Buffett's Berkshire Snaps Up Record $24.7 Billion of Own Stock

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. bought back a record $24.7 billion of its own stock last year and said there’s more to come.

• The conglomerate repurchased a total of $9 billion in the fourth quarter, matching a record set in the previous three-month period, the company said Saturday. Buffett has increasingly turned to buybacks as one way to deploy part of Berkshire’s ever-growing cash pile.

Key Insights

• “Berkshire has repurchased more shares since year-end, and is likely to further reduce its share count in the future,” Buffett said Saturday in his annual letter. “That action increased your ownership in all of Berkshire’s businesses by 5.2% without requiring you to so much as touch your wallet.”
• Buffett was able to put some of Berkshire’s ever-gushing cash flow to work in the last three months of the year, helping the conglomerate cut the company’s cash holdings 5% to $138.3 billion. Buffett has struggled to keep pace with the flow in recent years as Berkshire threw off cash faster than he could find higher-returning assets to snap up.
• Swings in Berkshire’s massive $281.2 billion stock portfolio feed into the company’s net income because of an accounting technicality. That drove the figure up 23% to $35.8 billion in the fourth quarter from a year earlier.