저자: BeckyQuick · 외국인
요약 보기
Kraft Heinz가 회사를 두 개로 분할하는 계획을 발표했고, 버크셔 해서웨이는 이에 실망을 표명했다. 주주 투표 없이 진행되는 점, 분할 비용 약 3억 달러와 약 1년 소요가 문제로 지적됐다. 합병 이후 주가는 약 70% 하락했으며, 버크셔는 27.5% 지분을 보유 중이고 지분 매각 계획은 밝히지 않았다. 발표 당일 주가는 약 3.5% 하락했다.
다듬은 글
Big corporate news today. Craft Hinds announcing it is splitting into two companies undoing the merger originally envisioned by Warren Buffett. Becky Quick just off the phone with Buffett and joins us now with the details. Becky. Hey Sarah. Hey Carl. It's good to see both of you. Obviously what Bergkshire Hathaway thinks about this is a pretty big deal because Bergkshire Hathaway is the largest shareholder in Craft Hind.
It owns 27 and a half% of that company. Well, if you're wondering what uh Buffett and Bergkshire are thinking about this, here's the answer. in one word, disappointed. Warren Buffett tells me that they were disappointed with them coming up with this idea and then disappointed on top of that that shareholders will not be getting a vote when it comes to what's going to be happening with this.
Uh he says that they will continue to do they will proceed to do from this point whatever they think is in the best interest for Bergkshire on this. He said if we are approached about selling our shares, we wouldn't accept a block bid unless the same offer is made to other shareholders. In other words, they're not going to sell a block bid in a deal um price that they can get that the rest of the shareholders won't if they're they haven't decided what they're going to be doing.
But if there's a buyer who comes forward, it would have to be someone who was buying the entire company. Now, he did tell me, but Warren Buffett told me that Craft Hind spoke with Greg Ael about a week ago and said they'd been working on this a long time. Greg Ael told them that he'd be disappointed if they went ahead with this.
And sure enough, a few days ago, word came back that they were going to go ahead with it anyway. Um, basically they were informed about what the craftiness board had decided on all of this. I asked Warren Buffett why they didn't like this deal. He said for starters it should cost them about $300 million to implement this and additional overhead costs and that it's going to take about a year to do so.
So that's time that I I guess in his view is wasted at that point. His words exactly to me were it certainly didn't turn out to be a brilliant idea to put them together, but I don't think taking it apart will fix it. Um, if you looked at the stock's performance over the last 10 years, you'd see a little bit of the pain that Bergkshire's been in over this period of time, just over the last year.
Yeah, you can see here since the merger closed in 2015, stocks down by about 70%. It's been down about 20% over the course of this year, and it's down three and a half this morning, three and a half% this morning on this news. Now, this was a deal that uh Bergkshire put together with 3G. At that point, they were very optimistic about what could be accomplished.
They did squeeze out some of the overhead costs at that point. It looked like it was doing fairly well for a while, but it's been quite a while since that stock has had any sort of good performance on anything. Um, Bergkshire's people resigned from the board of Craft Hinds. They had two designated um board members who resigned at uh I guess Warren Buffett and Greg Abel's suggestion at that point back on May 19th of this past year.
I guess they saw kind of where things were headed, weren't really in favor of it, so decided they didn't want to have their people voting on something along those lines. But if you look at this again, Bergkshire Hathaway is the largest shareholder by far, 27 a.5%. Bergkshire has never sold or bought any stake.
I think originally they were closer to about 26%. Craft Hinds has bought in shares and that's what's boosted its stock to about 27 a.5%. But if you look at the list of other big shareholders in this stock, you're going to see it's Vanguard Group at about 8.6%. 6%. Black Rockck Institutional has 4.3%.
State Street has 3.9%. Geode has two and 2.2%. Invesco Capital Management with the triple Q's has about 2%. Even if you add up those next five shareholders, that only gets you to about 21% of the shares versus the 27.5% that Bergkshire has owned. Now, obviously, it's been a long issue that Bergkshire almost never is an active shareholder.
They they are passive shareholders. they don't like to get involved in this. But I guess this is a situation where that sort of passive investment has been taken advantage of to the extreme to the point where even they when they voice their opinions and say they're not in favor of something with a stake this whole this big um they're getting ignored on this front.
So again, it looks like Craftine shares this morning down by just over 3.6% but again the largest shareholder Bergkshire Hathway is disappointed by this move to split those companies. So that that's I lots of questions, Becky, but one I was going to ask is so can they do anything further to fight against it if they don't want to see this happen?
No, I I look I I think part of what they expressed was the disappointment that there won't be a shareholder vote on this. Um I I believe that Craft Hind has held out the position that it is not something that they need to take a shareholder vote on according to Delaware law. Um I I don't know if there are New York Stock Exchange or other laws that would require them to do that.
If you look at this, uh, there's not another annual meeting. I think their annual meeting is in the spring of next year, maybe April or May. They did say this morning, Craft Hinds, that this would be a deal that they anticipate closing in the second half of next year. So, I think there would be a shareholder meeting that would take place before it.
Um, but that's the big frustration. I I I think that there's not a shareholder vote that's being taken on this. Yeah. They that shareholders didn't get a say. You know, I went back this morning and looked at Buffett's comments to you a few years ago. He he said, "I was wrong in a couple ways on Craft Hind.
We overpaid for Craft. It was sort of a rare always a rare blemish, right, on the dealmaking track track record of Berkshire Hathway." And this is not this has not paid off well for them. I I think they just took a they wrote down the uh investment just in the last couple of months. They wrote down by several billion dollars that investment that they had made over this.
They've been pretty clear that this was not something that panned out the way they thought it was going to. Uh but if you look at that since the merger closed down 70%. So no, I think you can say that this is uh not something that's going to go on the positive side of their investments. No, not a good one. Becky Becky, thanks. uh that he quit watching KHC
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