(AOF) – Berkshire Hathaway revealed on Friday evening significantly increased operating profits and the sale of 13% of its stake in Apple. Warren Buffett’s investment company generated net profit of $12.7 billion in the first quarter compared to net profit of $35.50 billion in 2022. An accounting rule requires the company to record minus or plus- latent values on its portfolio of securities and derivative products.
For the start of 2024, these represent unrealized losses of $9.7 billion compared to gains of $27.44 billion a year earlier. The net result also includes realized capital gains of $11.2 billion in the first quarter of 2024 compared to $1.7 billion a year earlier.
Over the first three months of the year, Berkshire appears to have sold around 115 million Apple shares, or 13% of its stake, according to Reuters calculations.
Operating income, which excludes unrealized capital losses or gains and exceptional items, jumped more than 39% to $11.225 billion.
This strong progression mainly reflects the clear improvement in the performance of its insurance activities. They recorded an operating profit of $2.6 billion compared to a profit of $911 million a year earlier. Warren Buffett notably owns the reinsurer General Re and the automobile insurer Geico.
Over the first 3 months of 2024, Warren Buffett’s investment company bought back 2.6 billion of its own shares.
The group ended the quarter with record cash of $189 billion, compared to $167.6 billion three months earlier.
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A great dynamic of development for French life insurance
The progression 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 in more than ten years. At 10.5 billion euros, net collection also returned to its highest level since 2011 over a similar period. Ultimately, at the end of April 2022, outstanding life insurance contracts reached 1,847 billion euros, up 1.1% year-on-year. These good performances are partly linked to the growing success of the PER (Retirement Savings Plan). Since the start of 2022, the PERs marketed by an insurer have shown 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 PER holders (at the end of December 2021) had taken it out with an insurer.