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livemint.com / 3 months ago
livemint.com / 3 months ago
livemint.com / 3 months ago
livemint.com / 3 months ago
Berkshire Hathaway once had a big silver investment. Too bad it was sold.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett is a longtime student of the silver market. The company made a sizable investment in silver in 1997 and 1998 when the metal was around $5 an ounce.
The company purchased 129.7 million ounces of the metal, but sold out of the position within a decade at an unspecified profit. That holding now would be valued at about $13 billion with silver trading at $100 an ounce. Silver has tripled in price over the past year, including a 40% gain so far in 2026.
Buffett had followed the silver market for decades before the company purchased the metal in 1997. “I bought it very early. I sold it very early.
Other than that, everything I did was perfect," Buffett said at the 2006 Berkshire annual meeting. “I was the silver king there for a while. We did make a few dollars on it.
But we’re not good at the game of, when it gets into the speculative area, figuring out how far a speculative boom will go." The silver foray is one of several examples of Buffett making a smart call, but then selling the investment too soon. He sold most of Berkshire’s stake in Apple in 2024 and 2025 and a group of bank stocks in 2020 and 2021 at below current prices. Berkshire put out a press release in February 1998 saying it held the 129.7 million ounces of silver accumulated over a six-month period and that it had no intention of buying any more.
The Berkshire purchases—which then amounted to about 25% of annual mined supply—attracted attention in the silver market and among regulators. There was apparent regulatory concern that Buffett might be trying to imitate the Hunt brothers, who drover up the silver market in the 1970s. The strategy worked for a while as the price of silver
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21.05 / 10:17
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Pain is invisible; the sufferer has to make noise for it to be acknowledged, treated or accepted. Mumbai-based artist Koshy Brahmatmaj, 34, lives with chronic endometriosis, a painful condition that afflicts millions of women around the world.
21.05 / 10:17
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Even at $5 trillion, Nvidia is underappreciated
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21.05 / 10:17
markets
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RK Swamy bets on integrated advertising model as global agency giants split media and creative
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Homegrown advertising group RK Swamy Ltd is betting on its integrated marketing model to drive growth over the next few years, combining media, creative and other advertising services even as the ‘Big Four’ agency networks increasingly separate those businesses.“We never did disaggregated media and creative [although] that was an option 20 years ago,” Shekhar Swamy, MD and group CEO of RK Swamy Ltd told Mint in an interview.“How can you disaggregate the two? The media function holds a lot of data, and then when media and creative walk separately, it creates a lot of tension. This is not a sensible model for a client.”RK Swamy’s clients include Magicbricks, Polycab, and several government institutions and PSUs such as LIC.The company reported a 15% jump in annual revenue for FY26 to ₹351.73 crore, while profit before tax and exceptional items rose 30% year-on-year to ₹32.2 crore.
21.05 / 09:47
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21.05 / 09:47
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FPIs exit Korea & Taiwan: Is India ready for the flow rotation?
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.PI Industries stock has fallen 11% over the past two trading sessions as pressure in its custom synthesis and manufacturing (CSM) business persisted. CSM revenues have now declined year-on-year for five consecutive quarters. The segment, which contributed about 75% of the agrochemicals maker’s FY26 revenue of ₹6,714 crore, saw revenue fall 16% year-on-year.Weak demand and customers’ shift to just-in-time procurement continued to weigh on the CSM business, where revenue declined 15% in the March quarter (Q4FY26), though that marked an improvement from the 32% drop in Q3FY26.Management said the global crop-protection market remains stuck in a prolonged multi-year downturn, resulting in an uneven recovery.
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‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’ has left audiences stunned but what they saw wasn’t all that bizarre
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21.05 / 08:45
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Forensic audits support corporate-fraud probes and IBC cases but still lack enforceable standards
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Forensic audits have gained significance in today’s world of business as they serve as a useful tool for commercial lenders to investigate fraud by borrowers and/or identify other deep-seated financial irregularities. Forensic auditors are also employed by resolution professionals to report on preferential, undervalued, fraudulent and extortionate (‘PUFE’) transactions for adjudication under India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). While there is no single universal definition, several globally recognized organizations have provided widely accepted definitions (and norms) of forensic auditing.
21.05 / 08:45
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Why Dixon, Syrma and Kaynes are moving beyond smartphones: margin pressure
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.MUMBAI: India’s listed electronics manufacturers are under pressure to defend profitability as the mobile-phone assembly boom slows, prompting a shift towards higher-value industrial electronics.Investors remained jittery through the last fiscal, driven by concerns that slowing consumer sentiment could weigh on the rapid growth that electronics manufacturing services (EMS) firms have delivered so far.In an interview with Mint, Jasbir Singh Gujral, managing director of Syrma SGS Technology Ltd, India’s second-largest listed EMS firm, said, “We’re increasingly looking to capture a larger chunk of contracts from defence, aerospace and med-tech verticals, all of which represent opportunities for original design manufacturing, and also bring significantly higher margins. We’ve already started this transition, and we plan to do more of it this fiscal.”Beyond mobile phones and laptops, EMS firms are expanding into smart metres for electricity boards, aerospace and defence subsystems, railway safety instrumentation, printed circuit boards and display assemblies, and medical devices deployed in hospitals.India’s annual mobile phone shipments have remained subdued since the covid-19 pandemic, with industry estimates pointing to a single-digit decline this calendar year from 152 million smartphones shipped last year.The margin pressure driving this shift is increasingly visible.In FY26, Syrma SGS reported an operating margin of 7.1%, up 2.3 percentage points.
