7.Portillo’s Hot Dogs

Portillo的热狗

[00:49:50] Sean Siegel: Hello, I’m Sean Siegel from Chicago, IL. Thank you for investing your time, and to the executive committee for putting on this meeting, and for bringing together a diverse group of people in attendance under one roof Out of all the companies that Berkshire Hathaway owns, there was one that you acquired, the Chicago-based company Portillo’s Hot Dogs. How did you know that this would be a good fit for the overall company’s portfolio?

[00:49:50] Sean Siegel：你好，我是来自伊利诺伊州芝加哥的 Sean Siegel。感谢你们投入时间，也感谢执行委员会组织了这次会议，把如此多元化的一群人聚集在同一个屋檐下。在 Berkshire Hathaway 所拥有的众多公司中，有一家是来自芝加哥的 Portillo’s Hot Dogs。你们当初是如何判断这家公司适合纳入 Berkshire 整体投资组合的？

[00:50:26] Warren Buffett: Well, I’ll have to ask Greg about that because I don’t know anything about it. So maybe he bought it when I was looking the other way.

[00:50:26] Warren Buffett：这个问题我恐怕得问 Greg，因为我对这家公司一无所知。也许是我没注意的时候他买下来的。

[00:50:37] Greg Abel: I think I’ve got to call a friend on this one.

[00:50:37] Greg Abel：我想这个问题我得打电话找个朋友求助了。

[00:50:44] Warren Buffett: We own a lot of companies, but I do like to think I know most of them, but maybe a subsidiary of a subsidiary in some way. But I really don’t know anything about it. I’m sorry, but that may be a good thing. I do know something about hot dogs, though.

[00:50:44] Warren Buffett：我们确实拥有很多公司，我通常觉得自己至少对大多数公司有所了解，但这家公司可能是某个子公司的子公司之类的。不过我确实对它完全不了解。很抱歉，不过这可能也不是什么坏事。虽然如此，我对热狗还是有点了解的。

[00:51:06] Greg Abel: We do have a lot of companies in Chicago, Warren, through Marmon, and that’s been a great opportunity where we’ve accumulated a variety of excellent companies under that portfolio, but as you noted, I don’t believe Portillo’s falls under that.

[00:51:06] Greg Abel：Warren，我们在芝加哥确实有很多公司，是通过 Marmon 体系持有的。那一直是一个非常好的平台，我们在那个组合下面聚集了很多优秀的公司。不过正如你说的，我不认为 Portillo’s 属于那个体系。

[00:51:28] Warren Buffett: I look at the financial statements of about, perhaps, 50 or 60 of our companies every month but in the case of Marmon, for example, Marmon itself owns over 100 companies. It was created by Jay Pritzker, and his brother Bob, and it was a remarkable company when we bought it. But it was highly diversified already, and then we diversified it further.

[00:51:28] Warren Buffett：我每个月大概会查看我们大约 50 到 60 家公司的财务报表。但以 Marmon 为例，Marmon 本身就拥有 100 多家公司。它是由 Jay Pritzker 和他的兄弟 Bob 创建的。我们收购它时，它已经是一家非常出色的公司，而且当时就已经高度多元化了，后来我们又进一步扩大了这种多元化。

So it is something of a Berkshire within Berkshire. We found that that’s working very good as an arrangement. It was interesting. Jay Pritzker was a remarkable manager, and there are various branches of the Pritzker family. So it really goes back to A.N. Pritzker before Jay, and so on. But in 1954, they changed the federal tax code very dramatically in the United States. It was quite a blow to me because I’ve been at Columbia, and I’ve been reading a J.K. Lasser book about the tax code, and then they went and changed the whole damn thing.

所以它有点像是 Berkshire 里面的一个 Berkshire。我们发现这种安排运作得非常好。Jay Pritzker 是一位非常杰出的经理人，而 Pritzker 家族本身也有很多不同的分支。实际上，这一切可以追溯到 Jay 之前的 A.N. Pritzker 等人。不过在 1954 年，美国联邦税法发生了一次非常重大的变化。这对我来说打击不小，因为当时我还在 Columbia，正在读一本 J.K. Lasser 写的税法书，结果他们就把整个税法都改了。

But ‘54 was a big year. Big change. Those years come every now, and then like 1986, and you may see a big one of these days. There was a company called Rockwood Chocolates in Brooklyn, and they made Rockwood Chocolate Bits, which we used to sell at the Buffet grocery store, and people made chocolate chip cookies out of them, and everything, and then it turned out that cocoa, which lately has had a big run to cocoa was $0.05 a pound in 1941 when LIFO was first allowed for insurance, for tax purposes. The Rockwood Chocolate company went into the LIFO. So they owned 30 million pounds of cocoa.

