2012: Is Berkshire bringing jobs back on shore to the US?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Glenn Mollenhour (PH), Westlake, Ohio. First of all, I want to thank you for having us here today. Very nice. Now Warren, I’d like to have dinner with you tomorrow night at Gorat’s.
WARREN BUFFETT: They’ll have a bidding at Glide here in June. It went for two million-six last year. (Laughter)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is about jobs coming back to the U.S. I notice a number of companies have started to bring jobs back here.
Is Berkshire Hathaway looking at doing that for any job they’ve shipped out of the United States?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I have to finish my fudge here — the — I would say that of the 200 — the number of jobs we have is listed in the back of the report — I think it’s about 270,000 — 270,858 at year-end.
I’m just trying to think.
We probably — I don’t think we have more than 15,000 on the outside — of those 270 — outside the United States.
So as I put in the annual report, we invested in plant equipment — not in stocks, but in plant equipment, and not in acquisitions — over $8 billion last year, and 95 percent or so of that was in the United States.
So we don’t really have a lot around the world. (Applause)
I’m not opposed to it. I mean, our ISCAR operation, which is based in Israel, operates throughout the world.
I mean, they — I’ve been to their plants in Japan, I’ve been to their plants in Korea, I’ve been to their plants in India.
The product they sell is going to be sold throughout the world. The U.S. is an important market for them, but it’s not a majority of their business or anything like it.
So that company has about 11,000 employees or so, and relatively few of theirs are going to be in the United States.
We’d like to do more business in the United States, but we’d like to do more business in Korea and Japan and India and you name it.
We have utility operations in the UK, but other than — we have — we just bought a business in Australia at Marmon here, recently.
Well we bought — just the last day or so it’s been announced — we’re buying a — for CTB, which we’ve had a terrific history with. Vic Mancinelli has been a great man to manage businesses.
And just in the last day or two, we bought an operation based in The Netherlands [poultry-processing device maker Meyn Holding], although they have employment here.
But I would say that it’s extremely likely that 10 years from now, when you look at the breakdown of our employees, that we have many, many more employees, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands more employees. And some of those will be outside this country, but most of them will be in this country.
We find — there’s lots of opportunity in the United States. There is no shortage of opportunity.
In that 8.2 billion, or whatever it was last year, we loved putting that money out, and we’ll put out more this year.
And this is — I mean it’s a real land of opportunity. That’s not to knock opportunities elsewhere. But we find lots of things to do that make a — we think — make a lot of sense in this country.
Charlie?
CHARLIE MUNGER: You can’t bring a lot back if it never left. (Laughter)
WARREN BUFFETT: That’s the long version of my answer. (Laughter)