In his 1977 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter, Warren Buffett explains why single year snapshots are not adequate portrayals of a business. Investors should focus on the long-term prospects of a company when making investment decisions, rather than getting caught up in short-term trends. Here’s an excerpt from the letter:
Just as it would be foolish to focus unduly on short-term prospects when acquiring an entire company, we think it equally unsound to become mesmerized by prospective near term earnings or recent trends in earnings when purchasing small pieces of a company; i.e., marketable common stocks.
A little digression illustrating this point may be interesting. Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates and Hathaway Manufacturing were merged in 1955 to form Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
In 1948, on a pro forma combined basis, they had earnings after tax of almost $18 million and employed 10,000 people at a dozen large mills throughout New England.
In the business world of that period they were an economic powerhouse. For example, in that same year earnings of IBM were $28 million (now $2.7 billion), Safeway Stores, $10 million, Minnesota Mining, $13 million, and Time, Inc., $9 million.
But, in the decade following the 1955 merger aggregate sales of $595 million produced an aggregate loss for Berkshire Hathaway of $10 million.
By 1964 the operation had been reduced to two mills and net worth had shrunk to $22 million, from $53 million at the time of the merger. So much for single year snapshots as adequate portrayals of a business.
You can read the entire letter here:
Berkshire Hathaway 1977 Annual Letter
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