1) >Interbrand estimated that the brand value of Duracell stood at $4.9 billion
2) >Duracell maintains over 25% of the global battery market share.
Duracell has both brand and volume advantage over competitors in battery business. Warren Buffett coined the term economic moat to describe the advantages companies like Duracell have.
>INVESTOPEDIA EXPLAINS 'Economic Moat'
>The wider the moat, the larger and more sustainable the competitive advantage. By having a well-known brand name, pricing power and a large portion of market demand, a company with a wide moat possesses characteristics that act as barriers against other companies wanting to enter into the industry.
In my world, AA batteries are all about door locks. There are a lot of card-reading door locks that depend on them.
Whenever a lock fails, step one or two or three is replace the batteries. That's 4-6 batteries per lock.
As a maintenance/security procedure, once every couple of years, every battery in every lock in the entire building is replaced. Doesn't matter if they are dead, weak or brand new. That's hundreds/thousands of batteries.
That's a lot of batteries. And Duracell has multiple levels of "pro"/"industrial grade" batteries. We buy them by the case.
I'm sure the markup on consumer batteries are huge, but I'd also think the commercial use of double-As must dwarf the consumer market. Smart buy by Warren is my guess.
What's needed in this space is a door lock that winds itself much like a "perpetual" watch. Something that takes the mechanical energy used to turn the door handle and turns it into stored energy that can be used to read the card and unbolt the door.
It already is, though not for hotel room doors/etc. I used to have access to a colo where racks rented individually (i.e. not in a cage) had a combination lock that was electronic. To use it, you first "charged" it by turning the knob back and forth a few times, then entering your code. The correct code mechanically connects the knob to the locking mechanism, so turning the knob unlocked the door.
In the case you mentioned, I do wonder if you could get a bit more energy from the door itself rather than just the handle. For example, if the spring-loaded self-closing mechanisms weren't just mechanical, but used that energy to generate electricity, you might get a bit more out of it.
> And Duracell has multiple levels of "pro"/"industrial grade" batteries
What are the differences between those and the retail cells, in your experience?
I've seen people quoting P&G reps that the only difference is the glossiness of the labels and the cardinality of the package, but I haven't found any definitive statement online one way or the other.
Duracell is a smart company and has been for a long time. Batteries are a largely disposable thing and so the customer LTV is pretty awesome. Rechargable batteries haven't really hurt the business signficantly and the need for electronics keeps going up.
Even more, the R&D side of a battery company could be incredibly lucrative with all the electric vehicles, portable electronic devices, and so on.
Buying a battery company in this day and age is a smart investment in tech, even for a non tech investor like Buffet. After all, every electronic device needs power right?
>>> Even more, the R&D side of a battery company could be incredibly lucrative with all the electric vehicles, portable electronic devices, and so on.
The manufacturing technology too. There's a reasonable chance that batteries of the future will still require handling and dispensing of chemicals, making and sealing the cells, etc.
It's just a licensed use of their name. It's run by a company named Condre Storage, and the devices shown are rebranded CTera networks storage appliances.
Wow, I thought most consumers these days know that generic alkaline batteries are just as good as Duracell alkaline batteries. Also, many gizmos come with cheap lipo built in + an USB port these days, that seems to be the trend. I'd think this is a business on the decline...
generic alkaline batteries are just as good as Duracell alkaline batteries
As someone who uses a lot of batteries I disagree. I do a lot of field recording work using powered microphones and that can mean going through 20+ batteries a day. Rechargeables would be ideal but that means a bunch of extra gear to cart around and extra things to go wrong or be overlooked by an assistant. Doing ___location work for film it's common to have 12+18 hour workdays where you're on your feet all the time, and working in a different ___location every day or ever multiple locations in the same day.
Long story short I've had terrible experiences with generic batteries. I haven't done exhaustive comparisons with the various leading brands, but I've come to strongly prefer Duracells. I have no idea what the watt/$ ratio is because I just expense that; what I care about is reliability in a high power drain situation.
For consumer stuff sure, most batteries are quite good. I wish it was a business on the decline, I'd be thrilled to have efficient short-range wireless power even if it only had a range of a meter or two.
Whenever I run out of charged rechargeable batteries I toss in Duracell batteries because they stand up to the abuse of camera flashes and other portable high drain lighting equipment for photography shoots. Even if the pack of Duracell batteries costs one dollar more the extra time and usage I get out of them makes them more cost effective.
Oh how right you are. My experiences are purely anecdotal but there seems to be a recurring theme.
