No. of Recommendations: 3
Excerpt from Rational Walk today (re the BRK 2023 proxy statement):
"Share RepurchasesShareholders of record as of the close of business on March 8, 2023 are entitled to vote at the meeting and the company announced that there were 590,238 Class A shares and 1,298,190,161 Class B shares on that date. Class A stock has one vote per share while Class B stock has 1/10,000 of a vote per share. As I wrote last year, Berkshire's future will depend on voting control, with Class A shares having a major advantage.
Based on this disclosure, we can calculate that Berkshire had 1,455,698 Class A equivalent shares outstanding on March 8.
...
Berkshire had 1,459,733 Class A equivalents outstanding on December 31, 2022, a figure also disclosed in the annual report. This indicates that Berkshire repurchased 1,498 Class A equivalents between January 1 and February 13.
Adding up these figures, Berkshire has reduced its share count by 4,035 Class A equivalents this year. Eyeballing the stock chart, it seems like $470,000 per share might approximate an average cost. This implies a cost of around $1.9 billion.
We will know the precise number of shares and amount spent when the first quarter report is released in late April or early May. Class A shares closed at $442,765 on Friday, March 17, well below the cost of recent repurchases, so perhaps Warren Buffett will accelerate the pace between now and March 31. However, Mr. Buffett might prefer buying shares of Occidental Petroleum and perhaps he is finding other opportunities based on market dislocations caused by recent bank failures ' either in banks or in other securities that have declined over the past week. Time will tell.
rationalwalk.substack.com - Berkshire hathaways proxy statement 