Warren Buffett has never been shy about the great businesses he let slip through his fingers. One of the most painful was McDonald's (MCD +0.75%), which Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB +0.83%) (BRKA +1.14%) sold in the late 1990s in a move Buffett flatly called "a very big mistake." Berkshire has passed on the stock ever since. I think Greg Abel, Berkshire's new chief executive officer, will eventually buy it back, and the reason is simple: McDonald's is a textbook Berkshire business.
NYSE: MCD
Key Data Points
The mold McDonald's fits
Forget the burgers for a moment. McDonald's is best understood as a real estate and royalty machine wearing a fast-food uniform. Roughly 95% of its restaurants are run by franchisees, which means McDonald's itself collects high-margin franchise fees and rent on prime real estate while its operators shoulder the day-to-day risk of running the restaurants. The result is capital-light, remarkably predictable cash flow, exactly the quality Buffett spent his career hunting for.
Layer on the rest of the checklist and the fit is almost eerie. McDonald's owns one of the most recognized brands on earth, a genuine competitive moat. It has pricing power built over decades. It generates enormous free cash flow. And it has raised its dividend -- which yields about 2.8% -- for nearly 50 consecutive years. A wide moat, durable earnings, dependable and growing cash returns: This is the archetype of the kind of company Berkshire was built to own.
NYSE: BRKB
Key Data Points
The one that got away
The history stings precisely because Buffett knew all this. At the end of 1996, Berkshire held about 30 million McDonald's shares, a 4.3% stake worth roughly $1.4 billion. Within two years, he had sold, and in his 1998 shareholder letter, he admitted the error in plain language, joking that shareholders would have been better off had he "regularly snuck off to the movies during market hours." That stake would be worth more than $10 billion today, before counting decades of dividends. It is a rare unforced error from the greatest investor of his era, and a reminder that even Buffett sometimes let a wonderful business go.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why Abel might change that
Here is where the simple reasoning comes in. Abel has shown he is more willing than the famously price-sensitive Buffett to act decisively and pay a fair price for quality, as his recent moves into large, fully valued businesses suggest. Buying McDonald's would require no leap into unfamiliar territory, no wrestling with a business model he does not understand, which is what kept Buffett out of so many technology names. It is a company Berkshire knows well and already wishes it still owned. For a leader looking to put Berkshire's mountain of cash to work in proven, moat-protected businesses, repurchasing the one that got away is about as natural a move as it gets.
The caveat worth naming
To be clear, this is a prediction, not a certainty, and the point is less about guessing Abel's next trade than recognizing what makes a stock Berkshire-worthy. McDonald's is not cheap and Berkshire may well find more compelling values elsewhere. Predictions about any single purchase are educated guesses at best.
Whether Abel actually pulls the trigger, McDonald's is the sort of business long-term investors can own with real confidence: a wide-moat, cash-gushing royalty and real estate operation that even Buffett wished he had never sold. That is the deeper lesson here. Instead of trying to predict Berkshire's next move, study the investing template it uses: durable brands, predictable cash flows, and pricing power, and McDonald's checks every box. If Greg Abel is hunting for Berkshire-worthy consumer businesses, this is the blueprint, and I would not be surprised to see Berkshire own it again.
