Berkshire Hathaway
took new equity positions in home-building, notably industry leader
D.R. Horton,
while reducing its stake in
General Motors
and eliminating a holding in
McKesson,
according to a 13-F regulatory filing released late Monday.
During the second quarter, Berkshire also added to its holding in
Capital One Financial
and reduced its position in
Celanese.
Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK/A, BRK/B) pared its holding in General Motors (GM) by 45% to 22 million shares now worth about $750 million. That holding, which dates back almost a decade, hadn’t been particularly profitable for Berkshire given its cost of around $30 a share. GM is currently trading around $34 a share.
The GM investment is believed to have been made by one of CEO Warren Buffett’s two investment lieutenants, Todd Weschler and Todd Combs, rather than by Buffett, who oversees about 90% of Berkshire’s equity portfolio of about $350 billion. Buffett isn’t enamored of the highly competitive auto business.
Buffett likes the home-building industry and Berkshire took a stake of about 6 million shares of D.R. Horton (DHI), the country’s largest home builder, that’s now worth over $700 million. Berkshire also took small positions in home builders
Lennar
(LEN) valued at less than $20 million and
NVR
(NVR) valued at around $70 million.
Berkshire owns Clayton Homes, the biggest producer of manufactured homes, and owns other housing-related businesses, including Shaw, a maker of carpeting and flooring, and Benjamin Moore in paints.
Berkshire lifted its stake in Capital One by about 25% to 12.5 million shares worth around $1.4 billion and eliminated a holding in McKesson—some 2.3 million shares—that had totaled about $one billion. Berkshire reduced its holding in Celanese by about 40% to 5.4 million shares now worth around $670 million.
The Berkshire 13-F includes U.S. equity holdings and an occasional foreign investment. There also apparently were sales of overseas stocks in the second quarter given that Berkshire disclosed total equity sales of about $12 billion in the period based on its recent 10-Q report. The reported sales in the 13-F don’t total $12 billion.
Berkshire left unchanged its stake of 93 million shares of
Paramount Global
(PARA) in the second quarter. Barron’s speculated in a recent article that Berkshire might have been a seller of the media company’s stock given critical comments by Buffett in the spring about its streaming prospects. He said streaming is “not really a very good business” in a CNBC interview. It’s possible that the Paramount stake is held by Berkshire managers Combs or Weschler rather than Buffett.
Berkshire is the largest holder of Paramount with a stake of worth about $1.4 billion. Berkshire owns around 15% of Paramount.
Write to Andrew Bary at [email protected]
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