Berkshire Shareholder Letters 2011 (Others)

心得：

• (Page 10) Regulated, Capital-Intensive Businesses 這類公司特色是：the huge investment they have in very long-lived, regulated assets, with these partially funded by large amounts of long-term debt that is not guaranteed by Berkshire. Both businesses have earning power that even under terrible business conditions amply covers their interest requirements.
  
• (Page 12) 看不懂：For 29 years, we have regularly laid out Berkshire’s economic principles in these reports (pages 93-98) and Number 11 describes our general reluctance to sell poor performers. 我剛剛查到的資料是：
  

  You should be fully aware of one attitude Charlie and I share that hurts our financial performance: Regardless of price, we have no interest at all in selling any good businesses that Berkshire owns. We are also very reluctant to sell sub-par businesses as long as we expect them to generate at least some cash and as long as we feel good about their managers and labor relations. We hope not to repeat the capital-allocation mistakes that led us into such sub-par businesses. And we react with great caution to suggestions that our poor businesses can be restored to satisfactory profitability by major capital expenditures. Nevertheless, gin rummy managerial behavior is not our style. We would rather have our overall results penalized a bit than engage in that kind of behavior.
  
  We continue to avoid gin rummy behavior. True, we closed our textile business in the mid-1980’s after 20 years of struggling with it, but only because we felt it was doomed to run never-ending operating losses. We have not, however, given thought to selling operations that would command very fancy prices nor have we dumped our laggards, though we focus hard on curing the problems that cause them to lag.

• (Page 15) If something’s not worth doing at all, it’s not worth doing well, and I should have listened harder.