标题: 巴菲特最新投资名言 [打印本页] 作者: 小粉 时间: 2012-6-21 16:15 标题: 巴菲特最新投资名言 Warren Buffett, the billionaire chief executive officer ofBerkshire Hathaway Inc., said he rates businesses on their ability to raise prices and sometimes doesn’t even consider the people in charge.
“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power,” Buffett told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in an interview released by the panel last week. “If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”
Buffett, 80, accumulated the world’s third-largest personal fortune through a career of stock picks and takeovers. He has bought companies such as railroads and electricity producers, whose pricing power stems from a dearth of competitive options available to clients. Buffett has also built stakes in firms like Coca-Cola Co. and Kraft Foods Inc., which rely on the appeal of their brands to attract and keep customers.
“The extraordinary business does not require good management,” Buffett said in the interview, which was conducted on May 26 in Omaha, Nebraska.
“顶级公司并不需要最好的管理,”巴菲特在2010年5月26日尼布拉斯州奥马哈的一次采访中说。
The FCIC investigators focused on Buffett’s investment in Moody’s Corp., the bond-ratings firm blamed by lawmakers for handing out inflated credit grades during the housing boom. Buffett said he held stock in Moody’s because the company’s leading market share, along with that of rival Standard & Poor’s, a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill Cos., gave the two firms flexibility in setting prices.
“I knew nothing about the management of Moody’s,” said Buffett. “If you own the only newspaper in town, up until the last five years or so, you had pricing power and you didn’t have to go to the office.”
A dominant position can’t prevent a bad manager from destroying a company over time, said Benjamin E. Hermalin, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
再好的公司对糟糕的管理者也没有永远的免疫力,加州伯克利大学商学院经济学教授Benjamin E. Hermalin说。
“If you have a really dominant position you can survive for quite a long time with bad management but eventually it will catch up to you,” said Hermalin. “In the short run I would agree with Buffett but in the longer-run perspective there is something to be said for having a good manager.”
Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the railroad Buffett bought last year for $26.5 billion, owns more than 30,000 miles of track across the U.S. West connecting producers and distributors of coal, grain and consumer goods. Omaha-based Berkshire’s power company, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., sells electricity to homes in the Great Plains and transports natural gas fromWyoming to California.
去年,巴菲特以265亿美元收购铁路公司Burlington Northern Santa Fe,它拥有美国西部超过3万英里(近5万公里)的铁路线,是煤炭、谷物和日常消费品的运输要道。巴菲特麾下的投资公司Berkshire Hathaway拥有的电力公司MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. 掌控美国中部大平原地区(覆盖美国中部十个州,译者注)的居民用电和从怀俄明到加州一带的天然气运输。
Praise From Buffett
Buffett routinely singles out and praises managers from Berkshire’s more than 70 operating companies. MidAmerican Chairman David Sokol and Gregory Abel, the unit’s CEO, are “two terrific managers,” Buffett said last year in his letter to shareholders. The acquisition of Burlington Northern had the “additional virtue” of bringing the railroad’s CEO, Matthew Rose, to Berkshire, Buffett said.
巴菲特定期从Berkshire控股的70多家公司中挑选出优秀的经理人并给与赞扬。MidAmerican能源公司主席David Sokol和CEO Gregory Abel是“两个杰出的经理人”,巴菲特在2009年致股东的信中说。收购Burlington Northern铁路公司的意外之喜是CEO Matthew Rose能够加盟Berkshire,巴菲特说。
Buffett criticized Kraft Chief Executive Officer Irene Rosenfeld last year for her takeover of Cadbury Plc and the sale of the foodmaker’s pizza brands. “Both deals were dumb,” Buffett told Berkshire investors in May. Berkshire is the biggest shareholder of Kraft with a stake valued at $3.3 billion at the end of December.
“In the short run, good management can make a stock pop but I follow what Warren’s saying, especially because his point of view looks at the fundamentals,” said Terry Connelly, dean of the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and a former managing director at Salomon Brothers. “Good management can’t do anything with a bad case.”