Berkshire CEO Greg Abel Commits Salary To Buying Company Stock

Greg Abel said he plans to put all of his after-tax compensation into shares of Berkshire Hathaway for as long as he runs the company, according to Yahoo Finance/Bloomberg.

He recently followed through by buying about $15.3 million of Berkshire stock, according to a regulatory filing. Abel said repeating the purchase each year after the company reports results could total “hundreds of millions” of dollars over time.

“Absolute alignment with our shareholders, our partners, our owners is critical,” Abel said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. “I already have some shares, but the goal was to continue to demonstrate alignment with them.”

Bloomberg writes that the conglomerate also restarted its share repurchase program on Wednesday after leadership concluded the company’s “intrinsic value” exceeded its trading price. Following the announcement, the stock rose as much as 2% in early trading in New York on Thursday.

Earlier in the week, Berkshire shares declined after the firm reported fourth-quarter results showing operating profit fell 30%, largely due to a 54% drop in insurance underwriting income.

Investors had been looking for clues on Abel’s buyback strategy, particularly since Berkshire had gone six consecutive quarters without repurchasing shares. In his first annual shareholder letter last week, Abel reiterated the company’s long-standing approach to returning capital and signaled that a dividend remains unlikely.

“We’ve maintained that we will retain a dollar if we see the opportunity to create more than a dollar for our shareholders —and that’s been the test,” Abel said. “So if we didn’t meet that test, we’d do a dividend.”

Abel added that repurchasing stock won’t prevent Berkshire from deploying its roughly $373 billion cash reserve elsewhere.

“There’s also ‘Do we acquire stock?’ And when we’re looking at companies: ‘Do we acquire whole companies also?’ And then there’s the ‘Do we acquire equities?’” Abel said. “Each of those, with the amount of capital we have, can be done independently. So when we’re purchasing our shares, it’s not taking away from any of the other decisions.”