저자: WarrenBuffett외CharlieMunger · 외국인
요약 보기
버핏은 해외 경쟁·노동비용 등 거시 변수보다 경쟁우위가 견고한 기업을 사는 것이 중요하다고 강조. 어린 시절 신문배달 등 사업 경험과 이른 시작이 이후 사업 성공과 상관이 있다는 연구를 언급하고, 시간을 자기계발에 투자하라고 조언. 철도산업은 과거보다 경쟁위치가 개선됐고 유가 상승 시 트럭 대비 상대적으로 유리하나 자본집약적이어서 폭발적 수익은 어렵다고 평가. 개별 종목 가격 방향에 대한 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
Will Rogers believed that you should learn not to pee on an electrified fence without actually trying it. We don't try to buy our businesses with the thoughts much of world trends. We certainly think in terms of in of international comp foreign competition. I mean, we do not want to buy into a business that has a very high labor content uh and that has a product that can be shipped in from abroad very easily because sooner or later that will probably be trouble just like Charlie and I really I bought into an airline.
He came along and tried to rescue me uh some years ago that had very high seat mile costs and it had protected routes. US Airways. Uh, so it was able to operate with 12 cents a seat mile of cost because Southwest hadn't gotten there yet with their 8 cent costs, but they get there. You do not want to have something whose competitive position is going to erode over time.
But I think our most of our businesses have got pretty strong competitive conditions and really the variables you name don't bother us. uh you know, we will play the hand as well as we can and we're playing it with terrific people in in very good businesses and we're dealing from strength all the time.
You know, we've always got a loaded gun and we think we've got the right values with our managers. The people think we got a culture that's owner oriented and we got we got a lot of things going for us and they won't they won't produce huge returns, but they're likely to work. Okay. What do you think are the best ways a 10year-old can earn money?
Well, I must say that was a that was a subject I gave a lot of thought to when I was 10, more than I gave to school as some of other things. Uh, you know, you have to it's probably a little young to deliver papers. That was always my favorite. Uh, and I got about half half the capital I started with by by delivering papers.
And I always liked it because I could sort of do it by myself. I don't know the situation in the town in which you live, but like I say, 10 is probably a little young, but but 12 or 13 would not be. And almost any there there can be a lot of little bit. I tried a I must have tried 20 different businesses.
Uh by the time I got out of high school, the best one was a pinball machine business, but I'm not sure I want to recommend that that you get into that. Uh when I did it was a much purer business where you put a nickel in and that was about it. But uh there it is interesting. I read a study a long time ago.
I wish I'd get my hands on it because I've quoted it a lot, but I've never quoted it as authoritatively as I would be able to if I could actually find the damn thing that I read 30 years ago. But it correlated business success with certain variables. And you know they tried grades in school and they tried what your parents did and they tried whether you went to business school all those kind of things.
And they found it correlated best with the age at which you enter got started your first business got into business that the younger you were when you did your first piece of business that seemed to correlate best with later business success and to some extent that's sort of natural. It's probably true that that when you see it in athletics you see it in music and that sort of thing.
Um, so whatever you can figure out that other people will pay you to do that they don't want to do themselves or that they would like done for them, uh, I advise you to look around the neighborhood and talk to your parents, talk to your friends, see what other people have done that have been 10 or 11 or 12 years old that's worked for them and and uh, copy it.
But if you can get a good paper out when you're 12 or 13, uh, that's a sure way to to save some money. I've often wondered about people that are having trouble being in debt, you know, that have a normal 8 hour job. If they added a a route in the morning and just put that aside, uh, you know, it could be the way out of being behind the game instead of being uh and and getting ahead of the game and take another hour and a half out of their day.
But not not too many people seem to do it. Charlie used to sell. Didn't you used to sell yourself the best hour of the day or something? Charlie early in the morning. You bet. Yeah. Tell them what you did. Well, when I was young, I read that savings bank thing, The Richest Man in Babylon, which taught the joys of underspending your income and investing the difference and how wonderfully it would work over time.
And lo and behold, I did exactly what this little pamphlet suggested and it worked. and uh the other idea and and so I I got the idea that I had a mental compound interest thing too and so I finally decided I was just going to give the best hour day of the day to improving my own mind and then the world could buy the rest of the time and uh that may have been a very selfish thing to do but it worked.
Yeah, Charlie was selling his time. I don't what were you getting per hour as a lawyer in those days? Not much. Yeah. He just decided to sell himself the best hour and uh not a crazy thing to do. But I would tell that little girl that if you make yourself a very reliable person and stay reliable all your life faithfully doing whatever you've engaged to do, it will be very hard for you to fail at anything you want.
Number six, what can you tell us about your views on the future profitability of the railroad industry and what might make that more exciting going forward versus what it's done historically? Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I don't think it'll be a lot more exciting, but the relative the competitive position of the rails has improved somewhat uh from really not a very good competitive position 20 or 25 years ago.
They there've been a lot of progress made on the labor front. They benefit in their competitive position visav trucking as oil prices go up. Higher diesel fuel obviously uh raises cost for rails, but it it raises cost for their competitors, the truckers, by a a a uh probably a factor of close to four uh compared to how it hurts them.
So, and there isn't a whole lot of new capacity being created in the rail industry. So what was a terrible business uh 30 years ago uh and it was operating under regulation. It's still under operates under the threat of reeregulation which has a tempering effect on their pricing power. But it's a better business now.
It'll never be a sensational business. It's a very capital intensive business. And when you put tons of capital out every year, it's very hard to earn really extraordinary returns on capital. But if they earn a decent return on capital, it'll be a it can be a good business over time and it can be a lot better business than it was in the past. Charlie, I've got nothing to add to that one either.
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