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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Buffett's Berkshire Gets A Billion In Beer Bucks


Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway will get almost a billion dollars in cash for its Anheuser-Busch shares, now that the St. Louis brewer's acquisition by Belgium's InBev has been formally completed.

In a news release this morning, the newly renamed Anheuser-Bush InBev notes that under the terms of the $52 billion merger deal, each BUD share has been exchanged for $70 in cash.

Berkshire's third quarter portfolio filing last Friday listed 13,845,000 Anheuser shares as of September 30. That works out to $969,150,000 in new cash for Buffett's company.

It would have been a larger number, if Buffett hadn't sold millions of BUD shares in June. At that point, InBev was offering $65 a share and Anheuser-Busch was aggressively moving to fend off a takeover, making a deal far from a sure thing.

Berkshire reported holding 35.6 million BUD shares at the end of March, worth $2.5 billion at today's deal price. (Of course, Berkshire did get roughly $1.3 billion from the sale of those 22 million shares around $61.)

Source

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