You mentioned earlier that Berkshire’s shoe business was great, but that other shoe businesses were not so good.
What are the uncertainties of the global brand leaders that Berkshire seems to like? They like Coke and Gillette. The global brand leaders in the shoe business being Nike and Reebok.
What are their uncertainties, in terms of long-term competitive advantage, business economics, consumer behavior, and the other risk factors that you mentioned in the annual report this year? Thank you.
WARREN BUFFETT: So, you’re really asking about the future prospects of Nike and Reebok?
Yeah. I don’t know that much about those businesses. We do have one person in this audience, at least, who owns a lot of Reebok.
But I am not expressing a negative view in any way on that. I just — I don’t understand that — I don’t understand their competitive position and the likelihood of permanence of their competitive position over a 10 or 20 year period as well as I think I understand the position of Brown and Dexter.
I think we’ve got very good businesses. But I — I’m not — I haven’t done the work and I’m not sure if I did the work I would understand them.
I think they are harder to understand, frankly, and to develop a fix on, than our kinds. But, they may be easier for other people who just have a better insight into that kind of business.
Some businesses are a lot easier to understand than others. And Charlie and I don’t like difficult problems. I mean, we — if something is hard to figure, you know, we’d rather multiply by three than by pi. I mean it’s just easier for us.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good afternoon. My name is Fred Costano (PH) from Detroit, Michigan. My question concerns Nike.
Nike is a company experiencing some short-term problems, but it’s a great company with an excellent track record. Phil Knight is similar to Bill Gates in the respect that he’s a marketing genius and is a very hard worker.
Making sneakers is a very simple business with high margins.
How do you view Nike and what do you think of the company?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I think Phil Knight is a terrific operator. I think — and he’s a competitor. He’s got a lot of money in Nike.
But as terms of what we think of the stock, you know, we keep all of those views to ourselves pretty much.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name’s Ed Boyle (PH) and I’m from Chicago. My question’s for Warren and Charlie.
Do you ever have any plans, or would you be interested, in buying a professional sport team — or sports equipment manufacturing company, being that we’re — sports is in a global world today? Or is this out of the Berkshire game?
WARREN BUFFETT: I owned a quarter of a major — a minor-league team, but it’s not responsible for my position on the Forbes 400.
The answer to your question about buying a sports team is no. In fact, if — Charlie and I — if you read that either one of us is buying a sports team, it may be time to talk about successors.
We are — we do — sports equipment has generally not been a very good business, although, you know, obviously Nike’s done incredibly well in its overall operation.
But — we own Spalding. We own Russell. And you know, Spalding has been around a long, long time. A.G. Spalding, I forget when the hell he was — I think he was trying to take baseball to the rest of the world back in the, I don’t know, the 1880s or something like that.
But it’s — generally speaking, if you look at the people that have made golf equipment, footballs, helmets particularly, baseball gloves, baseballs, it’s not been a particularly profitable business.
And certain aspects of it, like helmets, you know — the last thing Berkshire should do is own a helmet company. A helmet company should be owned by some guy that owes about a million dollars and doesn’t have a dime to his name, because, you know, he is not going to be a target. And we would be the ultimate target.
That’s the reason — we used to be involved in Pinkerton, but we’d had no interest in — and we got offered the chance to buy the whole place, and the idea of owning a business that provided guards at airports, you know, when anything went wrong, you know, you’re going to say that it was the guard’s fault. And here’s this super-rich corporation around there that is a perfect target.
I mean, a guard company at airports, again, should be owned by somebody whose net worth does not get out to two figures.
So, you won’t see much of us in the sports arena.
But Charlie here, are you looking at the Clippers or —?
Now I’m worried that he is.
CHARLIE MUNGER: Whatever Warren thinks about sports teams ownership, I like it less.
