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Buffett, Soros Increase Their Comcast, Time Warner Cable Stakes
Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investors Warren Buffett and George Soros increased their holdings of U.S. cable television companies, taking advantage of declines in stock prices to buy shares of the industry's top two operators.
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. doubled its stake in Comcast Corp., the world's largest cable-television operator, to 10 million shares in the fourth quarter, the investment holding company said in a filing yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The stake was valued at $328.4 million as of Dec. 31, the filing said.
Soros Fund Management LLC purchased 2.6 million shares of Time Warner Inc., operator of the No. 2 U.S. cable business, according to a filing with the SEC. Those shares were valued at $50.5 million as of Dec. 31, according to the filing. New York- based Soros Fund Management reported no holdings of Time Warner during the third quarter.
``It certainly gives the appearance of smart money moving into the cable group,'' said Laura Martin, an analyst with Soleil Securities in Pasadena, California, who doesn't own shares of either company.
Buffett and Soros, who both turn 75 in August, were ranked second and 24th, respectively, on Forbes magazine's 2004 list of the richest Americans. The two investors bought their shares after Philadelphia-based Comcast and Time Warner, based in New York, fell to their lowest prices for 2004 in August.
Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Soros, didn't immediately return a phone message left after business hours at his office. Marc Hamburg, chief financial officer of Berkshire Hathaway, declined to comment.
August Lows
Cable shares fell amid heightened competition from satellite- TV companies. The cable industry isn't gaining subscribers as quickly as companies such as DirecTV Group Inc. and EchoStar Communications Corp.
``The whole cable sector has been pretty well beat up,'' said Ron Rizzuto, a professor of finance at the University of Denver. ``Now people are starting to see the long-term value of the stock.''
Comcast Class A shares reached a 2004 low of $26.25 on Aug. 16. The stock closed at $31.31 yesterday, down 22 cents in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. Time Warner fell to $15.41 on Aug. 12, its lowest price last year. The stock fell 15 cents to $17.85 yesterday.
The shares have risen since August as Comcast and Time Warner Cable boosted profit by convincing customers to switch to higher-priced digital television packages that offer features including video-on-demand and digital video recorders.
Time Warner Cable's operating profit rose 11 percent to $887 million as revenue increased 10 percent to $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter, the company said Feb. 4. The company had 10.9 million basic subscribers at the end of December, about unchanged from the end of 2003.
Buffett
Comcast increased profit 10 percent to $423 million last quarter by selling more fast Internet access.
Comcast spokesman Tim Fitzpatrick declined to give immediate comment. Time Warner spokeswoman Mia Carbonell didn't immediately return a phone call to her office and an e-mail placed after business hours.
For the 12 months ended in June, the satellite companies boosted subscriber counts by 14 percent while cable companies' numbers were little changed.
Buffett purchased Berkshire's first 5 million shares of Comcast on April 30, two days after the cable company dropped a $54.1 billion bid for Walt Disney Co.
Berkshire, based in Omaha, Nebraska, yesterday also disclosed it no longer had a stake in HCA Inc., the largest U.S. hospital chain, after reporting 13.5 million shares in its third- quarter filing.
Soros
Berkshire acquired 375,500 shares of Dean Foods Inc., the biggest U.S. milk processor, and increased its holding in retailer Gap Inc. The company reduced its stakes in sporting goods maker Nike Inc. and Iron Mountain Inc., the largest seller of records-management services.
Yesterday, Soros Fund Management said the firm sold its stakes in Anheuser-Busch Cos. and Baxter International Inc. and bought shares of Altria Group Inc., Applied Micro Circuits Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and DuPont Co., according to the company's filing.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1344150/posts
One of the Nazis who met Haj Amin el-Husseini in the years of Nazi triumphs was one Francois Genoud, an early admirer of Hitler and a founder and militant of the pre-war Swiss Nazi party, the National Front. He met
Husseini in 1936 in the Middle East and once again in Berlin in 1943, while he was an agent of the Abwehr (German intelligence agency) and while Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, was urging on the
Holocaust and recruiting Arabs and other Muslims into the Nazi service.
Genoud met him several times in Beirut after the war, until the Mufti died in 1974.
Meanwhile, unrepentant, veteran Nazi Genoud got a management position with
the Red Cross in Brussels4 and later (1958) opened a bank in
Geneva called the Banque Commerciale Arabe (backed by Syrian funds).
Through his connections in Cairo, a post-war sanctuary for sundry Nazi war
criminals, he met leaders of the Algerian FLN and was later invited to run a
bank in newly independent Algeria, the Banque Populaire Arabe. In another role,
he participated in organizing and/or financing the defense of Eichmann in
Israel, of Klaus Barbie in France, and of PLO terrorists in Europe. He counted
among his friends Wadi Haddad and Ali Hassan Salameh, PLO master terrorists
who accomplished airliner hijackings and other high-profile terrorist acts.
Genoud claimed in recent years that what Hitler did "was
proper and in support of peace."5 Carlos met Genoud in the 1970s through
mutual friends in the Habash gang, known as the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. This was a Marxist faction of the PLO, which Habash
built out of a pan-Arab outfit he led called the Arab Nationalist Movement.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1344150/posts?page=1#1
What do these clients have in common with their lawyer? The same characteristics as another Verges associate, the ex-Nazi, now Islamist sympathizer Francois Genoud—who, as owner of the Arab Commercial Bank in Switzerland, was the apparent paymaster in the Barbie and some Palestinian terrorist cases. They are ideologues and defenders (Garaudy), practitioners (Milosevic, Barbie, Saddam) or would-be practitioners (Bouhired, Kelkal).of mass murder or genocide. Their ideology is totalitarian at its core, and they share yet another common trait of 20th century European totalitarianism and present Islamism–hatred of Jews and Israel.