(AOF) – Berkshire Hathaway, the company of Warren Buffett, has accelerated the pace of its share buybacks, with more than $1.8 billion in shares repurchased this year. Berkshire said as of March 8, it had the equivalent of 1,455,698 Class A shares outstanding, down 4,035 from year-end and 2,537 from February 13. which reflects redemptions. Berkshire ended 2022 with $128.6 billion in cash.
The Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate owns dozens of businesses, including auto insurance Geico and railroad BNSF, as well as stocks such as Apple Inc and Bank of America Corp. Buffett owns 15.6% of Berkshire shares.
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A strong development momentum for French life insurance
The growth of life insurance continues over the months. Over the first four months of the year, contributions reached 53.7 billion euros, a level not seen for more than ten years. At 10.5 billion euros, net inflows also returned to their highest level since 2011 over a similar period. In the end, at the end of April 2022, outstanding life insurance contracts reached 1.847 billion euros, up 1.1% over one year. These good performances are partly linked to the growing success of the PER (Retirement Savings Plan). Since the start of 2022, PERs marketed by an insurer have posted 592,000 additional policyholders and 9.3 billion euros in payments. At the end of April 2022, 3.2 million policyholders held a PER, which represented an outstanding amount of 39 billion euros. Without taking transfers into account, 87% of new holders of a PER (at the end of December 2021) had taken it out with an insurer.