Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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Buffett’s Berkshire posted a record quarterly net loss of nearly US$50 billion
Company sells entire stakes in US airlines, Buffett says ‘world has changed’
Warren Buffett speaks during the virtual Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting. Photo: Bloomberg
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Saturday he’s confident the US economy will bounce back from its pummelling by the coronavirus pandemic because “American magic has always prevailed”.
The 89-year-old made the sanguine prediction about the world’s largest economy as his holding company Berkshire Hathaway reported first-quarter net losses of nearly US$50 billion.
Buffett also announced Saturday that his company had sold all its stakes in four major US airlines last month, as the pandemic clobbered the travel industry.
“It turns out I was wrong,” he said of his acquisitions of 10 per cent stakes in American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines.
Berkshire Hathaway had paid US$7 billion to US$8 billion, and “we did not take out anything like that,” he said.
Between the purchases that took place over months, and the sale, “the airlines business I think changed in a very major way” and could no longer meet Berkshire criteria for profitability, he said.
Buffett’s announcement may further hurt airlines already pushed to the brink by coronavirus lockdown measures, now looking to the US government for US$25 billion in relief funds.
Berkshire Hathaway, based in Omaha, Nebraska, called its first-quarter setback “temporary” but said it could not reliably predict when its many businesses would return to normal or when consumers would resume their former buying habits.
Warren Buffett (left) and vice-chairman Charlie Munger at the annual Berkshire shareholder shopping day in Omaha, Nebraska in 2019. Photo: Reuters
“We’ve faced great problems in the past, haven’t faced this exact problem – in fact we haven’t really faced anything that quite resembles this problem,” Buffett said in a lengthy speech on the country’s economic history.
“But we faced tougher problems, and the American miracles, American magic has always prevailed and it will do so again.”
“We are now a better country, as well as an incredibly more wealthy country, than we were in 1789 … We got a long ways to go but we moved in the right direction,” he said, referencing the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage.
Warren Buffett has traded his old flip phone for Apple’s iPhone
25 Feb 2020
“Never bet against America.”
Buffett is considered one of the savviest investors anywhere. His fortune of US$72 billion is the fourth-largest in the world, according to Forbes, and in normal years, the company’s annual gathering in Omaha is a high-point of the calendar for investors, a “Woodstock for capitalists”.
But the devastating economic impact of the pandemic has hit hard at Berkshire Hathaway’s wide range of investments, and the need for social distancing forced it to hold the annual meeting online.
Buffett addressed his shareholders in a live-stream flanked only by Gregory Abel, who is in charge of Berkshire’s non-insurance operations.
His business partner for six decades, 96-year-old Charlie Munger, did not appear.
China’s first-quarter GDP shrinks for the first time since 1976 as coronavirus cripples economy
Buffett, in a statement, played down his company’s bleak-looking net figure. He said a better measure of the company’s performance was its operating earnings, which exclude investments and are less subject to sharp fluctuations.
By that measure, Berkshire Hathaway saw growth to US$5.9 billion from US$5.55 billion a year earlier.
The brutal drop in the net – to a loss of US$49.75 billion from a profit last year of US$21.7 billion – resulted primarily from the virus-related decline in value of its broad investment portfolio, which ranges from energy to transport to insurance and technology.
Chinese cryptocurrency billionaire finally sits down to eat with Warren Buffett
7 Feb 2020
The annual meeting often has an almost carnival atmosphere, as thousands of fans and investors flock to Nebraska to hear from the celebrated “Oracle of Omaha”. Buffett, famous for his relatively modest lifestyle, turns 90 on August 30.
In documents filed Saturday, Berkshire noted that until mid-March many of its companies were posting “comparative revenue and earnings increases” over the same 2019 period.
Many of its companies – including in rail transport, energy production and some manufacturing and service businesses – are deemed essential and are able to continue working amid the far-reaching confinement orders.
But their turnover slowed considerably in April, the company statement said.
