1995: Why did Berkshire buy Guinness?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name’s Mark Hake (PH) from Scottsdale. And I think your question — my question — about foreign equity investment was pretty much answered by the other gentleman.

But I noticed that you had made an investment in Guinness in the past. And can you comment on that? Do you — is it still owned? And if not, why not?

WARREN BUFFETT: We don’t comment on purchases and sales of securities or ownership, unless either we’re legally required to, or they hit this threshold level where we report annually.

And we move the threshold level up as our assets move up. We don’t move it up as a percentage of assets. So that we used, as a cutoff this year, 300 million, I believe, of market value as to where we reported.

Now, if we’d owned the same amount of Guinness — which I’m not saying that we did — but if we owned the same amount of Guinness on December 31st, 1994, it would not have hit that threshold as we had on December 31st, ’93. It would not have hit that threshold.

And we really don’t want to get in the business where we are talking at all about what we’re buying or selling. We get a lot of speculation on that, but it’s of no use to Berkshire to be talking about purchases or sales.

If we were acquiring a piece of land downtown and we bought a quarter of what we intended to buy, for example, we would not feel we were benefitted by a front-page story in the paper saying that we were acquiring land.

And it — we are not in the business of giving investment advice, basically. We’ll talk about our principles.

So, the only conclusion you can come to about Guinness, or anything else that does not show up on our list at year-end, is that we did not own $300 million’s worth at market value at that time.