Buffett Filing Indicates Berkshire Was a Light Buyer of its Shares This Quarter

A filing Wednesday by Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett indicates the company has been a relatively light buyer of its shares in the current quarter.

Barron’s estimates based on the filing that Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A, BRK/B) bought anywhere from no stock to about $3 billion of shares from March 31 to June 14, the date of the Buffett filing. A reasonable estimate is in the $1 billion to $2 billion area.

Berkshire slowed its stock buybacks in the first quarter to $3.2 billion from a pace of about $7 billion a quarter in 2021 as Berkshire’s stock price rose. Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual meeting on April 30 that Berkshire didn’t buy any shares in April. That means any buybacks in the quarter would have occurred since May 1.

Investors are interested in Berkshire’s buybacks as an indication of whether Buffett views the stock as undervalued. During the first quarter, Buffett felt there were better opportunities in the stock market as Berkshire bought over $50 billion of stocks, notably a big expansion of its stake in Chevron .

Berkshire’s Class A shares were up 0.8% Wednesday to $418,600 but have been hit so far in June, falling about 11%. The Class B stock was up 0.5% to $278.93.

Buffett made his annual donation of Berkshire shares –some 9,608 Class A shares worth about $4 billion that were converted into Class B stock—to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and four other philanthropies on Monday. The 13/D filing shows that Buffett owned 229,016 Class A shares after the donation, or 15.6% of the total shares outstanding.

Taking the Buffett stake and dividing by 15.6% (0.156) results in total Berkshire shares outstanding of roughly 1,468,051 based on the Class A stock. That is down by 2,823 shares since the end of the first quarter. That would suggest about $1.3 billion of stock repurchases in the quarter.

But there the actual buyback figure could be higher or lower because Berkshire rounds the Buffett stake to a 10th of a percentage point. It’s possible the buybacks could be as high as $3 billion or as low as zero, Barron’s estimates. Even at $3 billion, the repurchases would be modest relative to the pace of last year.

Berkshire’s share buybacks will be disclosed when it reports second-quarter results in early August.