I.H.123.Warren Buffett.Conglomerate Structure

企业集团需要有一个意见强烈的思想核心。

1、《1988-02-29 Warren Buffett's Letters to Berkshire Shareholders》

I would say that the controlled company offers two main advantages. First, when we control a company we get to allocate capital, whereas we are likely to have little or nothing to say about this process with marketable holdings. This point can be important because the heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising. Most bosses rise to the top because they have excelled in an area such as marketing, production, engineering, administration or, sometimes, institutional politics.

我会说，控股公司有两项主要优势。第一，当我们控股一家企业时，我们可以进行资本配置；而在可交易持股中，我们很可能对资本配置几乎没有发言权。这一点很重要，因为很多公司的负责人并不擅长资本配置。他们的不擅长并不奇怪：多数老板之所以爬到顶端，是因为他们在某个领域表现出色，比如市场营销、生产、工程、行政管理——有时甚至是机构政治。

局部泛化的缺陷，或者说不能产生更简洁、更统一的知识结构终归是有麻烦的，不能有效保存已经到手的胜利果实。

Once they become CEOs, they face new responsibilities. They now must make capital allocation decisions, a critical job that they may have never tackled and that is not easily mastered. To stretch the point, it’s as if the final step for a highly-talented musician was not to perform at Carnegie Hall but, instead, to be named Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

一旦他们成为 CEO，就要面对新的责任：他们必须做资本配置决策——这是一项关键工作，可能是他们从未真正处理过、而且也不容易掌握的工作。把话说得夸张一点：就好像一个极有天赋的音乐家，职业生涯的最后一步不是在 Carnegie Hall 演出，而是被任命为美联储主席。

The lack of skill that many CEOs have at capital allocation is no small matter: After ten years on the job, a CEO whose company annually retains earnings equal to 10% of net worth will have been responsible for the deployment of more than 60% of all the capital at work in the business.

许多 CEO 在资本配置上的欠缺，绝不是小事：在任十年后，如果一家公司每年留存的利润相当于净资产的10%，那么这位 CEO 其实已经对公司运用的全部资本中超过60%的那部分资本的“去向”负过责任了。

CEOs who recognize their lack of capital-allocation skills (which not all do) will often try to compensate by turning to their staffs, management consultants, or investment bankers. Charlie and I have frequently observed the consequences of such “help.” On balance, we feel it is more likely to accentuate the capital-allocation problem than to solve it.

那些意识到自己不擅长资本配置的 CEO（并不是人人都意识到）往往会试图用“求助”来弥补：转向内部幕僚、管理咨询公司或投资银行。Charlie 和我经常观察到这种“帮助”带来的后果。总体上，我们觉得：它更可能放大资本配置的问题，而不是解决问题。

In the end, plenty of unintelligent capital allocation takes place in corporate America. (That’s why you hear so much about “restructuring.”) Berkshire, however, has been fortunate. At the companies that are our major non-controlled holdings, capital has generally been well-deployed and, in some cases, brilliantly so.

归根结底，美国企业界发生了大量不聪明的资本配置。（这就是为什么你总听到那么多“重组”。）不过，Berkshire 很幸运。在我们那些重要的非控股持股公司里，资本总体上被配置得很好，有些情况下甚至堪称精彩。

The second advantage of a controlled company over a marketable security has to do with taxes. Berkshire, as a corporate holder, absorbs some significant tax costs through the ownership of partial positions that we do not when our ownership is 80%, or greater. Such tax disadvantages have long been with us, but changes in the tax code caused them to increase significantly during the past year. As a consequence, a given business result can now deliver Berkshire financial results that are as much as 50% better if they come from an 80%-or-greater holding rather than from a lesser holding.

控股公司相对于可交易证券的第二个优势，与税收有关。作为公司股东，Berkshire 持有非控股（即持股低于80%）的股权时，会承担一些显著的税负成本；而当我们的持股达到或超过80%时，就不会承受这些成本（或会大幅减轻）。这种税收劣势早就存在，但税法的变化使它在过去一年显著加重。因此，同样的经营成果，如果来自持股80%或以上的控股企业，而不是来自较小持股的企业，如今可能给 Berkshire 带来高出多达50%的财务结果。

2、《1994 Warren Buffett.UNC Business School》

It is also true that you can take the capital out, the earnings out of the business that you control 100%. You can decide the distribution policy and put [the capital] over someplace else — and that’s an advantage to us.

