No. of Recommendations: 11
Berkshire has options for their stake that will likely not be available to us. Things like choosing sections of the business if they are up for grabs, maybe getting all of Kraft's Cheese products - like when Berkshire got Duracell from Gillette when they split it off.
It's a more attractive strategy when you actually have capital gains that you don't want to pay taxes on, something which unfortunately does not apply to a firm like KraftHeinz whose value has gone from $23.4b at the merger in July 2015 to $7.4b now, 10+ years later. The loss is not nearly as bad as that, given the fact that they made money on the $9b stake in Heinz they owned from 2013 to 2015, through share appreciation and dividends; Buffett said in 2018 AR that the stake's carrying value was $13.8b, and there have been lots of dividends since then. But it's obviously been a terrible 10-year investment, even if they break even with the dividends, and they won't have any capital gains to shelter.
