Professor Glen Arnold

Dewhurst (LSE:DWHA) owns a number of niche manufacturing and distribution business with many displaying high market shares, strong reputations and long-standing relationships with customers and the agents of clients (e.g. an architect specifying Dewhurst lift components for new high rise building). The UK and European businesses Dewhurst UK Manufacturing What it makes: Pushbuttons, e.g. those...

Dewhurst non-voting shares (LSE:DWHA) are in my Buffett-style portfolio. It’s earnings history is not spectacular, just one of steady progression over the years.  But earnings are based on firm foundations of strong market positions, which bodes well for future growth. Sales, earnings and dividends Sales, £m   Earnings per share (p)   Dividend per share […]

I’ve bought Dewhurst “A” non-voting shares (LSE:DWHA) at a price of £5.94. This is after selling all my A shares in March at £7.22.  I explained back then why I sold in a 2nd March newsletter  “not because I judged it to be over-valued but because I wanted to rebalance my portfolio so as to have […]

At the end of this newsletter I set down what I think are the key lessons for modern day investors (speculators need not read – this is about businesses and understanding them not about financial markets and their ups and downs).  First I’ll finish the story of Al Ueltschi, the founder of FlightSafety, by looking […]

Warren Buffett prefers to make outstanding rates of return on capital in businesses that do not require much of a capital base, such as See’s Candy or Scott Fetzer. FlightSafety, on the other hand, needs to invest $19m or more in one simulator. When you have over 300 simulators and need to replace them regularly […]

In the year before Berkshire bought it (at the end of 1996) for $1.5bn FlightSafety International produced $111m in pre-tax earnings. Buffett was right in thinking that its strong market position would lead to a significant rise in profits. By 2007 pre-tax earnings were $270m. At this time the company could have been sold on […]

First: A tip to simplify portfolio construction to manageable proportions – favour low-change industries Buffett and Munger made life simpler for themselves by investing in businesses and industries unlikely to experience major change. “The reason for that is simple: we are searching for operations that we believe are virtually certain to possess enormous competitive strength […]

In the context of recently paying $1.5bn for FlightSafety, Warren Buffett, in his 1996 letter to shareholders, emphasized that intelligent investing is not complex. Flightsafety’s technology might be complex but the evaluation of the business is relatively straightforward.  It was the dominant supplier of flight training outside of government and major airlines. It had the […]

Many large companies approached the founder and 37% shareholder of FlightSafety, Al Ueltschi, in the 1990s to ask whether he would consider selling the company. After all, he was already well into his seventies and needed to think about what might happen upon his death, e.g. tax would have to be paid from his estate. […]

Today I’ll continue the story of how a strong economic franchise business was created from virtually nothing.  It became so strong that Warren Buffett paid $1.5bn for it (I’ll describe the making of that deal in tomorrow’s newsletter) In the late 1940s a number of companies bought corporate airplanes to provide greater flexibility and save […]