Gains in its insurance business offset lower revenue from its real estate and consumer products companies. The results came out at the start of the conglomerate’s 59th annual meeting.
Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday reported a sixfold jump in its first-quarter earnings, buoyed by huge paper gains on investments, as the conglomerate led by Warren E. Buffett held its annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, its hometown.
Berkshire, whose vast operations encompass insurance, railroads, utilities and consumer goods, said it earned $35.5 billion in the first three months of the year, up from nearly $5.6 billion in the same quarter a year ago.
With its breadth of businesses, Mr. Buffett’s company is often regarded as a proxy of the American economy, and its results reflected some of the major trends of the moment, including the war in Ukraine, higher interest rates and fuel prices and a drop-off in consumer spending.
Powering Berkshire’s jump in earnings was $31.1 billion in unrealized gains on the investments the company makes using the flood of cash it collects from its insurance operations. That far outstripped the roughly 7 percent gain in the S&P 500 stock index during the quarter.
But, as always, the company warned that it considers paper gains or losses on its investments “meaningless” for understanding its underlying financial health, given how volatile they can be. On the company’s preferred metric of operating earnings, which excludes many of those investment gains, Berkshire earned $8.
