"Stock God" Buffett is about to make another move, this time he may throw tens of billions of dollars.
According to foreign media reports, informed sources revealed that Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Company is negotiating to acquire Western Petroleum's petrochemical business OxyChem for approximately $10 billion.
It is reported that the deal, if reached, will become Berkshire's largest acquisition since 2022 and could be finalized within days.
According to FactSet data, Berkshire is currently the largest shareholder of Occidental Petroleum, with a shareholding ratio of about 28% and a market value of nearly US $13 billion. Occidental's oil and gas business is the main source of its revenue, with revenue of about $22 billion last year.
OxyChem mainly supplies chemical products used in the healthcare, food safety and construction sectors. News emerged last weekend that Occidental Oil was negotiating to sell OxyChem. In 2024, OxyChem accounted for 18% of Western Oil's total sales and US$4.92 billion of US$26.73 billion in total sales.
This would be the largest deal Berkshire has made since 2022. In 2022, the company acquired a reinsurance company, Alleghany, for nearly $12 billion. This is also the second time Berkshire has made a bet in petrochemicals, and in 2011, the company acquired specialty chemicals maker Lubrizol Corp., At the time, the deal was valued at nearly $10 billion.
In 2019, with the acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum, Berkshire had acquired a portion of the priority shares of Western oil, and from 2022, Buffett began to buy Western common stocks on the open market and became one of its most preferred shares in recent years, multiplied by multiples.
In an interview in March 2022, Buffett said he made the decision to increase the company’s shares after reading the documents of the Western Oil Company’s fourth-quarter report meeting, believing the company’s CEO Vicki Hollub was “managing the company in the right way.”
Over the years, Buffett has been avoiding large deals and gradually reducing holdings of Apple’s equal stock. Today, the 95-year-old CEO appears to be ready to take action before leaving office at the end of the year, and recently he has invested $1.6 billion in Joint Health.
In terms of cash reserves, Berkshire’s cash and cash equivalents at the end of June remained at $344 billion, close to a record high.
Answering questions about Berkshire’s reasons for cash accumulation at the 2025 shareholders’ meeting, Buffett said Berkshire would find a place to use cash: “It’s unlikely that this will happen tomorrow, but it’s likely that it will happen in the next five years.”
He said he had been looking for investment opportunities, and that Berkshire’s company was “opportunistic” and he hoped to reduce cash at hand, possibly to $50 billion.
At that time, Buffett also revealed that Berkshire almost spent $10 billion in investment recently, but didn't put it into action in the end. "For example, not long ago, we almost spent $10 billion, but we were also willing to spend $100 billion. I mean, when there are investment projects that are reasonable to us, we can understand and have good value, it is not difficult to make these investment decisions."
Since the beginning of this year, Occidental Petroleum's share price has fallen by more than 4% due to falling oil prices and concerns about the company's debt burden. At the opening of trading on October 1 local time, Occidental Petroleum rose 0.25% to $47.38.