|
 Buffett, the billionaire chief executive officer and chairman of
Berkshire, said he would also support Jain if ever he decided to
seek Buffett’s post.
"He loves what he does, he's not looking to take my job,” Buffett
then said about Jain, who was born in the eastern Indian state of
Orissa. “If he was, the board of directors would probably put him in
there in a minute.”
Speculation has been mounting among Berkshire investors as to who
will eventually succeed the 84-year-old Buffett. The field was
finally narrowed when, in a letter to shareholders on Saturday,
Buffett revealed that he and the board had found his successor, and
his second-in-command, Charlie Munger, identified Jain and Greg
Abel, the head of Berkshire's energy companies, as front-runners for
the top job.
Munger said on Saturday that Jain, 63, and Abel, 52, were each in
some important ways, “a better business executive than Buffett."
Jain joined Berkshire in 1986, and Buffett immediately put him in
charge of National Indemnity’s small, struggling reinsurance
operation. He has since “built this business into a one-of-a-kind
giant in the insurance world,” Buffett said in an annual shareholder
letter.
In Berkshire’s 2014 shareholder letter posted online on Saturday,
Munger said Jain’s reinsurance operation combines capacity, speed,
decisiveness and, most important, “brains in a manner unique in the
insurance business.” Munger stressed Jain “never exposes Berkshire
to risks that are inappropriate in relation to our resources.”
Munger even went so far as to give an example of Jain’s
“unmatchable” underwriting skills: If the insurance industry should
experience a $250 billion loss from some mega-catastrophe,
“Berkshire as a whole would likely record a significant profit for
the year because of its many streams of earnings.”
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Jain received an undergraduate degree in engineering at the Indian
Institute of Technology in Kharagpur in 1972 and worked for
International Business Machines Corp in India between 1973 to 1976
before earning a business degree at Harvard University in 1978.
In a 2009 shareholder letter, Buffett proclaimed that “a hugely
important event in Berkshire’s history occurred on a Saturday in
1985. Ajit Jain came into our office in Omaha – and I immediately
knew we had found a superstar.”
Jeff Matthews, author of "Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and
Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett,” said: “Having been Buffett's
favorite for decades, Ajit Jain would have the stature to attract
companies to the Berkshire fold as Buffett has done.”
(Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)
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