Note: All Rayovac batteries used were confirmed to be alkaline batteries and the Sunbeam batteries it appears are not alkaline. This may have been the reason for the subpar results I experienced yet I question why the Rayovac alkalines I used produced very similar results to the allegedly non-alkaline Sunbeams.
Xbox 360 controller: I've used Sunbeam and Rayovac AA batteries from the dollar store and CVS, respectively. They barely last a week and when I hit the dashboard button to check the state of charge it still shows 2 and sometimes 3 bars but the controller kept disconnecting. Tried 3 other controllers and 3 other battery packs to verify it wasn't a controller/battery holder problem. Same results. Switched to Duracell and not only do they last almost a month but they go all the way until the battery icon is empty and then they cut out. I now use Energizer rechargeable NiMH batteries and they last almost as long as the duracells but I can swap them out quickly.
Paintball marker: I have a relatively high end (it was top of the line back in 2007) paintball marker that I'd been experiencing problems with where it would turn off in the middle of games. At the time I was, again, using either Sunbeam or Rayovac 9V batteries from the dollar store or CVS. I found an old duracell 9V and tested it. It had about half a charge left, perhaps a little more. I put that in and it went strong for a few months and many games before finally crapping out.
Ditto same results for my paintball loader which takes 6 AA batteries or 2 9V batteries. Sunbeam and Rayovac barely worked for a little while but Duracells kept on trucking for a long time.
Ham radio: I have an AA adapter pack for my handheld ham radio but this time it was a 3 way comparison with Sunbeam and Rayovac again taking a distant 3rd place, a rechargeable Maha battery taking 1st and Duracells nipping at the heels of the rechargeable battery for signal strength and general usability when I needed it most.
All that being said and taking into consideration those experiences, all the smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors in the house have Duracells in them as I'll be damned if I'm going to take a chance on the generic batteries again.
P.S. I still can't convince my mom to buy Duracells as she insists on getting the generic batteries and then keeps complaining to me that dad gets frustrated that the TV remote "doesn't work like it used to!" (Note: It had Duracells in it for a while before they finally died and were replaced with...Sunbeams!)
I'd typically have 2 Sennheiser EW500s, with the receivers and transmitters using 2 AAs each, plus 2 or 4 for a portable recorder, which is feeding 48v phantom power to a condenser microphone or occasionally to two as well as its onboard condensers that I usually have going as a backup. On a long day I'd expect to run down two sets of batteries. It's not very efficient as I often just leave stuff switched on when it could be off, but then you'll usddenly be ready to shoot at short notice and you don't want to be the person holding everything up while you switch 5 different devices back on.
In field recording, sure. Film work often means going to remote locations and while generator or vehicle power is an option it may not be available if there's no night work. Additionally, running off AC power, even in an interior, means having another cable to wrangle - a pain in the rear every time the camera position is changed or there's any sort of traveling shot. It's better to have everything in a bag or mounted on a small wheelie truck. Ideally I'd like to everything wirelessly (plug-on transmitters can supply phantom from a 9v battery) but radio has its own downsides.
The current requirements are not that high so it's just a matter of a small step-up transformer for the preamp. Some older pro microphones also use T-power, which requires only 12v but delivers a somewhat less good signal/noise ratio than the 48v phantom standard.
ah - we're coming from slightly different worlds. I (was) used to mixer boards which have mains feeding into it. I guess those aren't suitable for mobile stuff.
Like the article says: it's about buying commodities (alkaline batteries or their components) and selling a brand. The difference in value is entirely in people's heads but that's still profitable.
From my perspective, I haven't bought an alkaline battery in years. Low self-discharge batteries (especially newer Eneloops) are so much better for most tasks that disposable batteries seem crazy.
The problem with NiMH is that lots of cheap devices are designed to run at 1.5 volts, and have dim lights or sluggish movement when used with 1.2 volt cells.
It'd be nice if there were a voltage regulator product that could fit into a standard battery compartment.
One option I've considered is to replace 2AA/2AAA with Li-Ion plus a dummy cell. But Li-Ion is around 4.2 volts fully charged, which might be too much.
This is mis-information, imho. I'd never trust no-name batteries in the Field. Empirical testing has shown over time they do not hold up. I don't claim to know why, but I just know that cheaper batteries create more landfill waste over time, which means more hassle shopping/disposing of them.They are fine for your bathroom scale, tho.
