32 Monday May 2 2022 | the times
Business
days, involved 58 hours in the air and
seven stops. At present the route is
flown with one stop. An unbroken jour-
ney of about 20 hours would be the
longest commercial route in the world.
In November 2019 Qantas flew a
Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner from London
to Sydney in 19 hours and 19 minutes in
a trial flight with 52 people on board,Investors queued to get into Berkshire Hathaway’s jamboree, where even a cardboardfrom ice creams for $1 to a $553,000
motorhome. Eleven tonnes of See’s
candy were on offer, Buffett said, and “if
we don’t sell out, Charlie and I get the
rest.”
He has a habit of talking through
complex corporate and economic
issues with metaphors involving farm-
land or lemonade stands, but Buffett
explained that he looks at his empire as
a painting on an ever-expanding
canvas.
The billionaire remains on the look-
out for new additions and insists he har-glomerate. Berkshire’s value has risen
by 3,641,613 per cent over the past six
decades, Buffett likes to note. Its shares
continue to beat the market, having
risen 6.6 per cent so far this year while
the S&P 500 retreated 13.9 per cent.
The $700 billion group’s dozens of
subsidiaries, including Duracell, the
battery manufacturer; NetJets, the pri-
vate plane group; and BNSF, the rail-
road network, set out their stalls at its
annual Bazaar of Bargains before the
annual meeting. Investors lined up to
sample Berkshire’s array of products,ha each year with his wife, Mary, since- Being a Berkshire shareholder is
about “more than just investment
advice,” he said. “It’s the experience.”
Berkshire was a struggling Rhode
Island textiles business when Buffett
took control in 1965. He used it to buy
insurance companies, creating a cash
pool from the premiums, which he
utilised for further investments.
It might have been three years, but
the billionaire still remembered how to
perform to a hometown crowd. “It feels
good to be back,” he declared, before
reaching for his biggest hits.
Wall Street, as ever, was in his sights.
Investment banks and brokerages were
accused of building up the stock market
into a “gambling parlour” in recent
years and goading investors into treat-
ing the stock market like a “slot
machine”.
Such firms “make a lot more money
when people are gambling”, rather than
investing, Buffett observed. “It’s much
better to have somebody that’s going to
trade 20 times a day and get all excited.”
Munger lamented that “almost a
mania of speculation” had taken hold.
“We have people who know nothing
about stocks being advised by stockbro-
kers who know even less,” he added.
“It’s an incredible, crazy situation.”
Shares in Robinhood, the commis-
sion-free trading app that, according to
Munger, encourages gambling, have
collapsed since last summer. “There’s
been some justice,” he said. Buffett
wondered if it was wise to issue such
pointed criticism. “Probably not,” his
friend replied, “but I can’t help it.”
Robinhood has sought to depict the
two as members of the “old guard” in-
sulting a new challenger. You would
hardly expect them to advocate day
trading over, say, investing in a con-
Back in January, two days after reveal-
ing Berkshire Hathaway’s plan to hold
its first in-person jamboree since 2019,
Warren Buffett saw fit to issue a clar-
ification. His investors knew when, but
not where, they would convene for the
first time since the onset of the
pandemic.
The veteran stockpicker said he had
“taken for granted” that the home of the
so-called Woodstock of Capitalism was
well established. “We would never con-
sider holding our shareholder meeting
any place other than Omaha.”
And so, thousands of Buffett’s disci-
ples returned to the Nebraska city once
more to spend a weekend with its most
famous living son. The most ardent ar-
rived before dawn on Saturday to get to
the front of queues that would stretch
around the block.
Money by Pink Floyd played in the
arena as the faithful took their seats,
waiting for two other rockstars to hit
the stage. “The boys are back,” pro-
claimed T-shirts on sale next door.
Other memorabilia included rubber
ducks modelled on Buffett, 91, and his
right-hand man Charlie Munger, 98.
Greg Rom, from Maple Grove, Min-
nesota, has long been “glued to every
word” from the pair. He tuned in re-
motely to last year’s virtual meeting,
but it just wasn’t the same. Rom, 71, has
typically been making the trip to Oma-1
Britons are planning holidays
later than before as they seek
to limit the risk of disruption.
