저자: CharlieMunger·WarrenBuffett · 외국인
요약 보기
버핏·멍거 주주총회 Q&A 정리. 자본비용 개념은 비이성적이며 기회비용이 올바른 사고라고 주장. 좋은 아이디어는 드물고 준비된 마음이 필요하다고 설명. 코카콜라는 1인당 음료 소비가 전세계적으로 계속 늘어 되돌리기 어렵다고 평가. 시리얼은 과도한 가격 인상, 수프는 라이프스타일 변화로 경쟁력이 약화됐고 유통 대형화(월마트·코스트코)가 브랜드 영향력을 낮췄다고 설명. 자사주매입은 저평가 시 유리하다는 입장.
다듬은 글
**주의:** 원문이 프랑스어 제목이지만 실제 자막 내용은 영어(워런 버핏·찰리 멍거 주주총회 Q&A)입니다. 영어 원문을 영어로 다듬어 정리합니다.
Hello Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger. My name is Kevin Truett from Chicago. I have three questions for you, Mr. Munger. At the last shareholders' meeting, you stated that you didn't think the concept of the cost of capital made any real economic sense. Could you explain why you thought that and what you would do to replace it with something else?
My second question is for Mr. Buffett. You mentioned the concept of "cost of capital" from time to time. How did you know when you had a great idea? And my third question, Mr. Buffett, you spoke about the importance of transparency and the sustainable competitive advantage of companies like Kellogg's and Campbell's Soup. These are companies that most people would have said possessed these qualities; however, over time, these qualities were lost due to changes in consumer tastes. What gives you confidence that the same thing won't happen to Coca-Cola or Gillette?
Well, the cost of capital. First of all, obviously, cost considerations are important in business, and obviously, opportunity costs are a doctrine of economics, in reality a doctrine of life, and they are also very important. We have always had this kind of fundamental thinking. Of course, capital is not free, and of course, you can calculate the cost of capital when you borrow money, or at least you can calculate the cost of loans.
But theorists had to develop a theory for the cost of equity, and there they went crazy. They said that if you earn 100% on capital because you had a wonderful business, your cost of capital was 100%, and therefore you should not consider an opportunity that yields a miserable 80%. This is the kind of thinking that emerged from asset valuation models and so on, which I've always considered insane.
What is the cost of Berkshire Hathaway's capital? We have this darn capital, and it just keeps multiplying and multiplying. What is its cost? If you have good, perfectly valid doctrines like opportunity cost, you know that at any point when we consider an investment, we have to compare it to the best investment alternative we have at that moment.
We had excellent, age-old ideas that are very basic, but they weren't good enough for these modern theorists, so they invented all this ridiculous math that concluded that the companies making the most money had the highest cost of capital. Well, all I can say is that it's not for us. Now I'll leave the other half of this question to Mr. Buffett.
Yes, what you're finding, of course, is that the cost of capital is about a quarter of a percent below the return promised by any transaction the CEO wants. And you know, we have three questions about capital. Leaving aside the question of whether we want to borrow money, which we generally don't want to do, one of these questions is: does it make more sense to distribute it to shareholders rather than keep it in the company?
The sub-question to that is, if we distribute it, is it better to do so through share buybacks or a dividend? The criterion for paying dividends is whether we can create more than one dollar of value within the company while retaining that dollar. And you never know the answer to that, but so far, the answer, judged by the results, is yes, we can.
And we believe that prospectively, we can, but that's, let's say, a hope on our part, and it's justified to some extent by past history, but it's not a certainty. Then the next question is: should we do share buybacks? And obviously, if you can buy your shares at a significant discount to their conservatively calculated intrinsic value, and if you can buy a reasonable quantity, it's a good use of capital.
Beyond that, the question then becomes: if you have the capital and you think you can create more than a dollar, how can you create the most with the least risk? And this relates to business risk; it doesn't relate to calculating volatility. I don't know the risk at Scott Fetzer as measured by the volatility of its stock because the stock hasn't been listed since 1972.
Does that mean I can't determine a company's risk because we don't have daily quotes for it? No, I can determine it by examining the company and the competitive environment in which it operates, and so on. So, once we've taken the step of deciding that we can deploy capital in a way that creates more than a dollar of value for every dollar retained, it's simply a matter of doing the smartest thing you can think of.
And you know that the cost of each transaction we make is measured by the second-best transaction available at any given time, including doing more of certain things we're already invested in. I've listened to discussions about the cost of capital at all sorts of board meetings and everything else, and I never found anything that made much sense except that it's what they learned at business school and it's what the consultants talk about, and most of the board members just nodded without knowing what was going on. That's been my experience with the cost of capital.
Now, as far as big ideas are concerned, when you have a big idea, I can't tell you exactly what goes on in your nervous system or your brain at that moment, but we've had relatively few big, good ideas over the years. I don't know how many you think we've had in total, probably in my career, maybe 25 or something like that.
If you took away the 15 best ideas from Berkshire to date, most of you wouldn't be here. So roughly one every two years, or one every one or two years, and sometimes there will be several, like in 1973 and 1974. But the problem for us is that now "big" really means big. It has to be billions of dollars to move the needle significantly at Berkshire.
But I would say that when I was turning those pages 50 years ago in the Moody's manuals, I knew when I came across a great idea. I have half a dozen of them, and I still have photocopies of those reports from 50 years ago, simply because it was so obvious. And it happens from time to time. When I met Lorimer Davidson, at the end of January 1951, he spent four or five hours with me explaining Geico. I knew it was a great idea.