Duracell (formerly Mallory) makes batteries for everything, including things like hearing aids (which go through them like crazy due to the necessarily small size). It's not all about the double-A, it's not even all about the alkaline, and not everything can be recharged practically.
I make a gizmo that runs on batteries, and a few years ago, tested several brands of 9-V alkaline batteries under a load similar to my product (a few milliamps). I also wanted some batteries known to be discharged by a certain amount, to test the performance of my product under those conditions.
I tested name brands and the drug store house brand. Within experimental errors, they all had the same lifetime.
I don't know about averages for generics, but I've definitely bought bad (really cheap..) store-brand batteries that lasted inconveniently short. If it's Duracell I know it's good.
> I've definitely bought bad (really cheap..) store-brand batteries that lasted inconveniently short. If it's Duracell I know it's good.
If you bought the cheapest battery on the shelf, then it probably wasn't an alkaline battery. A heavy-duty battery (carbon-zinc) has half the capacity of an alkaline.
If you buy Duracell, you know you will get at least an alkaline battery. Duracell simply does not sell heavy-duty batteries, hence the brand name: the durable cell. It's mostly a matter of brand positioning, rather than technology.
Rayovac uses one brand for both alkaline and heavy-duty batteries, which cheapens their brand when a consumer buys the wrong type and all the batteries die a quick death. Energizer addresses this problem by selling heavy-duty batteries under the Everready brand.
The carbon-chloride battery is labeled as "heavy-duty," because it has greater capacity than the carbon-zinc battery ("general-purpose").
When alkaline batteries were invented, the older chemistry continued to be sold as heavy-duty. This leads to the strange situation where the heavy-duty battery has less capacity than the other batteries you find on the shelf.
Anecdotally, Duracell cells are the only ones in recent memory that have consistently leaked when installed, on numerous occasions. Isn't that a solved problem?
So in my experience generics are actually better; Golden Sunrise or whatever, I don't care so long as they are on spec and don't ruin my gadgets.
It´s funny to note that the longest discussion in this thread is about the time.com page not scrolling rather than about the deal itself !
As for the deal it´s classic Buffett - almost a sure win, little downside risk, perfect timing. If you didn't read his biography yet (The snowball: Warren Buffett and the business of life) I highly recommend ! One of the wisest man alive.
"[Proctor & Gamble's] goals in the process of exiting this business are to maximize value to P&G’s shareholders and minimize earnings per share dilution."
It was a sick joke in Snow Crash in the 90s, and it hasn't changed.
Woops, you're right of course, it's Cryptonomicon.
I'm well aware that it's standard financial terminology, but I was referring to how Stephenson satirized it and showed how it provided perverse and destructive incentives.
No, I mean he wasn't missing the joke... I obviously enjoy Stephenson way too well for my own good if I can spot an oblique reference to the wrong book.
Buffett has every right to consider taxes as part of a investment decision and legally minimize it as much as possible. But he should quit saying that tax rates don't matter to business decisions
"Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist."
He was saying that raising top marginal tax rates would not result in rational investors withholding their capital. This is entirely consistent with the Duracell acquisition, which was tax efficient for both sides involved.
Your interpretation is completely wrong. The correct comparison would be if Buffett did not do the Duracell acquisition because he didn't want to pay capital gains on the increased value of his BRK-A holdings (which would be idiotic, and further reinforces the point he made)
Perhaps OT, but a smallish successful US startup is nearly half-owned by the government due to taxes due post-acquisition. That's anything in the $1MM - $10MM range... beyond which you can afford to spend more on lawyers to spend much less on taxes.
It definitely does enter into the equation... do I really want to take all that personal risk when a silent partner actually owns half the company?
Well for him it might not matter. My line of thinking is this. He's an investor. From a macro level, taxes should (in theory) impact a firm as much as its competitors, and in finance, you're trying to beat everyone else. So it doesn't really matter then because Duracell is being taxed as much as say, Energizer. He's making a bet that Duracell is going to do better than Energizer in the long term.
The tax break and branding make sense, but EBITDA seems like such a poor metric for valuation it's hard to understand why it's taken seriously. I'm guessing that point in the article was emphasized more by Money mag than by Buffet.
>EBITDA seems like such a poor metric for valuation
Why? Its got stacks of research & history behind it so you'll have to provide something a bit more substantial than "it's hard to understand why it's taken seriously".
In fact I'm struggling to see anything of substance in that post.