同样，你 100% 控股时，也可以把资本、把收益从企业里拿出来。你可以决定分配政策，把资金投到别处——这对我们是个优势。

If the XYZ company that we owned 5% of wants to go out and buy movie studios or whatever they might want to do, they get to allocate the capital. And, all things being equal (and even unequal), I would rather allocate the capital. I can do that if we own 100%, so that’s an advantage to owning 100%.

如果我们只持有 5% 的 XYZ 公司想买电影制片厂，或者想干别的，他们有权分配资本。而在其他条件相同（甚至不相同）时，我更愿意由我来分配资本。若我们 100% 持有，就能做到这一点，所以 100% 持有确实有优势。

2、《2004-05-01 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, the main thing is that practically nobody else does it. And yet to me it’s obvious it’s the way to go.

查理·芒格：嗯，主要是几乎没有其他人这样做。然而对我来说，很明显这是正确的做法。

There’s a lot in Berkshire that is like that. It’s just a little different from the way other people do it, partly the luxury of having a controlling shareholder of strong opinions.

在伯克希尔有很多这样的情况。它只是与其他人做事的方式有些不同，部分原因是拥有一个有强烈意见的控股股东的奢侈。

That accounts for this. It would be hard for a committee, including a lot of employees, to come up with these decisions.

这就是这一切的原因。对于一个委员会，包括许多员工来说，很难做出这样的决定。

3、《2012-05-05 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I think it’s almost impossible. Besides, I mean, it’s taken a long, long time to get here. It’s taken a great amount of consistency, and that consistency has been allowed because, basically, we’ve had a controlling shareholder during that time.

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我认为这几乎是不可能的。此外，我的意思是，来到这里花了很长很长的时间。这需要极大的持续性，而这种持续性之所以能够实现，基本上是因为在这段时间里我们有一个控股股东。

So we’ve not had to bow to any of the urgings of Wall Street or, you know, whatever may be the fad of the day. But we have had a culture that — where we could write out 13 or 14 principles more than 30 years ago, and we’ve been able to stick with them.

所以我们不必屈从于华尔街的任何压力，或者说，任何当下的潮流。但我们有一种文化——在 30 多年前，我们能够写出 13 或 14 条原则，并且我们一直能够坚持这些原则。

And that’s very hard to do for most American corporations, and I think it’s very hard to do when managers come and go and they have small shareholdings. I think it takes a very unusual structure to be able to do it.

这对大多数美国公司来说是非常困难的，我认为当管理者频繁更换并且他们的持股比例很小的时候，这更难做到。我认为需要一种非常特殊的结构才能做到这一点。

And, you know, it took a long time to get to the point where people with large private businesses in this country really cared about where those businesses were lodged after they gave up their stewardship. Took a long time to have it get so that a great many of those people would think of Berkshire first.

而且，花了很长时间才能达到一个阶段，即很多大型私营企业在放弃管理后，真正关心这些企业的去向。很多人现在首先想到伯克希尔。

And the nice thing about it is, if they think of Berkshire first they don’t think of anybody second, so we get the call.

而这件事的好处在于，如果他们首先想到伯克希尔，他们就不会想到其他任何人，所以我们会接到电话。

We don’t do well buying businesses at auction. I mean, if somebody’s only interest is to get the top price for their business, you know, seldom we’ll get one.

我们在拍卖中购买企业的表现并不理想。也就是说，如果某人的唯一兴趣是获得他们企业的最高价格，我们通常很难拿下。

We did buy one at auction, I mean, but it was an add-on. The Dutch company we bought yesterday, we bought at auction. But that sometimes happens with our smaller acquisitions.

我们确实有在拍卖中买过一家企业，但那只是一个附加收购。我们昨天收购的荷兰公司就是通过拍卖获得的。但这在我们的小型收购中偶尔会发生。

But the big private acquisitions are going to come to Berkshire because they want to come to Berkshire. And that’s a significant competitive edge, and I don’t see how anybody really challenges us on that.

