THE NEXT WARREN BUFFETT?

[chatchai]

EDDIE LAMPERT has turned once-bankrupt Kmart into a $3 billion cash cow.

Will he build it into a new Berkshire Hathaway?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/co ... _mz001.htm

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=KMRT&t= ... z=l&q=c&c=

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/041117/kmart_se ... er_10.html

[CK]

นึกว่าหมายถึงคุณเสริมสิน :lol:

[Stock Broker]

นึกว่าหมายถึงคุณเสริมสิน :lol:

อย่าไปแซวแกเลยครับ ทุกวันนี้ก็วิ่งหลบเจ้าหนี้จะแย่อยู่แล้ว

[kotaro]

ประวัติแกน่าสนใจนะครับ ( มีประวัติเคยถูกลักพาตัวด้วย)

K-mart ประกาศรวมกับ Sears เพื่อหวังสู้กับ Wallmart ครับ โดยหวังว่าการควบรวมครั้งนี้จะทำให้ บริษัทสามารถควบคุมต้นทุนราคาสินค้าได้ ปัจจุบันของที่ขายใน K-mart มีราคาแพงกว่า Wallmart หลายเปอร์เซ้นต์ ถ้าหลังควบรวมแล้ว สินค้าอาจถูกลง

Edward S. Lampert หวังใช้ K-mart เป็นแหล่งผลิตเงินสดไปซื้อบริษัทอื่นๆ เหมือน Berkshire Hathaway K-mart ตอนนี้คาดว่ามีเงินสดในมือหลายพันล้านเหรียญ โหะๆๆ

The Bottom Line
Blue Light Special
Or why Kmartthe downscale, beleaguered retailer everyone loves to hateis the next Berkshire Hathaway.

By James J. Cramer

You are going to laugh at what I am about to say. You might even laugh out loud and think that I have lost my mind. But by the time you finish reading this, you will stop laughing, and you will buy a stock that you thought of only as a laughingstock, so to speak. You will thank me when you see me and marvel that some story in New York Magazine got you in on the ground flooras you always hoped could happenof the next Berkshire Hathaway.


But lets get the laughter out of the way first, because I am not about to bury the punch line: This is a story about how I want you to buy Kmartyes, the worst retailer extant in America. I dont ask that you shop there first, although a little spadework of that sort might open your eyes to the possibilities. I dont ask that you suspend all judgment: Yes, Wal-Marts a predatory competitor and Targets a lot more fun to shop at than Kmart, and might always be. All I ask is that you consider that Kmart, the reconstituted stock of the once-bankrupt retailer, the third largest discounter in America, might be something bigger than a retailer.


For that I need you to think about Berkshire Hathaway. Did you ever wear a Berkshire Hathaway shirt? I did. Or I thought I did. Back in 1983, when I was starting out as a summer associate at Goldman Sachs, I bought Hathaway shirts at Marshalls, and thought I was buying a Berkshire Hathaway product (it turns out that the Hathaway shirt company is actually a separate concern from the Hathaway textile company thats part of Berkshire Hathaway). Anyway, I owed so much money to college and law school that Hathaways blue button-downs with the no-iron cotton-poly combo were about all I could afford. Which is why it was so confusing to me that Leon Cooperman, then the chief strategist at Goldman, was trying to get everyone to buy the stock of Berkshire Hathaway, because some Nebraskan by the name of Warren Buffett was using the companys stock to create a publicly traded empire that you could piggyback on. If I could afford this guys shirts (ahem), they had to be crummy, no?


I would joke about Buffett to my colleagues in the Swamp, the hot-as-hades dungeon where the interns toiled. Most of us had no idea what we wanted, save to get out of work early enough to get drunk and maybe get laid after picking up someone at an Upper East Side bar. But one of usthe youngest in our number, a guy fresh out of high school from the Island, some slick kid named Eddieknew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to be the next Warren Buffett. He didnt hit the bars with us; he worked all night. Perhaps it was because he wasnt yet old enough to drink. Or perhaps he was on a mission.




Kmart is making money, big money, even in quarters when it almost always lost a fortune.



