저자: Tom · 외국인
요약 보기
이 영상은 버핏이 기술주에 잘 투자하지 않는 이유를 찰리 멍거의 '가난한 찰리의 연감' 내용을 통해 설명한다. 버핏이 기술 기업을 피하는 주된 이유는 미래 실적을 예측하고 가치를 평가하기 어렵기 때문이라는 점을 짚는다. 애플은 예외적으로 큰 포지션이지만 버핏은 이를 기술 기업보다 소비재 기업으로 본다. 직물 사업 사례에서 새 직기 기술이 도입되면 생산비 절감 효과가 결국 고객에게 전가되어 기업 수익률은 낮은 수준에 머문다. 버핏이 새 기술을 반기지 않았던 이유도 이 때문이다. 자동차 업계의 전동 창문, 자동 와이퍼, 크루즈 컨트롤 같은 사례처럼 혁신 효과는 업계 전체로 확산되어 개별 기업의 초과수익으로 남지 않는다는 논리도 제시된다. 반대로 독점적 지위나 넓은 해자를 가진 기업(신문사, 철도회사)이 기술로 비용을 줄이면 초과 수익률을 얻을 수 있다고 설명한다. 결론적으로 기술이 기업을 도와줄지 해칠지를 구분하는 사고 모델이 중요하다고 강조한다. 영상 말미에는 투자 팟캐스트를 시작할 계획을 알린다. 구체적인 종목 가격 전망이나 시장 방향 예측 발언은 없다.
다듬은 글
Hey guys, Tom here from the Investing with Tom YouTube channel. Welcome back! If you enjoyed today's video, please hit like and subscribe so you can see future videos too. This is the first video back from holiday, and it feels great to get back into a regular routine. I hope you enjoy all the videos coming out throughout 2021.
This video is about Warren Buffett and investing in technology, and it will probably be a bit different from many of the other videos you may have seen along this line of thinking. We know Buffett is famous for barely investing, if at all, in technology businesses. He corrected that somewhat with Apple a few years ago, and it's now his largest position. But Buffett sees Apple more as a consumer products company than a technology company. You can argue that back and forth as much as you like, but that's how he sees it.
The most common reason Buffett doesn't invest in many of these businesses is that he simply doesn't understand them. He can't predict the future of different software or technology companies. If he can't predict the future well, he can't value them, and he can't invest in them and buy with a margin of safety the way he likes to.
This lack of understanding is probably the explanation for most of the technology businesses Buffett passes on. But I think there's another angle. Some of the more eagle-eyed viewers may notice that *Poor Charlie's Almanack* isn't sitting behind me today. That's because I recently came across a few paragraphs in it that explain some of Buffett's thinking on this exact topic. So I'm going to read a short excerpt and walk you through an example where Buffett was presented with some great technology in his textile business, Berkshire Hathaway, and he really wasn't happy to see it. We'll go through some of his mental processes on why he wasn't happy, even though the technology looked very attractive on the surface. Then we'll see how we can apply that to technology businesses today and to some non-technology businesses too. The textile company discussed in the almanac is not a high-tech business, but it still had innovations within its industry that could change the economics of the business quite dramatically.
What I'm about to read is a passage from a talk Charlie Munger gave. If you have a copy of *Poor Charlie's Almanack*, it's on page 188 and a few following pages. The talk is called "A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom as It Relates to Investment Management and Business." Munger says:
> "The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles, which are a real commodity product. One day the people came to Warren and said they'd invented a new loom that they think will do twice as much work as our old ones."
Take a moment to think about what would go through your head if you owned a textile business and someone came to you saying they had new technology that could dramatically improve production, pump out far more textile products, and do it at much lower cost. How would you interpret that? I think most people would say, "That's fantastic. We'll get all this extra production, it'll be much cheaper, we can undercut all our competitors," and it won't cost much more to get the improvement up and running.
Here's what Buffett said, and it may surprise some of you: "Gee, I hope this doesn't work, because if it does, I'm going to close the mill." He really meant it.
