Why John Malone is Warren Buffett’s Equal (MorningStar)
Hardly anyone can be Warren Buffett. If you owned Buffett’s stock, you did pretty well. But too few investors know that following another finance genius brought great gains, too – and is likely to keep delivering in the future. That’s John Malone, the cable and media pioneer. Last month, more than 40,000 people showed up to Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) annual meeting to hear him and sidekick Charlie Munger answer questions for the day. Last year, a charity-benefit auction on eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) to have lunch with Buffett ended up with a price tag of nearly $3.5 million. Obviously, time is precious for chief executives who created a lot of wealth for shareholders. Very rarely do you find excellence sustained over a long period. Even more unique is to find a leader who repeatedly battled back from situations where he had to start over. That’s why the investment world should view John Malone on a par with Buffett.
Buffett tells GEICO: ‘It ain’t over yet, fellas’ (BuffaloNews)
Even with the 2,500th worker on board at GEICO’s Amherst customer service center, the insurance giant is keeping the “Now Hiring” sign turned on. “It ain’t over yet, fellas. We’re going on from here,” said Warren E. Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A), which owns GEICO and The Buffalo News. “People go where they’re welcome, and Western New York has its arms out.” GEICO still has room to expand at the $40 million customer service center it opened in the CrossPoint Business Park in Amherst in September 2005, but company executives declined to set a long-term growth target for the facility.
BYD Says Electric-Car Charger Melts in Hong Kong Parking Lot (BusinessWeek)
BYD Co. (1211), the Chinese electric carmaker partly owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A), said a charger at a Hong Kong parking lot partially melted because of a faulty connection to the electricity grid. The incident at the Oi Man Plaza parking lot on June 18 didn’t cause other damage and won’t affect BYD’s electric-vehicle operations in Hong Kong, the Shenzhen, China-based automaker said in a statement posted on its official microblog. The company is targeting a fleet of 1,000 electric taxis in operation in Hong Kong in 2014 and more than 3,000 in 2015. Link Real Estate Investment Trust (823), which manages the parking lot, said it would suspend the use of the taxi chargers until the cause of the incident was determined.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Jumps Over Allstate as No. 2 Insurer (PropertyCasualty360)
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A), led by the group’s auto-insurance subsidiary Geico, leapt over Allstate in 2012 to become the second-largest P&C insurance group based on net premiums written, according to data from SNL Financial. Lists of the Top 100 insurance groups and insurance companies, based on total net premiums written, will be published in the July edition of PropertyCasualty360-National Underwriter magazine. The Berkshire group saw a 2012 increase in NPW of 12.1 percent—the largest such growth in the Top 20 P&C insurance groups. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A)’s NPW was about $27.25 billion.