Ten months later, I wrote an article for the Commercial and Financial Chronicle about the security I liked the most. It was a great idea. When I discovered Western Insurance Securities, I knew it was a great idea, but I couldn't invest millions of dollars in it. I didn't have millions, so that didn't matter. We've seen things since then, and we'll see more. If we have a normal lifespan, we'll see a few, but I can't tell you exactly how, or exactly what goes on in my mind, like a sign with flashing neon that says, "That's a great idea, and for you, Charlie."
Actually, one of my real criteria is when I have an idea and I call Charlie, and he just says no, instead of saying, "That's the worst idea I've ever heard." But if he just says no, it's a damn good idea. The game in our kind of life is being able to recognize a good idea, and they rarely come along. I think it's something you have to prepare for over a long period.
There's an old saying that opportunity comes to the prepared mind, and I don't think you can teach people in two minutes how to have a prepared mind, but that's the game. The things we learned 40 years ago, however, will help in recognizing them.
The next big idea and a stroke of luck, to get back to this: the current economics textbook for first-year students, which is all the rage in the country, says almost on the first page that all intelligent people should think primarily in terms of opportunity cost, and that's obviously correct. But it's very difficult to teach business based on opportunity cost. It's much easier to teach the financial asset valuation model where you can simply enter numbers and get results, so people teach what's easy to teach instead of what's correct to teach.
This reminds me of Einstein's famous quote: he said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Note that.
Yes, an interesting question about franchises as well. You mentioned Campbell's soup and Kellogg's, and I'm no expert on the subject, but based simply on my general observation over the years, the problems here stemmed from two different things. I think the problems with ready-to-eat cereals weren't so much related to changes in consumption habits or tastes. They simply pushed their prices too far, to the point of losing market share without having the profit margin they thought they would, unlike General Mills and General Foods cereals and all that.
If your pricing becomes truly irrelevant and people consider Wheaties or Grape-Nuts in the same category as Kellogg's cornflakes, you're going to lose market share. And once you start losing market share, it's hard to regain it. The problem with soups, I think, is more lifestyle-related. They don't fit into today's lifestyles as well as they did 40 years ago.
And soft drinks: I don't have the figures for soft drink consumption here, but I'd bet that over the last 110 years, per capita soft drink consumption has increased practically every year, and now it's nearly 30% of US liquid consumption. In other words, one-eighth of all the liquid consumed by a man, woman, or child in the United States comes from Coca-Cola products. This has practically increased everywhere in the world; it has increased in quantity per person. For non-alcoholic beverages, I would say that this trend is almost impossible to reverse globally.
There is so much potential in countries where per capita consumption is, say, 8 servings of 0.25 liters per year. So you have, in many important countries, one-third of the per capita consumption of Coca-Cola products compared to what you have here. I simply don't see how it could be otherwise.
Now, you can push prices too far; there comes a point. It depends on the country you're in, and even the specific areas within that country. But if you establish too large a difference between Coca-Cola and a private label product, you're going to change something. Consumption habits have changed, not enormously, but enough that you might not want to do it. But I don't think you'll see that.
It's interesting that coffee consumption has decreased everywhere. People talk about Starbucks and all that, but if you look at coffee consumption in this country, and at milk consumption, per capita, it just keeps going down, year after year.
I think it's pretty clear that people like to drink it once they get used to it. When I was born in 1930, a 20 cl Coca-Cola cost a nickel, plus a 2-cent deposit on the bottle. But forget that. Just take the nickel now. You buy a 35 cl can or a larger product, and you pay maybe a little more than double per deciliter than you paid in 1930, seventy years ago. Compare that with the price behavior of almost any product you know, apart from basic necessities, like cars and housing. There's been very, very little price inflation on those, and I think that has certainly contributed to per capita growth over time.
Charlie, about cereals and soups: I think those are examples where the gaps have become less hostile for competitors. Part of the problem was that purchasing power had become more concentrated and harder to come by. The big grocery chains now have a lot of influence, and then you add Walmart, Costco, and Sam's, and it's just a different world that Kellogg's is facing compared to the one they faced 30 or 40 years ago.
Yes, there will always be a battle between brands and retailers, because the retailer would like their name to be the brand. To the extent that people trust Costco or Walmart more than the brand, or as much as the brand, the brand value shifts from the product to the retailer themselves. That's been going on for a long time.
Early on, I remember going back to the days of A&P in the 1930s. A&P was, I think, the biggest food distributor in the country, and they were also a big private label promoter. They thought they could convince consumers in the 1930s that their brand meant more than just having Del Monte or Campbell's or anything else on it. People thought they were going to win that war for a while, but who knows? I don't know all the variables that contributed to A&P's decline, but it was spectacular. It was one of the great American success stories for a while, and then it became a big American failure.
Charlie, the power of Sam's Club and Costco has become very extreme. A little while earlier this morning, when I was signing books, a very beautiful woman approached me and said she wanted to thank me. I asked why, and she said, "You told me to buy these tights I'm wearing at Costco." I had obviously made a previous comment. It was incredible that Costco could convince Hanes to allow Kirkland-branded tights to be sold in Costco stores. This wouldn't have happened 20 years ago. She must have been pretty desperate if she was asking you where to buy tights.
This video is finished. If you liked it, don't forget to give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to expand your investment knowledge, I've included links to some very useful books on Amazon.
영상을 보시기 전에 구독 부탁드립니다. 다음 영상을 놓치지 않으실 수 있도록 말씀드리며, 곧 다시 뵙겠습니다!
Comments 0