I.H.14.Warren Buffett.Competition

I.H.14.Warren Buffett.Competition

1、《2006-05-06 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

36. “Media businesses do not have a great outlook”
“媒体行业的前景不太乐观”

WARREN BUFFETT: Number 1.
沃伦·巴菲特：第一名。

AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK. First, my name is Egil Dahl. I’m a retailer from Norway. I would like first to thank you gentlemen for the opportunity to come here and ask two of the best businessmen in the world a question.
观众成员：好的。首先，我的名字是埃吉尔·达尔。我是来自挪威的零售商。首先，我想感谢各位先生给我这个机会来到这里，向世界上最优秀的两位商人提问。

My question is regarding the media and entertainment business. Do you think that the nature of newspapers, magazine, television, and maybe movie and music business as well, are about to change permanently and become less predictable because of new technology and internet?
我的问题是关于媒体和娱乐行业的。你认为报纸、杂志、电视，或许还有电影和音乐行业的性质，会因为新技术和互联网而永久改变并变得不那么可预测吗？

And the second part is, if not so, do you think that some of these businesses represent good purchases at the moment because the market thinks so? Thank you.
第二部分是，如果不是这样，您是否认为其中一些企业目前是不错的购买机会，因为市场是这样认为的？谢谢。

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, people are always going to want to be entertained and they’re going to want to be informed and some mix thereof. But, you know, we only have two eyeballs, and we only have 24 hours a day.
沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，人们总是想要娱乐，也想要获取信息，或者两者兼而有之。但是，你知道，我们只有一双眼睛，每天只有 24 小时。

So if you go back 50 or 60 years and think about how people got informed or entertained then, the choices were far fewer. You had the local movie theater, and you had the radio, and you had newspapers.
所以，如果你回到五六十年前，想想那时人们是如何获取信息或娱乐的，选择要少得多。你有当地的电影院，有收音机，还有报纸。

And as the years have gone by, what technology has done is opened up a huge variety of ways of being informed faster, certainly. And whether it’s better or not depends on who you ask.
随着岁月的流逝，技术所做的是开辟了多种更快获取信息的方式。当然，这是否更好取决于你问谁。

And certainly entertained in way many more forms, many that are free. And it hasn’t expanded the time you have for entertainment or for acquiring knowledge.
当然，以更多的形式娱乐，许多是免费的。而且它并没有增加你用于娱乐或获取知识的时间。

And any time you get more and more people competing in any given area, generally, the economics deteriorate.
而且，任何时候在某个特定领域竞争的人越来越多，通常经济状况会恶化。

And the economics have deteriorated for newspapers, although they’re still enormously profitable in relation to tangible equity employed, but they do not have the same economic prospects, if you look at the future stream of earnings, that it looked like they had 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.
尽管报纸在使用有形股本方面仍然有非常好的盈利，但其经济状况已经恶化。如果你看未来的收益流，它们的经济前景不再像 20 或 30 或 40 年前那样。

And television, again, the margins have been maintained surprisingly well, but the audience keeps going down and — for any given means of distribution.
电视方面，利润率依然保持得出乎意料的好，但观众数量持续下降——对于任何给定的分发方式都是如此。

So, that has to erode economics over time. Cable was thought to operate pretty much all by itself, and the telecoms come in.
所以，这必然会随着时间的推移侵蚀经济状况。人们曾认为有线电视几乎可以独立运营，但电信公司进来了。

And very few businesses get better because of more competition. They like to talk about it, you know, but it — you know, the idea —
而且很少有企业因为更多的竞争而变得更好。你知道，他们喜欢谈论它，但你知道，这个想法——