Travel agents and airlines are
reporting that holidaymakers are
now booking holidays only a
couple of months before
departure. Passengers are also
reducing the number of short trips
they take and opting instead for
one longer break, partly to reduce
their air miles but also to avoid
Covid bureaucracy. Page 32
Working from home is the
new religion for many but it
could prove to be an
expensive one if businesses follow
the lead of a prominent City law
firm. Staff at Stephenson
Harwood, one of London’s oldest
legal practices, have been told they
can work from home permanently,
however, it will cost them a 20 per
cent pay cut. Page 53
A windfall tax on oil and gas
companies would be a
“disincentive” to investment,
the business secretary, Kwasi
Kwarteng, has said, days after
Rishi Sunak, the chancellor,
suggested he was considering one.
Page 74
Warren Buffett has amassed a
$5.6 billion stake in Activision
Blizzard, the video games
group, after his Berkshire
Hathaway investment empire
embarked upon its largest stock-
market spending spree in more
than a decade. Page 315
Ping An, a Chinese insurance
company based in Shenzhen
that is pushing for a break up
of HSBC, has called for an
investor debate about the future of
Britain’s largest bank. Page 316
Nick Mackenzie, chief
executive of Greene King, one
of Britain’s biggest pub
companies, has warned the
government that the hospitality
sector is “not out of the woods” as
he called for action on business
rates and alcohol duty.7
Qantas is poised to unveil an
order for new jets that will
allow it to fly non-stop from
Sydney to London. The Australian
flag carrier will announce today
that it is ordering 12 A350-1000
aircraft from Airbus that could
cover the 20-hour route.8
The drugs company Indivior
has been criticised by Glass
Lewis, a shareholder advisory
group, for not justifying the “good
leaver” status of its jailed former
boss Shaun Thaxter. Page 349
Saudi Arabia’s economy is
growing at its fastest pace in
more than a decade as oil
prices boom while many
economies across the world brace
for economic slowdowns. The
price of oil and gas spiked after
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the
end of February amid concerns of
tightening supplies. Page 3610
Andy Hill, founder and
chief executive of Hill
Group, one of Britain’s
biggest privately owned
housebuilders, has said that
Michael Gove’s “aggressive” tactics
helped to squeeze money out of
the industry more quickly for
replacement cladding in the
aftermath of the Grenfell Tower.
Page 37Need to know
After a two-year hiatus
during the pandemic
Berkshire Hathaway
fans meet their hero,
Callum Jones writes
Aft
Qantas buys jets for non-stop London to Sydney flights
Qantas is poised to unveil an order for
new jets that will allow it to fly non-stop
from Sydney to London.
The Australian flag carrier will an-
nounce today that it is ordering 12
A350-1000 aircraft from Airbus that
will be able to complete the 20-hour
journey.
It has been looking at a plan to offer
ultra-long-haul flights since 2017, when
it first announced its aim of flying non-
stop from Australia’s eastern seaboard
to London and New York. At the time
Alan Joyce, Qantas’s chief executive,
said that the non-stop route was “a last
frontier in global aviation” and an “anti-
dote to the tyranny of distance”.
Qantas called its plan “Project Sun-
rise” and had hoped to start the flights
by this year. However, the pandemicforced the airline to suspend its plan
while it focused on trying to weather
the Covid storm.
Yesterday it was claimed that Qantas
was about to announce the biggest air-
craft order in its history, paving the way
for the non-stop 11,000-mile flights by
the middle of 2025.
As well as a dozen A350-1000, the or-
der will include 20 A321XLRs and 20
A220s, and rights for a further 106 air-
craft, according to The West Australian.
The A350s are thought to each cost
about $350 million.
A Qantas spokesman would only
confirm that the airline planned to
make a “significant announcement
about the future shape of its network”.
The carrier has been flying the so-
called “Kangaroo route” between Syd-
ney and London since December 1947,
when the journey took more than fourincluding Joyce, who saw two sunrises
and covered 17,800 kilometres. The
previous month it also conducted a test
flight with a Dreamliner between New
York and Sydney that took 19 hours and
16 minutes.
However, Qantas announced in De-
cember that year that it had decided to
pick the Airbus A350-1000 to fly the ul-
tra-long-haul routes, although it did
not place an order for the jets. Perth to
London is already flown non-stop.
Qantas can trace its roots back al-
most 102 years and is the world’s third-
oldest airline. It said in February that it
fell to an underlying pre-tax loss of
A$1.28 billion for the first-half of its
financial year, covering the six months
to the end of December, and that the
spread of the Omicron variant had
delayed its pandemic recovery plans by
about half a year.Ben MartinBuffett preaches again to
Qantas is buying a dozen of the planes
which cost about $350 million each