1954 年是一个非常重要的年份，发生了重大变化。这种年份偶尔会出现，比如 1986 年就是一次，也许未来某一天还会再出现。那时候在 Brooklyn 有一家叫 Rockwood Chocolates 的公司，他们生产一种叫 Rockwood Chocolate Bits 的产品，我们以前在 Buffett 家开的杂货店里也卖过，人们用它来做巧克力曲奇等等。后来发生的一件事是，可可这种商品——最近价格涨得很厉害——在 1941 年第一次允许在税务上使用 LIFO（后进先出）会计方法时，价格只有每磅 0.05 美元。Rockwood Chocolate 公司采用了 LIFO 方法，因此他们持有大约 3000 万磅的可可库存。

Then, cocoa took a run in 1955, and I just moved to New York. There was a provision in the new tax code that if you were in two or more companies, and you did certain things, and you’ve been in them for five years, and you got out of one of them there would be no capital gains tax on LIFO inventory gains, and tax rates were around 48%, maybe 52%, and so there was this huge profit cause the cocoa had gone up in price, but that made it terrible for them in selling Rockwood Chocolate Bits because the price of retail, which of the chocolate bits did not match what was going on at wholesale. Something almost identical has been happening in the chocolate business. Recently, Hershey Chocolate just came out, and they’re going to have a bad quarter, and we’re paying $4.50 a pound for chocolate because things are going on in West Africa that make cocoa prices go up dramatically.

随后在 1955 年，可可价格出现了一轮大涨，而那时我刚搬到 New York。新的税法中有一项规定：如果你持有两家或以上的公司，并满足一些特定条件，而且持有时间达到五年，那么在退出其中一家公司时，由 LIFO 库存产生的收益就不需要缴纳资本利得税。当时的税率大约在 48%，甚至可能接近 52%。由于可可价格上涨，这家公司账面上出现了巨大的利润，但这对他们销售 Rockwood Chocolate Bits 来说却是个问题，因为零售价格与批发市场上可可价格的变化完全不匹配。最近在巧克力行业中发生的事情几乎是同样的情况。最近 Hershey Chocolate 就宣布，他们这一季度的业绩会很差，因为现在我们为巧克力支付的成本大约是每磅 4.50 美元，而 West Africa 发生的一些事情让可可价格大幅上涨。

In any event, Jay Pritzker bought control of Rockwood, the chocolate company, and as I say, I was 24 or 25 years old, and they called the meeting to split off one of the chocolate businesses in a way that would enable them to recognize the gain on this these cocoa beans without paying roughly 50% federal taxes on the gain. So I went to the meeting, which was in Brooklyn, and nobody was there, this was in the turned every page category, except one guy. I was 24, and he was 29, and it was Jay Pritzker. Nobody had shown up at the meeting, and it was kind of a crummy building they had. But they had a lot of corporates there, and Jay just gave me a lecture or a lesson, I should say, on the tax code, and I could have gone to graduate school for years, and never learned as much as he did, and then later, we actually bought the company, that Rockwood Company, but after he did some other things became the basis for Marmon, and Marmon, among other things, developed the car that won the first Indianapolis Speedway race, and it invented the rearview mirror, which I’m not sure is a great advantage in economics or anything. They used to have, at the Indianapolis 500, two people in the car. One guy was to look back and see what the other people were doing, and the other guy was to drive the car. Our guy got sick, and so they invented a rear-view mirror. So if you want to see what’s going on in the laboratories of Berkshire Hathaway, we’ve got people working on things like the rear-view mirror.

无论如何，Jay Pritzker 买下了 Rockwood 这家巧克力公司的控制权。当时我大概 24 或 25 岁，他们召开了一次会议，计划把其中一家巧克力业务分拆出来，这样就可以在不缴纳大约 50% 联邦税的情况下，实现这些可可库存的账面收益。我于是去了那次在 Brooklyn 举行的会议。结果现场几乎没人，这正是“把每一页都翻一遍”的那种情况。只有一个人到了。我当时 24 岁，他 29 岁，那个人就是 Jay Pritzker。那次会议没有其他人到场，公司的办公楼看起来也相当破旧。但他们拥有很多公司资产，而 Jay 给我上了一堂关于税法的课，可以说是一次真正的讲解。我如果去读几年研究生，也未必能学到他讲的那么多东西。后来我们实际上还买下了那家 Rockwood 公司，不过在他进行了一些其他操作之后，这家公司最终成为 Marmon 的基础之一。Marmon 做过很多事情，其中包括制造了赢得第一届 Indianapolis Speedway 比赛的汽车，还发明了后视镜。我不确定后视镜在经济学上是不是一项伟大的发明。过去在 Indianapolis 500 比赛中，车里通常有两个人：一个负责往后看其他赛车的情况，另一个负责开车。后来我们的那个人生病了，于是他们就发明了后视镜。所以如果你想看看 Berkshire Hathaway 的实验室里在做什么，我们也有人在研究类似后视镜这样的东西。

[00:57:40] Greg Abel: Hey, Warren? I’m happy a friend called. So that still works. Peter Eastwood, who runs one of our Berkshire subsidiaries, and does a great job of running it, tracked down that Portillo’s is owned by a private equity firm called Berkshire Partners. So that was the basis of the question. But it’s not associated with Berkshire. So, we got to the bottom of that one. Thank you, Peter.

[00:57:40] Greg Abel：Warren，我很高兴刚刚有朋友打电话过来，这个办法果然还有效。Peter Eastwood 负责管理我们的一家 Berkshire 子公司，他做得非常出色。他查了一下，Portillo’s 实际上是由一家名为 Berkshire Partners 的私募股权公司持有的。这就是问题产生的原因。但它和 Berkshire Hathaway 没有关系。所以我们终于把这个问题搞清楚了。谢谢你，Peter。