I had one friend in the newspaper business. And I think Charlie used to tease her a bit by saying that her idea of a competitor was a corpse laid out on a slab with a toe twitching, you know. And the — it is not a better business when more people compete.
我在报业有一个朋友。我想查理过去常常取笑她，说她对竞争对手的看法是一个躺在石板上的尸体，脚趾还在抽动。竞争者多了，生意并不会更好。
Idea
竞争=噪音，短期可能不是问题，长期一定会有问题。
So I think that, generally speaking, the economics of media businesses do not have a great outlook, I mean, compared to — like I say, they’re enormously profitable now, in returns on tangible assets.
所以我认为，总的来说，媒体行业的经济前景并不乐观，我的意思是，相比之下——就像我说的，它们现在在有形资产回报方面是非常盈利的。

I mean, it’s a business — you know, a license from the federal government became a royalty stream on huge amounts of money.
我的意思是，这是一个生意——你知道，从联邦政府获得的许可证变成了巨额资金的版税收入。

I mean, there were only three highways between — electronic highways — between Procter & Gamble and Ford Motor and the eyeballs of several hundred million people, and those three highways could make a lot of money when there were only three highways.
我的意思是，在宝洁公司和福特汽车公司与数亿人眼球之间，只有三条高速公路——电子高速公路——而当时只有这三条高速公路可以赚很多钱。

But you keep building more ways to — for the P&Gs, or the Gillettes, or whomever it might be, or Ford Motor, or General Motors — to get to those eyeballs, and you decrease the value of the highways. It’s not complicated.
但是你不断为宝洁、吉列、或者其他公司，或者福特汽车、通用汽车等，创造更多途径来吸引那些眼球，而这降低了公路的价值。这并不复杂。

So, I think you will see — it’s hard to imagine those businesses having great prospects in aggregate.
所以，我认为你会看到——很难想象这些企业整体上有很好的前景。

We owned the World Book. We still own the World Book. We were selling 300,000 sets a year or something like that in the mid ’80s. It’s a very valuable product. It sold for $600 or thereabouts, and it was worth it.
我们拥有《世界图书》。我们仍然拥有《世界图书》。在 80 年代中期，我们每年销售大约 30 万套。它是一个非常有价值的产品。售价大约为 600 美元，而且物有所值。

But the problem became that you could get that same information, or a good bit of the same information, you know, very, very cheap through the internet.
但问题在于，你可以通过互联网以非常非常便宜的价格获得相同的信息，或者大部分相同的信息。

And you didn’t have to cut down trees. And you didn’t have to run paper mills. And you didn’t have to hire United Parcel Service to deliver a very bulky package.
你不必砍伐树木。你不必运行造纸厂。你不必雇用联合包裹服务公司来递送一个非常笨重的包裹。

And it isn’t that the product we have isn’t worth the money; it’s that people have lots of other alternatives. And that’s true in information and entertainment in a big, big way, and it won’t stop, in my view.
并不是说我们的产品不值这个价钱，而是人们有很多其他选择。在信息和娱乐方面尤其如此，而且在我看来，这种情况不会停止。

Charlie? 查理？

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah. It’s simplicity itself. It will be a rare business that doesn’t have a way worse future than it had a past.
查理·芒格：是的。这非常简单。很少有企业的未来不会比过去更糟。

WARREN BUFFETT: Give them the bad news, Charlie. (Laughter)
沃伦·巴菲特：告诉他们坏消息，查理。（笑声）

The thing to do was to buy the NFL originally or something like that.
最初要做的事情是购买 NFL 或类似的东西。

I mean, you know, there still is only — you know, there are certain primary events, but it’s the people who transmit them — there’s more ways to transmit those events, and so the value gets extracted in a much different way.
我想，您知道，确实还有——有些主要事件，但传递这些事件的人越来越多，提取价值的方式也大相径庭。

    Article Comments Update


      热门标签

      PGR
      CB
      AXP
      V
      MA
      COF
      AAPL
      GOOG
      MSFT
      AMZN
      NVDA
      TSLA
      TCEHY
      KO
      OXY
      CNOOC
      IBKR
      RMD
      Right People
      Warren Buffett
      Steve Jobs
      Ideas
      I.C.S
      I.C.S.Capital