Warren Buffett rarely sells stock. On Thursday, he unloaded Berkshire Hathaway’s entire $4.7 billion stake in Procter & Gamble for P&G’s Duracell battery business.
That’s surely a sign the Buffett isn’t all that confident about P&G’s long-term future.
P&G, the global beauty and home products maker, added about $1.8 billion in cash to the deal. That values Duracell itself at about $2.9 billion. Buffett could presumably have just given P&G stock worth that amount and kept the remaining shares. Instead, he unloaded all 52.8 million shares and, like someone using a dollar bill to buy a 75 cent candy bar, got some change back.
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As Sanford Bernstein analyst Ali Dibadj told Reuters, “I don’t take it as a good sign that Buffett would rather own Duracell than P&G.”