Well it's just like the government inflation "measurement". Everytime it shows something they don't like, they remove stuff. I believe oil was the first "WTF", then energy, and they just kept going. You see, according to the government, oil prices high or low don't affect the lives of Americans. Not that European governments did differently. Or that they stopped there. Then housing was removed. Americans don't see their budgets affected by housing, right ? Not according to the government. (this is talking about the measures the government reports, ie. Core CPI (previously) and PCE-Deflator (now)).
I mean it's a question of degrees. Were the pre-1972 adjustments in the core CPI fraud ? No, not really. Then with oil you start to have this nagging feeling, and what they did last year ... well sorry to say, but that's cheating. That's fraud, no question about it.
And EBITDA, sure. People used to use profit, for 50+ years. Then EBITDA. Why ? Because if you loan money for paying dividends or doing share buybacks profit will drop like a stone, EBITDA will be unaffected. But hell, if they had stopped there, that would have been reasonable. But they started cheating. Then came GAAP. This was modified 10 times over the last 2 decades or so, never to the advantage of investors of course, every single time it was to make companies look better than they did. And now most companies report non-GAAP EBITDA ... Differences are such things as that in non-GAAP future obligations (like a loan that's payment-free for a year) doesn't get counted until the payments start. Non-money agreements (e.g. we're going to build machines for X, they already paid 40% of the price, but we will only start delivery next quarter), the 40% is counted, the future obligation is not.
I mean again there is a spectrum here. Profit vs EBITDA ... probably not fraud. GAAP "adjustments" ... I think we can all agree that this is very dangerous territory. Non-GAAP reporting, for me at least that crosses the line.
Where does this inflation-hiding meme come from? The first federal government source from Google is http://www.bls.gov/cpi/ and over there the first number is the "all items" number, then the "less food and energy" number. It's not like they're trying to hide the all-items number. And the all-items number is the number used for things like cost-of-living adjustments.
If you look at a graph that shows both numbers, you see that they are on about the same level on average, just with more volatility in the all-items graph. Which is why economists like to use it for some things, they don't want the noise that comes from commodity price volatility and they want to see the "sticky" prices that show the direction where the inertia of inflation is headed.
Fudging the inflation numbers has been coming on for a while now; I call it the "screw the old people and the foreigners" strategy.
As for the issues with GAAP, I can't understand why the holes in off-balance-sheet accounting haven't been closed given the number of disasters that have occurred. Government accounting, of course, is basically indistinguishable from bald-faced lying.
> I call it the "screw the old people and the foreigners" strategy
It's only half of the strategy. ZIRP is the other half. Not only is inflation being under-reported, the savings that "the old people" have can't keep up with inflation because the Fed is artificially holding interest rates at zero.
I don't think you've quite understood the purpose of EBITDA. They aren't removing stuff they don't like, but rather factors that shouldn't be considered in valuing an equity share. Take the interest component - depending on the funding structure that will give you wildly different valuation numbers if you leave it in.
Its simply not intended for use as a "type" of profit number in its raw form...its an input for a valuation technique. The valuation technique factors in things like you loaning money for dividends as a further input (if you're doing it right anyway)
As for the GAAP issue - thankfully I operate on IFRS turf which seems to have less scary stuff than US GAAP from what I can tell.
Interest is hard to take into valuation, agreed. Impossible, or "shouldn't", I disagree. An outstanding loan has a clear NPV (generally larger than the NPV of the loaned amount) ... just subtract from the value of the company.
But if you do that, most companies come out wildly negative. I wonder if that has something to do with it.
Of course there are thousand different loan types and various obligations companies may have that make this a subtle and very involved calculation. But it's certainly not impossible to value them, just hard. And ever since this was provided as an accepted loophole, I hope you can agree with me that it's been exploited a LOT by lots of companies.
Very tempted to harshly criticize at this stage, but let me instead suggest that you take a formal varsity level class in valuations to improve your understanding of it. You've got the entire thing 100% back to front and its definitely not something I can explain via HN comments. Discussing it with a lecturer would be a better medium.
"References to EBITDA make us shudder. Does management think the tooth fairy pays for capital expenditures?" - Warren Buffett in the 2000 letter to shareholders. You may be correct that the EBITDA stuff is more down to the journalist. I think EBITDA is taken seriously by speculators, leveraged buy out operators and the like because they hope to flip the thing to some other suckers fast enough that they can ignore depreciation. For long term owners though it is important.
