新浪财经讯 北京时间2月18日晚上消息，据美国金融危机调查委员会(FCIC)发布的谈话录影带，股神巴菲特(Warren Buffett)在与FCIC对话时指出，他评估一家企业时主要看重企业提高产品价格的能力，有时他甚至不会考虑谁掌管这家公司或管理的水平如何。
巴菲特表示：“评估一家企业时唯一重要的决定性因素是定价能力。如果你有能力提价而业务又不会流向竞争对手，你拥有的就是一家很好的企业。如果你在提价10%前还要祈祷，你拥有的就是一家糟糕的企业。”
现年80岁的巴菲特是世界第三号富豪，他的个人财富源自辉煌的股票投资和企业收购生涯。巴菲特曾收购过铁路和发电商等诸多企业，这些企业的定价力源自其客户几乎找不到其他选择。巴菲特还增持了可口可乐和卡夫食品等公司的股份，这类企业的品牌具有吸引力，能够吸引和留住客户。
巴菲特在录影带中还称：“出色的企业并不必然需要良好的管理。”FCIC对巴菲特的调查集中在他对穆迪公司的投资上。一些国会议员曾批评道，这家债券评级机构在房地产泡沫期向客户提供了虚夸的信用评级。巴菲特的回答是，他持有穆迪的股票是因为穆迪的市场份额领先，它与主要对手标普的强强组合使两家公司具有很大的定价灵活度。
巴菲特指出：“我对穆迪的管理层一无所知。如果你拥有一个城镇上唯一的一家报纸，这种状况持续了约五年时间，你就拥有了定价能力，你不用到办公室施加太多的管理。”
加州大学伯克利分校哈斯商学院的经济学教授赫马林(Benjamin E. Hermalin)则认为，具有市场统治地位并不能阻止恶劣的管理随着时间的推移毁掉一家企业。
去年巴菲特以265亿美元收购了伯灵顿北圣达菲公司，该公司拥有美国西部地区连接煤炭、谷类和消费者产品生产商及销售商的总计超过3万英里的铁路。巴菲特掌管的伯克希尔-哈撒韦集团麾下的电力公司：中美能源控股也拥有定价能力，它向美国大平原地区的家庭出售电力，还负责从怀俄明州向加州输送天然气。(立悟)
Buffett Says Pricing Power Beats Good Management When Evaluating Companies
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Warren Buffett. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Warren Buffett, the billionaire chief executive officer ofBerkshire Hathaway Inc., said he rates businesses on their ability to raise prices and sometimes doesn’t even consider the people in charge.
“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power,” Buffett told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in an interview released by the panel last week. “If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”
Buffett, 80, accumulated the world’s third-largest personal fortune through a career of stock picks and takeovers. He has bought companies such as railroads and electricity producers, whose pricing power stems from a dearth of competitive options available to clients. Buffett has also built stakes in firms like Coca-Cola Co. and Kraft Foods Inc., which rely on the appeal of their brands to attract and keep customers.
“The extraordinary business does not require good management,” Buffett said in the interview, which was conducted on May 26 in Omaha, Nebraska.
The FCIC investigators focused on Buffett’s investment in Moody’s Corp., the bond-ratings firm blamed by lawmakers for handing out inflated credit grades during the housing boom. Buffett said he held stock in Moody’s because the company’s leading market share, along with that of rival Standard & Poor’s, a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill Cos., gave the two firms flexibility in setting prices.
Pricing Power
“I knew nothing about the management of Moody’s,” said Buffett. “If you own the only newspaper in town, up until the last five years or so, you had pricing power and you didn’t have to go to the office.”
A dominant position can’t prevent a bad manager from destroying a company over time, said Benjamin E. Hermalin, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
“If you have a really dominant position you can survive for quite a long time with bad management but eventually it will catch up to you,” said Hermalin. “In the short run I would agree with Buffett but in the longer-run perspective there is something to be said for having a good manager.”
Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the railroad Buffett bought last year for $26.5 billion, owns more than 30,000 miles of track across the U.S. West connecting producers and distributors of coal, grain and consumer goods. Omaha-based Berkshire’s power company, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., sells electricity to homes in the Great Plains and transports natural gas fromWyoming to California.
Praise From Buffett
Buffett routinely singles out and praises managers from Berkshire’s more than 70 operating companies. MidAmerican Chairman David Sokol and Gregory Abel, the unit’s CEO, are “two terrific managers,” Buffett said last year in his letter to shareholders. The acquisition of Burlington Northern had the “additional virtue” of bringing the railroad’s CEO, Matthew Rose, to Berkshire, Buffett said.
Buffett criticized Kraft Chief Executive Officer Irene Rosenfeld last year for her takeover of Cadbury Plc and the sale of the foodmaker’s pizza brands. “Both deals were dumb,” Buffett told Berkshire investors in May. Berkshire is the biggest shareholder of Kraft with a stake valued at $3.3 billion at the end of December.
“In the short run, good management can make a stock pop but I follow what Warren’s saying, especially because his point of view looks at the fundamentals,” said Terry Connelly, dean of the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and a former managing director at Salomon Brothers. “Good management can’t do anything with a bad case.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Andrew Frye in New York at afrye@bloomberg.net; Dakin Campbell in San Francisco at dcampbell27@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Kraut at dkraut2@bloomberg.net Rick Green at rgreen18@bloomberg.net
没有评论:
发表评论