Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Reportedly Raises $1.2B Via Yen Bonds After Massive Japan Bets

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc (NYSE:BRK) (NYSE:BRK) has reportedly raised funds by issuing 164.4 billion yen ($1.2 billion) of bonds on Friday, just days after the billionaire investor said he had increased holdings in Japanese trading houses.

What Happened: The company's five-part bond deal included notes as short as three years while the longest tenor notes mature in 2053, a Bloomberg report said.

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The proceeds from the bond issue will be used for general corporate purposes, including refinancing some debt, the issuer said in a filing earlier this month.

Berkshire is one of the largest overseas issuers of yen debt. It attracted investors with stronger credit ratings from Moody's Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings than the credit assessors give to the Japanese sovereign, the report said.

Japan Bets: Shares of Japan's major trading houses rose on Tuesday after Buffett told the Nikkei newspaper that Berkshire had increased holdings in them to 7.4% from about 5% in 2020, according to the report. "We’ll be in these stocks 10-20 years," he had said.

In his appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box on Wednesday, he elaborated further on the logic behind his Japanese bets.

"I was confounded by the fact that we could buy into these companies and in effect have earnings yield, maybe 14% or something like that, with dividends…..that grew 70% during that time and people were investing money at quarter percent or nothing, and then the quarter percent, if they put it out for a year, it wasn't going to grow," the billionaire said.

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