Sure enough, about a half-decade later, Eddie and I would leave Goldman Sachs and become competitors in the money-management game. I lost track of him only to see his picture next to mine in a 1989 cover story in Fortune: ARE THESE THE NEW WARREN BUFFETTS? By that point, he was Edward S. Lampert, no longer Eddie, and he had built a multi-hundred-million-dollar hedge fund based on the long-term principles of the Oracle of Omaha. He bought stakes in big, dumb, lumbering companies and hoped to reform them. (Me? My goal was to trade my way to $100 million instantlya decidedly anti-Buffett prescription for the cure of wealth.)


Lamperts tortoise strategy worked, big-time. By 2002, he was worth an estimated $800 million, although unless you read the Forbes 400 list, you probably wouldnt have known about him. In fact, if it werent for some stupid kidnappersLampert was abducted in 2003 from a Greenwich parking garage, but he persuaded his captors to release him, agreeing to leave $40,000 in a Wendys garbage can (he never paid it)youd be even less likely to know about him.


If you want to be Warren Buffett, though, you cant do it at a hedge fund. You need a publicly traded vehicle. Lampert has cash under management, and thats a terrific asset, but what Buffet did was create a highly valued stock and use that as currency to buy lower-valued companies and turn them around. Which is why, when Kmart went belly-up, and everyone else gave up on it, Lampert bought all the Kmart bonds he could find and took the company out of bankruptcy in record time. Eddie knows that it doesnt matter whether the core company in question is a (non)shirtmaker or a onetime textile manufacturer or a No. 3 retailer with a big K on its front door.


Still snickering? In a years time, Eddie has engineered a whopping turnaround. First, he fired just about everyone. How could you not? Kmart had to be the most mismanaged, poorly run institution ever to take up a strip mall. Too much debt. A philosophy that said Keep those same-store sales up no matter what to please Wall Street. This was a chain that was practically giving away expensive TVs because it hoped youd buy a floor mop and some cheese balls on the way out. This was a chain that existed to show growth in sales even as the sales were at bigger and bigger losses.

Second, he brought in the team from the Gap that had created and sourced clothing at rock-bottom prices, and told them to reinvent Kmart as a youthful store. Last weeks deal to furnish WBs teen lineup stars with clothes was the first sign of the change.


Third, he took stock of Kmarts only good inventory, its real estate, and began the process of selling off the properties for big gainssheltered, of course, by some of the largest net operating losses ever racked up by one company.


Finally, he decided to run the business for Main Street, not Wall Street, selling much less but always selling at a profit.


The result? Eddies Kmart is making money, big money, even in quarters when it almost always lost a fortune, like the first quarter that just got announced (net income: $93 million). Maybe it was ex-hedge-fund-manager jealousy, but I didnt believe in Eddies Kmart turnaround at first. I said on my television show, Kudlow & Cramer that the turn wasnt sustainable, that Eddie would cut and run like a good hedge-fund manager now that hed managed to get some liquidity in the form of a common stock he could dump.


But then Eddie took to hounding me for not doing enough homework, and once I looked deeper, I saw what I see now.


I know what youre thinking. Hasnt Kmart already moved too much (its up more than 250 percent, from about $15 to about $51, in the past year)? Isnt this Cramer just helping an old pal or, worse, talking his book? To which I say two things: (1) I have so many trading restrictions, courtesy of the jihad against guys who put their money where their mouth is, that I will have to own Kmart for years, and (2) I intend to buy enough Kmart going forward that my current stake will seem like a pittance. Still skeptical? Keep in mind that Kmart holdings has practically no debt and $22 in cash per share plus real estate conservatively valued north of $30 a share by independent retail analyst Gary Balter from UBS, another ex-Goldman alumnus who sees what I see.


Warren Buffett took a dowdy textile company and used the cash flow from it to buy other businesses outright and shares in publicly traded companies he thought were undervalued. He ended up with a wildly successful portfolio of stakes in both public and private companies. Given Kmarts huge net operating losses and the gigantic gains that can be had by selling and leasing Kmarts real estate, Lampert has stumbled onto his own Berkshire Hathaway holding company that he can use to house a similar portfolio, and I believe thats exactly what hes going to do. You are not buying shares in a third-rate discounter. You are buying the future holding company of a future Warren Buffett. Still laughing?



James J. Cramer is co-founder of TheStreet.com. At the time of publication, he owned stock in Kmart. He often buys and sells securities that are the subject of his columns and articles, both before and after they are published, and the positions he takes may change at any time.