You do realize that a majority of all PE-type transactions are based on EBITDA multiples right? VC-type (the ones you and I read every day on TechCrunch) are multiples on users/revenues because they are high-growth. Duracell is not a high growth equity.
ebitda is not a poor metric for a stable business like duracell because interest charges (the most suspect component of ebitda) are not going to be wildly outside industry norms. it's also an interesting metric in general because it seeks to normalize true operating earning power across businesses if all other things were equal (tax rates, interest charges, fixed asset related charges).
if you're evaluating a business and they tout ebitda as the only thing you should care about, you should look at net income in relation to it. for example, a mountain of debt or stupid financing terms would lead to high, maybe unsustainable, interest charges and ebitda would obscure the businesses' true circumstances. otherwise, it's reasonable to consider ebitda.
is it just me, or has the page actually broken scrolling down?! that's a whole new level of wtf.
edit: works in an incognito window, so it seems like some extension is blocking it, but i can't think of anything an extension could block that should be required to simply scroll down in a block of text.
Its NoScript. I had the same exact issue. Its a ridiculous world when I need to enable Javascript just to view static text on a plain background. Sigh.
As a web developer, people like you always make me wonder why I try. Yes, some sites abuse javascript for terrible purposes, but as CSS becomes more powerful, are you going to start blocking that too?
Complaining that a site doesn't work because you purposely disabled part of the code is akin to complaining your car doesn't work because you pulled the alternator.
I, for one, would greatly appreciate web developers trying far less hard.
Breaking scrolling, javascript on or off, is inexcusable. The UI is the most important thing, far more important than all the other slow-loading javascript chrome that decreases this article's usability and stickiness.
You know what else I can't do? Get smooth scrolling when I page up and page down. Further, I can't use the top 100 pixels because it's occupied by a worthless black bar.
There are fewer than 80 words on the screen in a "full" page of text at normal window sizes.
This entire design is amateurish, thoughtless, and user-hostile, all because some set of web developers are trying something and end up making the page much worse than if they had tried less.
You're generalizing an entire industry based on a few bad sites. All the interactive projects you see news organizations doing are REQUIRE Javascript. You're asking developers to handicap themselves just because a few people decided to abuse a tool.
I've never done any of those things you've mentioned above and my first aim is always user experience across all devices. Don't portray all developers who are creating good experiences on the web as bad guys. Show HN itself contains numerous examples of Javascript doing amazing things in the browser and your attitude craps all over the hard work of those people.
Maybe you should stop trying. It's infuriating to have a simple webpage strain a 3 years old laptop. And crash firefox on Android because it requires too much ram.
Please, for heavens sake stop that madness! Disabling pinch-to-zoom and similar Web 2.0 nonsense.
Just stop. I usually use readability to fight the nonsense.
About Buffet: He seems to be a counterexample to current economic dogmas
> As a web developer, people like you always make me wonder why I try.
To me, "trying" would involve not writing your pages in a way that means people can't read them. If for you trying involves deliberately doing the opposite of that, I also wonder why you try, and wish you would stop.
You do realize that Javascript powers the majority of ads, you know, the things content creators need to continue creating. And don't forget all those great Show HN browser libraries and projects powered by Javascript. News organizations and interactives to do data journalism? Yea, Javascript.
I'm fully against people creating a frustrating user experience by people using tools, but I don't blame the tools, I blame the people.
The issue is that plain HTML+CSS is literally designed for this use-case. The only thing Javascript can possibly do is reinvent the wheel.
It's more like complaining that my car isn't allowed drive on a particular road unless I allow them to install a special additional windshield. It serves no practical purpose, and is just duplicating effort. Sure, it may work, but there's no reason to do it.
Yes, if CSS starts becoming powerful enough to do become a security hole, it will become imperative to selectively disable it, or at least its new, unsafe features.
People who use tools like NoScript are helping promote better security around the entire web. When my browser executes malicious code, it attacks someone else. So it's not just for my benefit.
As a web developer you can help by:
- not pulling JS from a dozen different sites. Host whatever you want me to run in your own ___domain, as much as possible.
- detect that JS is disabled and put up some warning, like "site requires JavasScript".
- Say which Javascript (from which domains) are used for what: which are must haves for even basic functionality, and what doesn't work if the others are not enabled. For instance, I've never seen anything break (from my end) if I blocked JS from Google Ad Services or Google Analytics.
I have seen lots of sites (including some major shopping sites) break with GA blocked; a common coding pattern in these cases seems to be an onclick handler that is something like "shadyTrackingFunction() && submit; return false;".
