Pettit Funds

A bank ad running in Argentina:

I just read this cover story in the most recent FORTUNE Magazine, about how Warren (the second best investor in Omaha) has purchased 10% of the stock in China’s BYD corporation, which makes electric cars.

Interesting for a couple of reasons: First, Buffett doesn’t usually invest in technology; and Second, he had wanted to buy 25% of the company but the owner would only sell him 10%. This owner seems to have some confidence.

We aren’t necessarily going to see these things in the USA for a while–they’ll start selling in China first, of course, and then probably be marketed in Europe, where gasoline prices are much higher.

Here’s the article from FORTUNE:

(Fortune Magazine) — Warren Buffett is famous for his rules of investing: When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact. You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will. And perhaps most famously, Never invest in a business you cannot understand.

So when Buffett’s friend and longtime partner in Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB), Charlie Munger, suggested early last year that they invest in BYD, an obscure Chinese battery, mobile phone, and electric car company, one might have predicted Buffett would cite rule No. 3 above. He is, after all, a man who shunned the booming U.S. tech industry during the 1990s.

But Buffett, who is 78, was intrigued by Munger’s description of the entrepreneur behind BYD, a man named Wang Chuan-Fu, whom he had met through a mutual friend. “This guy,” Munger tells Fortune, “is a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch - something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I have never seen anything like it.” [Rest of article]