In 1973, the Washington Post Company couldn’t have been a more widely revered media company. The Watergate scandal, which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein begun reporting on in mid-1972, came to a spectacular end with President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. But the reverence of the publication didn’t match the company’s popularity on Wall Street. The Post—along with many other stocks at that time—was trading at historic lows.

Below is the letter that Warren Buffett wrote to Katherine Graham in June 1973 after he had acquired over 5% of the stock. By the end of the year his stake had increased to 10%. The letter gives a lot of insight into how Buffett viewed the Post—not only as an investment, but as a business with noble purposes that brings out his sentimental side.

This purchase represents a sizable commit ment to us—and an explicitly quantified compliment to the Post as a business enterprise and to you as its chief executive. Writing a check separates conviction from conversation. I recognize that the Post is Graham-controlled and Graham-managed. And that suits me fine.

Some years back, a partnership which I managed made a significant investment in the stock of Walt Disney Productions. The stock was ridiculously cheap based upon earnings, asset values and capability of management. That alone was enough to make my pulse quicken (and pocketbook open), but there was also an important extra dimension to the investment. In its field, Disney simply was the finest—hands down. Anything that didn’t reflect his best efforts—anything that might leave the customer feeling short-changed—just wasn’t acceptable to Walt Disney. He melded energetic creativity with a discipline regarding profitability, and achieved something unique in entertainment.

I feel the same way about The Washington Post. The stock is dramatically undervalued relative to the intrinsic worth of its constituent properties, although that is true of many securities in today’s markets. But, the twin attraction to the undervaluation is an enterprise that has become synonymous for quality in communications. How much more satisfying it is going to be to watch an investment in the Post grow over the years than it would be to own stock in some garden variety company which, though cheap, had no sense of purpose.

I am additionally impressed by the sense of stewardship projected by your communications to fellow shareholders. They are factual, complete and interesting as you bring your established newspaper standards for integrity to the newer field of corporate reporting.

You may remember that I was in your office about two years ago with Charles Munger, discussing the New Yorker. At the time I mentioned to you that I had received my financial start delivering the Post while attending Woodrow Wilson High in the mid 1940’s. Although I delivered about 400 Posts per day, my record of loyalty is slightly tarnished in that I also had the Times-Herald route (much smaller—my customers were discriminating) in the Westchester. This was perhaps the first faint sign to keenly perceptive Washingtonians that the two organizations eventually would get together.

I should mention that Berkshire Hathaway has no radio or television properties, so that we will not be a complicating factor with the FCC. Our only communications property is the ownership of Sun Newspapers of Omaha, a group of financially (but not editorially) insignificant weekly newspapers in the metropolitan Omaha area. Last month our whole organization, seventy people counting printing, went into orbit when we won a Pulitzer for our reporting on Boys Town’s undisclosed wealth. Incidentally, Newsweek and Time used approximately equal space in covering the story last year, but Newsweek’s reporting job was far superior.

You can see that the Post has a rather fervent fan out in Omaha. I have hopes that, as funds become available, we will add to our holdings, at which time I will send along amended 13-D filings.

Cordially,
Warren E. Buffett

This letter was taken from Katherine Graham’s wonderful autobiography, Personal History.

I’m excited to announce the release of a book I’ve been working on for about 6 months now, and first started in 2010.

It’s a compilation of every letter Warren Buffett wrote to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. I first created it a few years ago for myself and friends. Last year I got Buffett’s endorsement — plus a few non-public letters — to publish the book for the benefit of fans and shareholders of Berkshire.

Here is the official page with all the details. There you can find a more detailed description, plus some sample pages and a chart detailing the performance of Berkshire’s insurance operations. (For any programmers out there, the chart was created with D3. You can check out the development version on GitHub.)

Features of the book:

• Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letters from 1965 to 2012 (706 pages), including the 11 earliest letters not available on Berkshire’s website
• Tabulated letter years so you can easily flip to the desired letter
• Topics index
• Company index
• Person index
• Charts of:
  • The growth in Berkshire’s book value and market price relative to benchmarks
  • Insurance float and performance
  • The operating businesses of Berkshire

The entire book is paginated, and has easy-to-flip-to labels for each letter’s year.

It is available for pre-order now. The first batch will be sold at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting on May 4 in the convention center. The rest of the copies will be available on Amazon on May 7.

Future projects

• The obvious next step is to publish a digital version, easily readable on iPads or potentially Kindles. This is normally an easy transfer, but that’s not the case with this book due to the many tables that have to be converted. So no timeline on this but it will be forthcoming.
• A book of letters to the partners of Buffett Partnership, Ltd., Buffett’s hedge fund he ran from 1957 to 1970. This will be a similar format to the Berkshire book, with indexes, page numbers, etc.

A recent article by Forbes contributor Steve Denning reviewed Roger Martin’s new book, Fixing the Game. It was a good review and I plan on reading the book.

The gist of the article is that managers of public companies focus too much on the expectations behind their stock price, and in turn “maximizing shareholder value.” [1] According to Martin, the causes stem from misaligned incentives and the business culture that has developed over the past 30 years. This focus on shareholders usually comes at the expense of customers and employees. “If you try to take care of shareholders, customers don’t benefit and, ironically, shareholders don’t get very far either.” When managers are working in the expectations market, they’re much more likely to make short term decisions that benefit only themselves and a (vocal) subset of shareholders—traders. This includes seemingly harmless activities like giving quarterly or annual earnings guidance, or for retailers reporting monthly same-store sales figures.