What was he thinking? He was thinking, "It's a lousy business. We're earning substandard returns, and we're keeping it open just to be nice to the elderly workers. But we're not going to put huge amounts of new capital into a lousy business." This explanation of how Buffett thinks about technology, particularly in commodity businesses, goes on for a couple more pages, so I won't read all of it. But basically, with technology like this, especially in a commodity business like textiles, almost all of the extra production improvements and cost reductions get passed on to the customer.
Here's what happens. You spend money improving your production, you undercut your competitors, and maybe for a short time you have an advantage. But then all your competitors adopt the same technology, and suddenly you're back on an even playing field, still earning substandard returns on the capital you put into the business. This happens in so many industries. When I think about businesses I've invested in or looked at before, I see it everywhere.
Another example that comes to mind, though perhaps less obvious, is the traditional auto sector. Every so often a car company makes an innovation. A couple of decades ago, it might have been going from manual windows you wind by hand to electric windows. When a particular company first makes that innovation, it may charge a little extra for its cars. But a year or two later, every manufacturer has electric windows, and all the benefit has been passed on to the consumer. The original designer of that feature gets no lasting advantage. The cycle goes on: first electric windows, then automatic wipers, then cruise control, then Bluetooth radio. The consumer does great. They pay roughly the same price, adjusted for inflation, but get features that cars from 5, 10, or 15 years ago didn't have. Yet the auto manufacturers are still only earning maybe 5% returns on invested capital. This happens everywhere, and it's an interesting idea to apply across all sorts of industries.
Munger goes on to say that they were in the textile business for about 20 years. They kept getting promises of new technology where you'd get your money back in three years and earn 20 to 30 percent returns on capital. They'd continue doing that every three years, and 20 years down the track, they'd still only earned about 4% returns on capital. Those new technologies may have worked. They may have really increased production in those textile mills. But in terms of generating good returns for shareholders, they couldn't differentiate their product from a mill just down the road or one overseas, so the returns never showed up for investors.
That said, there are types of technology Buffett will grab and run with, because they can create substantial returns for investors in particular companies. As Munger said at the beginning of the excerpt, it's all about deciding whether a certain technology is going to kill you or really help you.
In *Poor Charlie's Almanack*, the example of technology that really helps is almost always in the context of monopoly-type or wide-moat businesses, almost never commodity companies. They give the example of the newspaper business. Newspapers are definitely not as good a business as they were 20 or 30 years ago, but I think the example should still make sense to most of you.
Newspaper companies were very much monopoly businesses, sort of local monopolies. In each town you'd have maybe one or two newspapers, and it was very hard for a new competitor to come in. So you usually had just one or two companies, both making good profits in their niche. If a business like that finds a way to bring down its production costs, say through new printing technology that lets it produce its daily paper or Sunday edition much more efficiently, that technology can genuinely produce high returns on capital and improve the business.
Another example might be the railway companies, another large business within Berkshire Hathaway. Railways have a huge advantage: they own a railway, and it's very hard for a competitor to come in and build its own rails. Some of these companies have been around for hundreds of years. If a railroad company can automate some of the processes, such as loading carriages or billing certain customers, cutting out people and the cost of paying them, or find ways to stay on time at each stop and move more miles of goods across its network, these efficiency gains can really improve profitability, especially if there isn't much competition in their space. Rail is by far the cheapest way to transport goods, much cheaper than trucking. Any time a railroad can reduce costs and gain efficiency, it can drop some costs and potentially increase revenue if it moves more freight with the same level of inputs. These can only be good for margins and profitability. So that is a type of technology that can really help the investor.
That's all from me today. It was an interesting learning experience for me from *Poor Charlie's Almanack*. We hear a lot about Buffett not investing in technology businesses simply because he doesn't understand them, and that's certainly a valid reason. But technology and innovation turn up in just about every industry imaginable, so having this mental model in your head, deciding whether a given technology will help you or hinder you, is an important concept to understand.
One final thing before I wrap up: in my goals video a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I want to start a podcast this year, the Investing with Tom podcast, and at least experiment with it to see how it goes. I've recently bought all the audio equipment, so I'll be recording the first couple of episodes very soon. Keep an eye out for that. I'll share it on YouTube and put links to the podcast once it's up and running.
That's all for today. See you in the next one. Cheers!
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