Berkshire Hathaway Shares Hit $500,000

Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett walks the showroom floor as shareholders gather to hear from the billionaire investor at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual shareholder meeting. in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, May 4, 2019. REUTERS/Scott Morgan/File Photo

March 14 – Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) stock hit $500,000 for the first time on Monday, reflecting the company’s defensive status in a market volatile due to events in Ukraine and rising inflation.

Class A shares of Berkshire are up 10% in 2022, outperforming the Standard & Poor’s 500 (.SPX) index, which is down 12%.

According to Forbes magazine, the Omaha, Nebraska-based company has a market value of approximately $731 billion, which ranks sixth in the US, and Buffett’s 16.2% stake makes him the fifth richest person in the world, with a net worth of $119.2 billion. .

Berkshire posted a record operating profit of $27.46 billion last year, including profits from Geico auto insurance, BNSF rail and Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

He also owns dozens of other businesses, including the fast-growing mobile home division of Clayton Homes and the largest residential real estate brokerage in the United States.

Berkshire specializes “in places, Main Street style,” said Bill Smead, chief executive of Smead Capital Management Inc in Phoenix, which invests about $4.3 billion and owns shares in Berkshire.

“They’re big, and they’re not tech stocks, and investors are enjoying that.”

Berkshire stock also slightly outperformed the S&P 500 in 2021 after lagging in 2019 and 2020. On Monday, they rose 0.8% to $493,785.

The majority of Berkshire’s operations are located in the United States, and about 77% of its approximately 372,000 employees work there.

Among those expanding in other countries is Dairy Queen, which plans to open 600 stores by 2030 in China, already the largest market outside the US.

Berkshire was trading below $20 when Buffett took over the then textile company in 1965. Its class B shares are worth approximately 1/1500 of class A shares.

Larger market cap US companies include Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), Amazon.com Inc and Tesla Inc (TSLA.O). Apple is also the largest holding of Berkshire common stock.

Berkshire ended 2021 with $146.7 billion in cash, although it has since invested more than $5 billion in Occidental Petroleum Corp as oil prices soared.

Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Richard Chang

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