What Buffett said in an interview with CNN in London on September 25th, 2112
One of the paragraphs:
It was a serious mistake to decide to sell the McDonald's stock held by the company. In a word, if I often sneaked to the movies during the opening of the stock market, you should have earned more last year.
Background:
What Warren Buffett said at the shareholders' meeting in 1999 when he admitted that there was no more extensive investment in the stock market to make profits.
As for why he sold McDonald's, the following is his previous remarks:
Buffett:
In the case of McDonald's, many factors play a role, especially overseas factors. McDonald's is in a stronger position overseas than in the United States. This business will become more and more difficult as time goes on. People, except those children who are waiting to give gifts, don't want to eat McDonald's every day.
people who drink coke drink five cans today, and may drink five more tomorrow. The fast food industry is much more difficult than this. However, if you must be in the fast food industry, which is huge in the world, if you choose one, you will choose McDonald's. It has the best positioning. Although it is delicious for children, it is not the best for adults. Recently, it has entered the field of sales promotion by reducing prices, rather than relying on the product itself to sell.
personally, I prefer those companies that sell money on the product itself. At this point, I prefer Gillette. People don't buy Mark
3 because there are some small gifts attached. In essence, Gillette's products are stronger. Berkshire owns a lot of Gillette shares. When you think about the beards that grow on the faces of billions of men every day and every night, and even better, there are women's legs, you will sleep soundly at night. That is the business you want.
If what you want is what price reduction strategy I will use to suppress Burger King next month, if they signed an agreement with Disney and I didn't. . . Wait a minute. I prefer those independent products, and I don't need to make price reduction promotions to make them more attractive. Although you can use those tricks to do business well, for example, McDonald's is a very excellent enterprise, but it is not like Coke after all, and there is almost nothing like Coke.
if you must buy an enterprise in that field, buy the cheese queen! I'm kidding. Let's buy McDonald's. Some time ago, Berkshire bought the cheese queen, so I'm here to advertise the cheese queen shamelessly (laughs).
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In 2112, Disney's cable network will lose $411 million. Faced with such a bad economic situation, eisner still holds the view that there are only weak products and no weak market. He believes that "the company's profit and loss are entirely in quality." Under this guiding ideology, eisner continued to launch new films regardless of everything, but these films were all joined in the loss ranks because of their blandness.
It has been pointed out that Eisner's ability to bring back the dead is limited. He can only keep his annual salary of751,111 at most. As early as 1996, eisner demanded that for every $1 increase in Disney's share price, he would get $15 million in revenue; But today, Disney's share price has plunged like a free fall. Moreover, due to the economic difficulties in Europe and the United States, major shareholders have also sold Disney. Warren buffett used to be Eisner's financial adviser, but today he also took advantage of the situation to short Disney shares. Before 9.11, the company's only decision to deal with the crisis was to reduce the number of employees to 4111, and then lay off employees again soon, but all this did not slow down the crisis.
Maybe Buffett dumped Disney because of the 9.11 incident and was not optimistic about tourism.