Few businesses have been able to escape the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns that are keeping millions of Americans at home.
Even Warren Buffett, the so-called oracle of Omaha and legendary investor, is seeing the impact of COVID-19 through the portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway, the company he's run for more than five decades.
The Berkshire Hathaway portfolio has a diverse group of companies spanning many sectors including insurance, retail, energy, and transportation. While this mix helped Berkshire persevere through the Great Recession of 2008, it's now seeing that the coronavirus pandemic is wide-reaching. Some companies in the portfolio have so far been able to adapt to the pandemic, but others have been hit by store closures and furloughs amid social-distancing measures.
Berkshire Hathaway will report quarterly results in May, and in the same month will host an online version of its famous annual shareholder meeting. Both events will give investors and industry watchers a glimpse into how Buffett views the current crisis, and what the company will do to weather the economic fallout ahead.
"We're like the captain of a ship when the worst typhoon that's ever happened comes," Buffett's right-hand man Charlie Munger told The Wall Street Journal in April. "We just want to get through the typhoon, and we'd rather come out of it with a whole lot of liquidity."
In the same interview, Munger commented that battered companies such as the big-four airlines, of which Berkshire is a shareholder, are not calling on Buffett for bailouts amid the coronavirus crisis.
The company is certainly in solid standing after 2019, when its cash pile grew to a record $128 billion, with a stock portfolio of more than $248 billion in value. Still, investors and Buffett himself have been frustrated by the lack of an "elephant-sized" acquisition — the last major purchase the company made was of Precision Castparts in 2016.
Last year, Berkshire Hathaway stock underperformed the S&P 500 as Buffett again failed to make a major acquisition, and put less money into share buybacks than investors hoped. Going forward, investors will be looking for any further indication of what Buffett is thinking on both of those scores.
Here's how some of the companies in Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio are faring in the coronavirus pandemic, in no particular order:
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