What kind of shareholder is Mr Buffett? Consider just one parameter. Mr Buffett has said he is loath to micromanage the companies he owns significant shares in - but he was aware that some of them had more people than needed, and he didn't endorse over-staffing. His vice-chairman, Charlie Munger, went further by saying that if businesses did not look for efficiency, they would end up like the industrial behemoths of the former Soviet Union. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" is an approach that doesn't work for economies at large, averred Mr Munger - who might just as well have been talking about many public sector units in India.
Mr Buffett and Mr Munger have never, in fact, invested in India even though Berkshire Hathaway has profited hugely from investments in the Chinese car maker BYD and oil giant PetroChina. Why Berkshire didn't is hard to guess at, but perhaps the rigorous approach to investing espoused by the two famous value investors meant that India's richly priced, well-managed companies never quite passed muster. It hasn't hurt returns. Since the company was founded its market value has increased by an annual average of 21.6 per cent versus 9.9 per cent for the S&P 500 index, but in recent years its performance has started to underperform the market's.
Mr Buffett, though in his 80s, gave no suggestion that he plans to step down soon. Nor did he give any indication of who his successor might be. Future business historians may well conclude this was a blot on his record; the shares are expected to drop sharply in the event of his death. That might be inevitable as the so-called "Warren premium" dissolves when Mr Buffett does die, regardless of how good the company's succession planning is. But with investors left to parse over Mr Buffett's letter to shareholders to interpret the references to Greg Abel and Ajit Jain, two of his senior lieutenants in Berkshire, it is reasonable to conclude that Mr Buffett thinks a competition to the very end is necessary.