No. of Recommendations: 4
Buffett has been selling since August 2022, trimming this spectacularly successful bet:
Berkshire Hathaway initially purchased its BYD stake in 2008, acquiring 225 million shares for about $232 million. In late 2021, Berkshire owned about 21% of BYD, according to Hong Kong regulatory filings, worth more than $7 billion dollars at its peak last year.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wa...With the sales announced today, we are down from about 21% to 7.98% of the Hong Kong shares, or about 87 million shares still held, by my calculation.
The share price is 236 CNY, and has been between about 225 and 300 for the last 2 years, so so far, these sales have worked out pretty well. But BYD the company is firing on all cylinders, probably passing Tesla for unit EV sales and doing this quite profitably - they are currently at about 22 times earnings over the last 12 months, and their revenues are up about 80% year over year. They sold 287,454 hybrid and fully electric cars in September alone, on track for 3 million vehicles in 2023, about the same as Tesla. For comparison's sake, world car EV sales this year are projected to be 14 million, and sales (electric and internal combustion combined) are expected to be 87 million this year. So BYD will sell about 15% of all electric cars and almost 4% of ALL cars.
I wouldn't want to bet against them, and I would be happy if Berkshire held on to the remaining 87 million shares, worth about $3.6b.
dtb
