1996: How should shareholders think about Berkshire's future growth rate?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Your problem seems to be that you’ve attracted a fair number of potential shareholders that don’t have a way of estimating intrinsic value or developing expectations about what Berkshire’s future prospects are.

Now, do you have any suggestions about how they might do that, short of the general guidance that you can’t continue to compound your intrinsic value at the same high rate that you have in the past because of your asset base, and that you don’t believe the share is undervalued?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Well, we’ll probably talk more in the general question and answer period about our various businesses, but we simply try to give you all of the information about our businesses in a large, general way that Charlie and I consider important and that we would want if our positions were reversed.

I can assure you that if all Charlie and I knew about our businesses, what we’ve publicly disclosed, it would not change our estimates from what they might be from being intimately involved with the businesses. The facts are out regarding what we do.

So, you are in the same position to the extent that you have followed our kind of businesses and understand industry conditions and all of that.

And we’ll continue to do that. We essentially regard you as our partners. And we tell — we try to tell you exactly what we, as partners, would want to know if you were running the place. And we’ll continue to do that.

We won’t tell you a number because we don’t know the number. We have a range in our mind. Things change that range over time. And we’d probably get in all kinds of trouble if we tried to put out that range.

And Charlie and I would not come up with exactly the same range. But they’d be pretty close. We’ll talk more about that a little later.