The car won't start because you are wearing a personal EMP that is disabling the electronics. While older cars work fine, and some newer ones can fall back to just using analog mechanics, more and more require the electronics to work.
And yet, somehow I'd be very suspicious of cars that require electronics to make steering or braking work at all. Not everything needs to be turned into fly-by-wire.
Javascript is designed to be an addon to HTML / CSS. An alternator is not designed to be an addon to a car. (Well, to be pedantic an alternator is an addon, but some means of electrical generation isn't - some means of electrical generation is integral to a (non-diesel) motor)
A better analogy might be your car refusing to start because your OnStar subscription expired - and things like that are actually starting to happen. And no, I don't like it there either.
Here's the thing with JS: I fail to see what it adds. And yet at the same time I can see rather drastic examples of what it loses. Namely security.
I will start enabling JS by default when JS-based exploits stop being a routine thing. However, I doubt that will happen anytime soon. Because, oddly enough, when you have a complex language, and everyone demands every last drop of performance, security suffers. At least assuming dev time is constant. Oh, and enabling JS also enables an absurd amount of tracking. And performance problems. Oh, and website bloat. So those are the downsides.
As such, what are the upsides? Give me a justification for why I should enable JS globally. I have yet to see a good reason. And no, badly reimplementing parts of HTML / CSS is not an answer. AJAX? There are some things that are better with AJAX, for certain definitions of better. In which case I enable it for the page / website and go from there. Still not a justification for globally enabling JS. And most of the time I'd prefer proper pages anyways. AJAX tends to break things - URLs actually being uniform resource locators and opening links in new tabs in particular. About the only thing I actually find myself wanting AJAX for is webmail clients, and it's iffy even then. Most other things are, again, bad reimplementations of HTML / CSS. (Case in point: infinite scrolling)
And as for your comment about CSS - yes, in fact. Or rather, there are a number of websites that I override the CSS on. And if/when there starts to be a steady stream of exploits for features in CSS, I'll consider blocking those by default. But currently there doesn't seem to be. Largely, I suspect, because CSS parsing isn't Turing-complete (as far as I know at least). (I know that CSS + repeated "dumb" input is Turing-complete, but that's not the same thing.)
In parting: I don't mind when disabling JS disables JS-only features. What I mind is when disabling JS means that the things that HTML / CSS are designed for no longer work because devs tried too hard to reinvent the wheel. Case in point: those websites that require JS just to display a static page because they're parsing markdown on the client or some such absurdity, and they don't even display the raw pre-markdowned text if you load it without JS because instead of doing the (relatively) sane thing of putting the text into the HTML and parsing it and replacing it, they store the entire thing as a JS string. I mean, really, if your solution is "make every client that ever visits your static website duplicate the same work (and load in massive libraries to do so, to boot) that you could do easily server-side once", you're asking the wrong question.
> Your analogy fails. Javascript is designed to be an addon to HTML / CSS.
Your analogy fails because you think the original design intent matters, it does not. What matters is how people use things, not how they were intended to be used. His analogy was correct, developers do build their sites with js capabilities assumed and if you remove those abilities you break much of the web today and you know it.
I was able to view the page without allowing any JavaScript, by using the Print Edit Firefox Add On. But it wasn't quite easy. Under the Print Edit preview, the entire right side of the article is covered by some white rectangle. The picture, the headlines and paragraph bodies are all chopped off.
Select the bounding rectangle that surrounds the entire article. Then use the "Delete Except" button/menu at the top and invoke "Delete Except: Without Float". This does the trick; the occluding white space is gone and you can read everything.
Can't scroll down on my phone; dolphin browser on an S3.
On top of the multiple certificate errors, it's not a great experience from such a major site...
It's a strategy that has a lot to do with taxes, but it's more complicated than a dodge. The idea seems to be that BH wanted to exit their P&G position, but their cost basis was so low that the tax hit would be high. But P&G had something other than cash that BH wanted, so they traded instead of doing a cash transaction.
1) >Interbrand estimated that the brand value of Duracell stood at $4.9 billion
2) >Duracell maintains over 25% of the global battery market share.
Duracell has both brand and volume advantage over competitors in battery business. Warren Buffett coined the term economic moat to describe the advantages companies like Duracell have.
>INVESTOPEDIA EXPLAINS 'Economic Moat'
>The wider the moat, the larger and more sustainable the competitive advantage. By having a well-known brand name, pricing power and a large portion of market demand, a company with a wide moat possesses characteristics that act as barriers against other companies wanting to enter into the industry.