2022: Does Berkshire proactively approach foreign companies it'd like to acquire?

OLA POLEM: Good morning. My name is Ola Polem (PH). I live in Hanover, Germany. This is my first time in Omaha.

My question is on Berkshire buying entire companies outside the U.S. There were a few, Iscar, probably the first one. Louis, in Germany.

My question is, would you only answer calls from them if you’re interested in? Or would you proactively approach them if they would like to sell their company?

WARREN BUFFETT: I would — we actually made a few trips. I think maybe Charlie went with me on one of them. We tried to stir up interest and all that sort of thing in Berkshire around the world. We probably did that 20 years or 25 years ago.

During that period — that I showed you — that burst of action we had, we probably spent — we probably at least 5 billion of that — yeah, maybe pretty — in the area of 5 billion of it — we bought three German securities.

We bought two — well, we bought one — in Japan. We rounded up on some of the holdings we already had there.

We would love them to buy, but we — they don’t think of us as quickly there. I mean, I don’t have somebody that’s going to send me an email about a company that I’ve been following for 60 years and I know I can see them in New York and, you know, I can name a number to them, and if he likes it, he can take it to his board and so on.

It just doesn’t happen that way. We haven’t had that experience in — well, anywhere outside the United States.

Now, you can say with 40 trillion here, you know, we should be able to find something here (laughs) a little closer to home.

But we don’t have any bias against doing it. We —

There are companies, you know, we’d buy in 10 minutes if we had somebody on the other end that could do business in 10 minutes.

It’s much more complicated in certain countries than in the United States to purchase businesses, and there are certain rules.

But obviously this — you know, we got a call — whenever it was — many years ago, on our company in Germany. And actually, the two fellows that run it are probably here in the audience. I saw them yesterday. And they’re marvelous. And they run the business. And, you know — they’re as trustworthy as — well, all the pictures were up on the movie we showed before this meeting started here. You know —

We have so much trouble finding good ideas that we can’t afford to ignore any. But they do have to be sizable now. I mean, there really isn’t — there isn’t a lot of —

I love the operation we bought in Germany, and it’s just a pleasure to be associated with the people there. I just wish we could add another zero to all the figures and it was a much larger deal.

It’s not going to have an economic impact on Berkshire. But they love it. They care. You can see it. You can feel it. And that’s the kind of business we’d like to have, and we’re very happy we’ve got it in Berkshire. But we can’t do it one (unintelligible) of Louis at a time.

And we would never, never sell an operation like that, ever. I’m looking at you, Greg. (Laughs)

The — you know — but if — if we get a call tomorrow and we could make a deal that involves 10 or 20 billion dollars that was in Germany or France or Britain or Japan — or name a whole group of countries — we’d do it.

We bought the interest in the five leading trading companies in Japan a couple years ago. And I rounded them up a little bit. But I told them originally we weren’t going to but a lot of — we weren’t going to change our positions materially without their OK.

So, we actually, I think, rounded the 5.85% — based on the latest figures we had then — of all five of them. And that was a good many hundreds of millions, or maybe a billion or two, to work. So, we will, you know —

President Kennedy said we’ll pay any price, climb any hills, you know — (laughs) — whatever it may be — to find businesses.

But we actually prefer it when they fall into our lap, like getting a letter from somebody you hadn’t heard from for a couple of years, and you know what you’d pay for the business. And you know if the board of directors of that company regards it as attractive, they’ll be happy to buy it. And they know you’re going to show up at the closing and that you’re not going to pile debt on it or change things or anything.

They’ve got an answer, and then you have to see if they’ve got the question in their mind is what’s the best thing for Alleghany Corp? And in that case, we had $11 billion less at the end of the day — or the end of the dinner — than we had at the start of the day.

So, opportunity can be any place. And we do have a terrific operation, for example, in Israel, I mean, just terrific. And it’s pretty good size.

Would we like to have another one like it? Yeah, I just don’t know where the other one is. Charlie?