但大型私人收购将会来到伯克希尔，因为他们想要来到伯克希尔。这是一个显著的竞争优势，我看不出还有谁能在这方面真正挑战我们。

4、《2015-02-27 Berkshire - Past Present and Future》

At the shareholder level, taxes and frictional costs weigh heavily on individual investors when they attempt to reallocate capital among businesses and industries. Even tax-free institutional investors face major costs as they move capital because they usually need intermediaries to do this job. A lot of mouths with expensive tastes then clamor to be fed -- among them investment bankers, accountants, consultants, lawyers and such capital-reallocators as leveraged buyout operators. Money-shufflers don’t come cheap.

在股东的层面，当个人投资者试图在企业和行业之间重新分配资本时，税收和摩擦成本会给他们带来沉重的负担。即使免税的机构投资者在转换资本时也面临比较大的成本，因为他们通常需要中介机构去完成这个工作。此时，无数张昂贵的嘴需要被养活——其中包括投资银行家，会计师，咨询师，律师以及资本配置运营商比如杠杆收购者。资本的重新洗牌可一点也不便宜。

In contrast, a conglomerate such as Berkshire is perfectly positioned to allocate capital rationally and at minimal cost. Of course, form itself is no guarantee of success: We have made plenty of mistakes, and we will make more. Our structural advantages, however, are formidable.

相比之下，像伯克希尔这样的企业集团完全有能力以最低的成本，合理地配置资本。当然，企业形式本身并不能保证会成功：我们犯了无数错误，并且还会犯更多。然而，我们的结构性优势是非常强大的。

At Berkshire, we can -- without incurring taxes or much in the way of other costs -- move huge sums from businesses that have limited opportunities for incremental investment to other sectors with greater promise. Moreover, we are free of historical biases created by lifelong association with a given industry and are not subject to pressures from colleagues having a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. That’s important: If horses had controlled investment decisions, there would have been no auto industry.

在伯克希尔，我们能够在不产生税负或者其他成本的情况下，将巨额资本，从增量投资机会有限的业务中，转移到其他有更大前景的业务中。另外，我们不会因与特定行业的终身联系而产生历史偏见，也不会遭受维护现状符合其既得利益的同伴的压力。这一点很重要：如果马儿控制了投资决策，那么就不会有汽车行业了。

Another major advantage we possess is the ability to buy pieces of wonderful businesses -- a.k.a. common stocks. That’s not a course of action open to most managements. Over our history, this strategic alternative has proved to be very helpful; a broad range of options always sharpens decision-making. The businesses we are offered by the stock market every day -- in small pieces, to be sure -- are often far more attractive than the businesses we are concurrently being offered in their entirety. Additionally, the gains we’ve realized from marketable securities have helped us make certain large acquisitions that would otherwise have been beyond our financial capabilities.

我们拥有的另一个主要优势是，购买好生意的一部分(普通股)的能力。这不是大多数管理层可以采取的活动。在我们的历史中，这种策略选择已被证明是非常有益的；广泛的选择总是使得决策更加明智。股票市场每天给予我们的企业报价(当然只是一小部分)，往往比我们整体收购的报价更具吸引力。此外，我们从股市上实现的收益，帮助我们进行了许多大型收购，否则这些收购将会超出我们的财务能力。

In effect, the world is Berkshire’s oyster -- a world offering us a range of opportunities far beyond those realistically open to most companies. We are limited, of course, to businesses whose economic prospects we can evaluate. And that’s a serious limitation: Charlie and I have no idea what a great many companies will look like ten years from now. But that limitation is much smaller than that borne by an executive whose experience has been confined to a single industry. On top of that, we can profitably scale to a far larger size than the many businesses that are constrained by the limited potential of the single industry in which they operate.

实际上世界是属于伯克希尔的——这个世界提供给我们范围广泛的机会，远远超出大多数企业实际面临的机会。当然，我们仅限于那些我们能够评估其经济前景的企业。这是一个重要的限制：很多企业查理和我都不知道十年后将会如何。但是这种限制远远小于，一位经验仅限于单一领域的高管所承受的限制。除此之外，我们可以有利可图的持续扩大规模，远远超过许多企业，这些企业普遍受到其所在单一行业潜力有限的制约。

I mentioned earlier that See’s Candy had produced huge earnings compared to its modest capital requirements. We would have loved, of course, to intelligently use those funds to expand our candy operation. But our many attempts to do so were largely futile. So, without incurring tax inefficiencies or frictional costs, we have used the excess funds generated by See’s to help purchase other businesses. If See’s had remained a stand-alone company, its earnings would have had to be distributed to investors to redeploy, sometimes after being heavily depleted by large taxes and, almost always, by significant frictional and agency costs.

