Berkshire Hathaway Posts a Drop in Earnings in Buffett’s Last Year

In his first report as C.E.O., Gregory Abel, stuck to a straight commentary rather than Warren Buffett’s folksy tone. The lower earnings were largely driven by declines in the insurance business.

Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday published its last report card on its Warren Buffett era, and started to lay out what it will look like under his replacement.

The conglomerate, whose operations include both big insurers and a collection of businesses including a major railroad, consumer goods brands and an energy company, on Saturday reported nearly $67 billion in profit for 2025. That was down nearly 25 percent from the same time a year ago, mainly because of a drop in its insurance underwriting.

But Berkshire’s report on Saturday was more notable for including the first letter to shareholders by Gregory E. Abel, the handpicked successor to Mr. Buffett as the company’s chief executive.

In the message, his first extended communication to shareholders since assuming the role at year end, Mr. Abel lavished praise on Mr. Buffett for having made Berkshire one of the most successful investment engines in modern American capitalism.

“Warren is obviously a hard act to follow,” Mr. Abel wrote.

Unlike Mr. Buffett’s shareholder letters, which were infused with both folksy Midwestern aphorisms and observations about the world, Mr. Abel stuck largely to straight commentary about Berkshire and how he intends to lead the company.

Investors have been anxious about what the Abel era at Berkshire will entail. The company remains one of America’s biggest, with a market value of more than $1 trillion.

But its performance last year lagged the S&P 500, one of Mr. Buffett’s traditional benchmarks: Berkshire shares rose 11.8 percent over the past 12 months, behind the stock index’s 17.5 percent.

In the last four months of 2025, Berkshire reported $19.2 billion in net income, down 2.5 percent from the same time a year ago, driven largely by lower insurance underwriting fees and investment performance. It also took a $4.5 billion write-down related to its investments in Kraft Heinz — a food giant it helped create and which Mr. Abel called “disappointing” — and the oil company Occidental.

Berkshire’s operating earnings, its preferred metric because it excludes unrealized gains or losses on the company’s investments, were $10.2 billion in the quarter, down nearly 30 percent from the fourth quarter of 2024.

But Berkshire appeared financially strong based on several other measures. Its cash hoard — which Mr. Buffett had long called the company’s “elephant gun” and which powered his multibillion-dollar acquisitions — has grown to more than $370 billion.

Mr. Abel didn’t rule out more takeovers, though he did not elaborate on potential targets. One area he did touch on was railroads: BNSF, the railroad Berkshire owns, was unlikely to buy a rival, even as Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern seek to merge.

“There will undoubtedly be incremental opportunities to deploy our owners’ capital without compromising Berkshire’s resilience,” he wrote. ”We will always aim for ownership of productive businesses over U.S. Treasuries.”

In his letter, Mr. Abel reconfirmed that Mr. Buffett will not be onstage to answer shareholders’ questions at Berkshire’s annual investor meeting in Omaha in May, a thousands-strong gathering often called “Woodstock for capitalists.”

Instead, Mr. Abel will preside over two sessions, one of which will also include Ajit Jain, Berkshire’s top insurance executive. The other will feature Katie Farmer, the chief executive of BNSF, and Adam Johnson, the president of Berkshire’s consumer products, service and retailing businesses as well as the chief executive of the private jet company NetJets.

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