BEIJING/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is accelerating its sale of shares in BYD, China’s biggest electric car seller.
Berkshire reduced its stake in BYD’s H shares to 5.99% on June 19, from 7.02% as of June 11, according to a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
In Hong Kong, large shareholders are required to disclose the price of any sale if their stake falls below a percentage of the total. Berkshire could stop disclosing the price of its BYD sale if its stake falls below 5%.
Buffett’s firm began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, acquiring about 225 million shares for $230 million, or a 10% stake at the time.
The company began disclosing sales figures in August 2022, two months after BYD’s shares hit an all-time high and rose more than 20-fold. The shares have fallen about 28% since then.
The investment in BYD was led by the late Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, to whom Buffett gives full credit. Berkshire invests primarily in the United States.
Founded in 1995 by Chinese chemist Wang Chuanfu as a maker of rechargeable batteries, BYD last year overtook fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla as the world’s largest electric-car maker, after Tesla reclaimed the top spot in the first quarter.
Berkshire sold $20 billion in shares, mostly in Apple, in the first quarter and had $189 billion in Treasury bonds, cash and equivalents at the end of March.
The cash holdings include $182.3 billion outside Berkshire’s railroad, utility and energy businesses. At Berkshire’s annual meeting on May 4, Buffett said it was a “reasonable assumption” that this amount could grow to $200 billion this quarter.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