Martin proposes a few remedies to the problem, like improving board governance and eliminating both safe harbor provisions and stock-based compensation. These would go a long way to nudge corporate behavior in the right direction. But for managers who want to take it upon themselves, here’s my proposal: think of your company as a Dynamic Pie.

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Here is Warren Buffett’s 2010 Letter to Shareholders if you haven’t seen it already.

It was a very good letter overall, with Buffett providing his usual wisdom and wit. This year, he didn’t have to review the basics as he did in 2009 for the new Burlington Northern shareholders, so there was even more wisdom about Buffett’s methodologies and Berkshire’s businesses than usual.

He spends some time in the letter talking about Berkshire’s culture, which is an extremely important yet overlooked part of their past and future success. It is this culture that will allow Buffett to continue to “run” the company for many years after his death. That’s what Berkshire shareholders and the media should focus on instead of worrying so much about succession.

One thing is clear: Buffett may not run the companies that Berkshire owns, but he knows the numbers cold. Of course, that’s always been the case. For every kind of business, he knows the metrics that matter most and the determinants that drive success over time. Sometimes, he even knows it better than the managers themselves (and he’s a much better manager than he’d like to admit in his letters).

For investors, one of the most insightful parts of both Buffett’s letters and annual meetings is how he thinks about and evaluates businesses. In this letter, he didn’t disappoint by providing more insight on how he evaluates Berkshire’s holdings. GEICO was one specific example. The value of policyholders for many insurance companies is zero or even less than zero — these companies are worth tangible book value and no more. But GEICO, according to Buffett’s evaluation, has an extremely valuable base of policyholders: worth about $14 billion, or 97% of annual premium volume.

Number-wise, Buffett provided his estimate of the normalized earnings power of Berkshire’s operations — which at $17 billion, is higher than the reported amount in 2010. These earnings alone would give Berkshire a current pre-tax yield of over 8%, and that doesn’t include any new investments or future gains on their $158 billion in investments.

This valuation compares very favorably to many large-caps in the S&P 500. I think Berkshire is worth at least $100 per “B” share, if not more if Buffett can continue to deploy capital into good, growing businesses.

You can see the above comments in addition to commentary from other Berkshire shareholders in this WSJ blog post: “Here is What People Are Saying About Buffett’s Letter“

Braewick Holdings LP owns shares in Berkshire Hathaway. We reserve the right to buy or sell them at any time.

The following is a writeup I did for Wal-Mart on Sum Zero, included in its entirety below. Also at the end of the post are some charts that show how Wal-Mart has evolved over time. There is no doubt that Sam Walton and Wal-Mart are one of the, if not the greatest success story over the past 50 years. So it’s a great case study to take a look at. (I believe Warren Buffett once said that his greatest error of omission was not investing in Wal-Mart, a business he could understand very well, in its early days–which is clearly seen in the charts below.)

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Wal-Mart is often listed as a cheap large-cap, but is owned by surprisingly few value investors. One reason is that it’s big and well scrutinized and hence its price is more “efficient.”  This is partly true, and you won’t get stellar returns investing in Wal-Mart. But it is a cheap, well-managed company that returns cash to shareholders and should fare well under a number of different macro scenarios.

Competitive Advantages

The U.S. stores division of Wal-Mart (about 3/4 of pre-tax profit) has significant competitive advantages. To consumers, Wal-Mart’s brand represents one thing: low prices. Customers in the vicinity of a Wal-Mart remain loyal because they can be certain that they will have the lowest prices. And as long as Wal-Mart doesn’t slack off in the service and facility departments, there will be no good reason for customers to switch.

Wal-Mart can have the lowest prices because of their (1) efficient operations and (2) economies of scale. Operationally, expenses are lower because of their non-unionized workforce and other shrewd cost management (shrinkage, inbound logistics, etc.). This penny-pinching mentality has been ingrained in the company since it was founded by Sam Walton. The biggest cost advantages are from Wal-Mart’s economies of scale. The most obvious consequence is purchasing power—Wal-Mart can buy products at lower prices because they can purchase in such enormous quantities. But the biggest and most un-replicable scale advantage is geographic concentration. Wal-Mart has a “hub and spoke” system of a distribution centers with 100-150 stores around them, all within about a day’s drive. Because of this concentration, costs can be distributed over a larger base of potential customers: distribution, advertising, regional management, etc. Wal-Mart also has some of the most technologically advanced merchandise and logistics systems in the world. This is something that smaller or more spread-out retailers can’t match.

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Just going through the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen. I have a few posts I’ll likely write that relate to the book — this is one of them.

The Innovators Dilemma talks a lot about a company’s culture, and why incumbent leaders of a certain technology are restrained from participating in a disruptive technology’s upside. Christensen names these attributes as the incumbent’s downfall: (1) Current customers aren’t served by new market; (2) New market is too small for large companies; (3) Use of new technology isn’t fully known yet; (4) Processes that help them with current business hurt them with new business; and (5) New technology isn’t good enough yet to meet higher-end market demand.

One solution to the above issues is to acquire another company that can take advantage of the disruptive technology. If done correctly, this can solve numbers 1, 2, 4, and 5 above.

Christensen breaks down the factors that affect what a company can and cannot do into Resources, Processes, and Values. Resources are people, equipment, brands, technology, customers, etc. Processes are how companies transform those resources into products or services of greater value. Values are standards by which employees make and prioritize decisions (think of a company’s “Core Values” of the Jim Collins variety).

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