Warren Buffett Watch: BYD bids Warren Buffett’s Berkshire an unfazed farewell: Selling is ‘normal’

(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)

Hours after we first reported last week that Berkshire sold off the remainder of its stake in BYD earlier this year, the Chinese electric vehicle maker confirmed the news and thanked Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger for believing in the company.

In a post on the Chinese social media site Weibo, BYD public relations executive Li Yunfei wrote, as translated by Google:

BYD Executive Vice President Stella Li, appearing on CNBC Europe’s Access Middle East this week, echoed the Weibo post, saying Buffett and Munger “loved” BYD and its management, but “they are investors, so naturally buying and selling is their business, so it’s not because they don’t like us.”

And Reuters quotes a special adviser to BYD, Alfredo Altavilla, as saying that Buffett “made a profit of 20 times the capital he invested. He did very well to do what he did.”

“We’ve been extremely glad to have had Buffett (as an investor), but the fact that he monetised [UK spelling] his position is exactly what Berkshire Hathaway does for a living: buying, earning and selling.”

Investors around the world, however, were not as accepting.

BYD shares fell more than 6% this week in Hong Kong.

While Berkshire is closing out its Chinese investment, it continues to expand its holdings of Japanese “trading house” stocks.

This week, Mitsui said in a news release that it was “informed” by Berkshire that “they now hold 10% or more of the voting rights in Mitsui as a result of an additional acquisition of our shares.”

It did not, however, know the exact number of shares Berkshire now owns.

In a March 17 disclosure, Berkshire reporting holding a 9.8% stake of 285,401,400 Mitsui shares. They would be valued at around $7.3 billion at today’s close.

Late last month, a Mitsui official told Reuters Berkshire raised its stake but declined to give a percentage. 

At the same time, Mitsubishi said in a regulatory filing that Berkshire’s stake had increased to 10.2% from 9.7%.

We haven’t heard anything about Berkshire’s three other Japanese holdings, Itochu, Marubeni, and Sumitomo, but it would not be a surprise to learn those stakes have also gone above 10%.

Leading up to the Berkshire board’s vote on adding Class B shares, Warren Buffett explains the thinking behind the move.

Holdings are as of June 30, 2025 as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on August 14, 2025, except for:

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)

Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.

— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch