During the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, on Saturday, the company’s chairman and CEO Warren Buffett met over 40,000 shareholders, including thousands of investors from China.
At this year’s meeting, the first question he took was related to Berkshire’s investment in BYD. Since Buffett first invested in the Chinese EV company in 2008, Berkshire’s profit from it has exceeded 30 times. It’s not just BYD. Buffett, famous for value investing, has always been a long-term investor, known for the concept of “rolling snowballs down a hill in wet snow”.
Over a decade after Buffett invested in BYD, despite the impact of artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, Buffett insists that his investment principles will not change.
Buffett is an example that all investment decisions should be based on investors’ deep insights into the future of industries and the value of companies. That’s the right path, far superior to short-term behaviors that we are so familiar with in the capital markets, such as storytelling and selling speculative concepts.
More investors need to understand what patient capital is. By discovering valuable companies and sharing in their growth dividends through long-term investment, patient capital earns more than short-term trading gains. Of course, this demands a high level of investor literacy, on which both domestic and global venture capital still have a long way to go.
The success of BYD also shows that the competitiveness of Chinese electric vehicles in the world market today is a result of multiple factors rather than the Chinese government subsidies, as some Western China-bashing politicians allege. Also the rise of the Chinese EV sector benefits not only the world’s green transition but also global investors, including those from the United States.
-BEIJING NEWS