Editor’s note for Tuesday, December 13, 2022
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
My thoughts today:
We live in an uncertain world: That’s the lesson of almost everything in this newsletter today.
The one particular bit of uncertainty I’d like to point out here though is from the News Briefing section (which is the second item in the newsletter): Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has offloaded shares of electric car heavyweight BYD. The legendary Omaha-based investment firm sold about $34.4 million worth of Hong Kong-listed shares in BYD today. (The number is in U.S. dollars, it was about 267.69 million in Hong Kong dollars.)
That might sound like a lot of money if, like me, you are a mere peasant, but the sale only reduced Warren Buffett’s firm’s stake from 15.07% to 14.95%.
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting move. Given the seeming inevitability of the electric car business, and BYD’s success so far in it, I would interpret to the Buffett sale to mean one or more of the following things:
- BYD as a company is not quite what everyone, including Buffett, previously believed;
- The electric car sector in China and globally is over-invested and overhyped;
- China is about to go through some horrible times;
- Buffett and his fellow Berkshire Hathaway executives are out of touch.
Which of those do you think is right?
Our word of the day is BYD (比亚迪 bǐyǎdí).
