When asked this question during the Annual Meeting of Berkshire Hathaway in 2003, he replied,
“About 40 or 50 years ago, I did a lot of talking to managements. I used to go out and take a trip every now and then and drop in on maybe 15 or 20 companies. I haven’t done that for a long, long time. Today, everything we do, pretty much, I find through public documents.
I try to understand the business and not have any preconceived notions. There is adequate information out there to evaluate a great many businesses.
We do not find it particularly helpful to talk to managements. Managements frequently want to come to Omaha. And they usually have a variety of reasons why they say they want to talk to me. But what they’re really hoping is that we get interested in their stock. And that never works.
The managements are not the best reporting parties in most cases. The figures tell us more than management. So we do not spend any real amount of time talking to management. Before we buy a business, we look at the record to determine what the management’s like.
But we don’t give a hoot about anybody’s projections—we don’t even want to hear about them—in terms of what they’re going to do in the future. We’ve never found any value in anything like that.”
Later he added,
“We never look at any analysts’ reports. It’s far overrated. If I read one, it was because the funny papers weren’t available. I don’t understand why people do it.”