我前面提到，相比于它适度的资本需求，喜诗糖果产出了大量现金收益。当然，我们很乐意明智地使用那些资本，去扩大我们的糖果业务。但是我们多次扩张的尝试基本上都是徒劳的。所以，在不产生无效税负或摩擦成本的情况下，我们将喜诗糖果产出的多余资金用于收购其他业务。如果喜诗糖果仍然是一家独立的公司，它的巨额收益将不得不分配给投资者以重新配置，有时在巨额税收以后，几乎总是被巨大的摩擦和代理人成本耗尽。

在美国100%控股的企业有股息扣除的政策（Dividends Received Deduction，简称DRD），不需要缴税联邦相关的所得税。

5、《2021-05-01 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

WARREN BUFFETT: And we’ll — you know, we’ve got some wonderful deals, and some terrible deals.

沃伦·巴菲特：我们有一些很棒的交易，也有一些糟糕的交易。

And the nice thing about it is — as I pointed out, this doesn’t really apply in the case of Precision, precisely — but when we’re disappointed in a business, it usually becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of our business, just by the nature of things, because it isn’t going anyplace.

而这件事的好处在于——正如我所指出的，这在精确度的情况下并不适用——但当我们对一项业务感到失望时，它通常会逐渐成为我们业务中越来越小的百分比，这就是事物的本质，因为它没有任何进展。

And when we get a successful business, like a GEICO or something of the sort — GEICO’s doing — they’re doing 15 times as much business as when we bought control in 19 — they become a proportionally much more important part of our mix.

当我们获得一个成功的业务，比如 GEICO 或类似的公司——GEICO 的业务——他们的业务量是我们在 19 年收购控制权时的 15 倍——他们在我们的组合中变得相对更重要。

So, you really get, through just natural forces, you get more of your money in the things that have developed more favorably than you thought. You actually end up getting a greater concentration in the ones that work out.

所以，通过自然力量，你实际上会在那些发展得比你想象中更有利的事物上获得更多的收益。你最终会在那些成功的项目上获得更大的集中度。

注意力的锚点，water the flowers and skip over the weeds。

It’s not like — as Charlie would say, it’s not like having children. I mean — (Laughs)

这并不像——正如查理所说，这并不像有孩子。我是说——（笑）

The one that — the bad ones cause you more problems. (Laughs)

坏的那些会给你带来更多问题。（笑）

But the — in this — in the children of businesses, the small ones kind of — by the way, we started with three businesses, Charlie and I. And Berkshire was textiles, Diversified Retailing was a department store, and trading stamps were Blue Chip’s business. And those were the three companies we put together. And all three of the original businesses failed.

但是在这方面，孩子们的企业，小企业有点——顺便说一下，我们是从三家企业开始的，查理和我。伯克希尔是纺织业，多元化零售是百货商店，交易邮票是蓝筹公司的业务。这三家公司是我们组合在一起的。而且这三家原始企业都失败了。

Which sort of gets me, in terms of the people that are worried about, don’t we know that coal is going to be phased out over time? (Laughs)

这让我有点困惑，关于那些担心的人，我们难道不知道煤炭会逐渐被淘汰吗？（笑）

Of course, we know coal’s going to be — you know, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be phased out over time. I mean that —

当然，我们知道煤炭会被淘汰——你知道的，但这并不意味着我们会随着时间的推移而被取代。我的意思是——

Every business has some things to think about, about that way.

每个企业都有一些事情需要考虑，关于那种方式。

I.H.123.Warren Buffett.Conglomerate Structure

I.H.123.Warren Buffett.Conglomerate Structure

1、《1988-02-29 Warren Buffett's Letters to Berkshire Shareholders》

2、《1994 Warren Buffett.UNC Business School》

2、《2004-05-01 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

3、《2012-05-05 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

4、《2015-02-27 Berkshire - Past Present and Future》

5、《2021-05-01 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

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