Moves taken by those companies such as employee furloughs, salary cuts and reductions, and capital spending reductions are “necessary actions” and “temporary,” it said.
Lufthansa, British Airways, Air Canada among several big name airlines to halt flights, while others reduce services
Travel agents expecting slump in sales amid rising uncertainty over how epidemic will play out
Many airlines have cancelled flights into mainland China because of the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: AP
International air travellers and ticketing agents are in for a turbulent time in the weeks ahead as airlines around the world react to the coronavirus epidemic by cancelling or limiting flights to and from the Chinese mainland.
Lufthansa, British Airways, Air Canada and Indonesia’s Lion Air have
, while United Airlines, American Airlines, IndiGo, Finnair, Delta Air Lines and Jetstar Asia have significantly reduced their services.
“It’s going to be pretty bad for travel agencies. We’ve had a lot of cancellations. Everyone is afraid of coming to China,” said Annabelle Auger from Travel Stone in Beijing.
“Many of our European clients are very worried because of the media coverage they’ve seen. Still, people are willing to wait and see for a few weeks to see how things go,” she said.
For foreigners looking to leave China, Auger said they should contact their embassy to find out about repatriation flights.
“The situation is very unclear, so it’s difficult to give any general recommendations,” she said.
Already this week, the embassies of the United States, Japan, South Korea and Britain have cleared flights to evacuate their nationals from Hubei, the central China province at the heart of the outbreak.
Auger said she and her colleagues had been busy rearranging flights for China-based foreigners who had gone away for the holidays.
“The schools are closed, so families with children abroad are thinking, ‘OK, let’s extend our stay for another week’,” she said.
Politics may have stalled information in coronavirus crisis, scientist says
30 Jan 2020
The Beijing government said on Monday it would extend the Lunar New Year
holiday until Sunday to help stop the spread of the disease, while school breaks have also been extended.
Another travel agent in Beijing, who asked not to be named, said the virus outbreak had yet to have a significant impact on business but concerns were growing.
“We are a bit worried that things may get difficult in the coming months,” she said. “But we trust that the government is doing all it can and will take the appropriate measures to solve the problems.”
Zhu Tao, director of the flight standards department at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), said at a press conference in Beijing on Thursday that the relevant authorities were working closely with airlines to help Chinese nationals trapped overseas to get home.
The government had already chartered flights from Japan, Myanmar and South Korea to bring Chinese nationals back to Hubei, he said.
While all flights out of Hubei have been suspended since last week, Zhu said air transport was playing its part in fighting the disease.
As of Wednesday, the CAAC had sent 86 flights carrying 5,129 medical workers and 115,000 items of equipment and other supplies into Wuhan, he said.
Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said that efforts to prevent the coronavirus spreading outside the country had been successful, as only about 1 per cent of the confirmed infections were outside China.
Despite the flight cancellations, Beijing’s Capital International Airport was operating as normal on Thursday.
Andre Muchanga, a student from Abu Dhabi at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said he made a late decision to fly home.
“I decided to buy my ticket last night,” he said. “At school, our dormitory is almost completely empty. I knocked on a friend’s door last night and found there was no one there, so I decided I better just go home and spend some time with my family.”
He said he decided not to buy a return flight as it he did not know when his classes would resume.
Signs at check-in counters reminded passengers who had travelled to Hubei or had a Hubei address to put themselves in isolation for 14 days.
While flights out of Hubei have been stopped, there was still plenty of inbound traffic.
“The number of domestic inbound travellers seems pretty normal for this time of year,” a man working on an information desk at Capital airport said.
“It’s the sixth day of the Lunar New Year. Lots of people have to return to work.”
An Air China employee, surnamed Hu, said that the airport had stepped up its disinfecting and general cleaning work. Body temperature checks had been installed at all access points and employees had been told to wear masks, he said.
“I don’t mind working during the Lunar New Year holiday,” he said. “I’m not afraid of the virus, I’m here to serve the people.”
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 