No. of Recommendations: 17
Berkshire now holds Oxy shares 255,281,524, plus 83,858,848.81 from the warrants, total 339.1m, Oxy has 886.6m shares outstanding, so Berkshire would have (255,281,524+83,858,848.81)/(886,640,000+83,858,848.81) = 35.1% when the warrants are converted.
I know Buffett has said he doesn't want to buy Oxy outright, but I can't think of another example where he has kept buying up to a percentage in the mid-30s, and this number will keep climbing even if Buffett stops buying, as the Oxy is buying back a lot of shares too (share count down about 30 million shares since a year ago).
The scale of these Oxy share purchases is interesting: about a million shares a day for the last 3 days, or $60m worth. In the last 3 years, Berkshire's operating earnings have been $27.6 billion for 2021; $30.9 billion for 2022 and $37.4 billion for 2023 (from p.4 of the annual report). Even if Berkshire bought $60m worth of Oxy every day of the year, with 250 trading days in a year, that would be only $1.5b. So to sop up all that cash flowing in, we would need about 20 Occidentals getting $1.5b each, including capital reinvestment in existing companies like BNSF and BH Energy. And if he stops when he gets to 50% of Oxy, that means he can only buy another 15%, or 145m shares. At a million shares a day, he would have to stop in about 7 months, and find something else to pour $1.5b a year into.
Dtb
