Berkshire Hathaway bought small stakes in Heico (HEI) and Ulta Beauty (ULTA) in the second quarter, while adding to its holding in Chubb (CB), according to the company’s quarterly 13-F filing released Wednesday after the market closed.
Berkshire eliminated its holding of 6.1 million shares of Snowflake (SNOW), the software company, which it bought at the time of the company’s initial public offering in 2020. That holding was worth about $1.2 billion at the end of March.
Berkshire bought 690,000 shares of Ulta Beauty that were worth $266 million at the end of the second quarter and just over a million shares of Heico, a supplier to the aerospace industry. That stake was worth $185 million on June 30.
Berkshire also bought about a million shares of insurer Chubb. It held 27 million shares worth $6.9 billion on June 30.
Berkshire trimmed its stake in Capital One Financial by about 2.6 million shares to 9.8 million shares in the second quarter.
Berkshire was a light buyer of stocks in the second quarter, purchasing less than $2 billion, while selling about $77 billion, mostly Apple
That stake fell nearly 50% to 400 million shares and was reported in Berkshire’s recently released 10-Q report for the second quarter.
Ulta Beauty stock was higher in after-hours trading, rising 13% to $371.70. The stock was down about 33% in 2024 as of the close of trading Wednesday and Berkshire appears to have taken advantage of that weakness.
Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett oversees the company’s equity portfolio of more than $300 billion, but he delegates authority over about 10% of it to investment managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler. They operate independently of Buffett.
The new holdings in Heico and Ulta Beauty could be investments by Combs or Weschler given their small size. Buffett tends to accumulate holdings of at least $3 billion in order to move the needle given the large size of the Berkshire portfolio and Berkshire’s market capitalization of $940 billion.
The Snowflake holding is believed to have been initiated by Combs. At the time of the Snowflake IPO in 2020, the company’s CEO Frank Slootman said most of his Berkshire interactions had been with Combs.
The Snowflake investment likely wasn’t particularly profitable for Berkshire—a demonstration of the dangers of buying richly priced IPOs. Snowflake went public in late 2020 at $120 and its stock price averaged about $150 a share in the second quarter. The stock is below that level now, trading down 1.5% to $125.41 in after-hours action on Wednesday.
Berkshire eliminated its holding in Paramount Global in the second quarter—a move that Buffett telegraphed at his company’s annual meeting in May.
The company reduced its sizable holding in Chevron by four million shares to about 119 million shares that were worth $18.6 billion on June 30. That move was disclosed in the 10-Q.
Berkshire also bought about 92 million shares of Sirius XM Holdings, the satellite radio company, in the second quarter. It held 133 million shares on June 30, a stake that is now worth about $400 million. Berkshire also is the largest shareholder of Liberty Sirius XM Holdings, a tracking stock for Sirius XM, with a stake of about 30%. The two companies are due to merge in September.
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