uh thinks straight and uh does their homework and uh that's a plus because it means we don't have to do it and in effect that if institutions want to talk to somebody about it they don't they don't call me because they're not going to have much luck calling me and they can they can call Alice or some other some other analyst that that wants to do it.
And that's that's perfect. We have a non-paid it is not investor relations because that's thought of somebody as sort of pumping your stuff. Well, at least we have a information office now, a non-paid information office. And uh you know that goes along the grain of my nature. Uh and we you we we people say you want individual owners, you want institutional owners.
What we want are informed owners who are in sync with our objectives, our measurements, our time horizons, all of that sort of I mean, we want we want people that are going to be comfortable owning Birkshire, and we don't want people uh who are owning it for reasons different in a in a way different uh that that are different from uh our reasons for owning.
We don't want people that are concerned about quarterly earnings. We don't want people who are concerned about stock splits. We don't, you know, we don't want people that that need to be pumped up about the stock periodically. Uh it's just not of interest to us because it just means we have to keep living that way in the future.
And it's not the way we want to live now. It's not the way we want to live in the future. What we really want are a bunch of people like we have in this audience who sit down and read and think and understand that they're making an investment. I think this has been very interesting to the economists of the world.
I I don't think any of them would have predicted that as modern a country as Japan could could contract for as long as it as it did. And I think the cause is related to the extreness of its booms in both land prices and security prices and the uh corruption in its accounting practices and in its uh regulation of of uh financial system including banks.
I think it's an interesting lesson for the world uh of how important it is not to a lot of slop get into the into the accounting and regulatory systems and how a lot of folly uh u in markets doesn't help either.
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