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Warren Buffett clearly takes the cake as far as buy and hold investor examples go. He will purchase a stock and hold on to it for years, if not decades. His methodology of owning stocks for the long haul produces incredibly large returns. If you follow Buffett’s long-term convictions, you’ll receive a great lesson in value investing.

We looked at Warren Buffett’s stock positions, going back one year, and recognize five of which he increased the size of his position substantially during that time.

Let’s take a look at the five stocks right now…

DaVita Healthcare Partners, Inc.

Out of the entire group, this company carries the smallest market. It comes in under $13 billion. The company provides dialysis services. Berkshire Hathaway increased their position by 127% during 2012. They steadily increased their share size each quarter.

Warren Buffett adds substantially to his winners, and that’s precisely what he did with DaVita. The company produced huge returns during 2012, and Warren Buffett’s position gained 41% in value.

During April 2013, Deutsche Bank upgraded the stock. They believe that the business will potentially generate better earnings at a rate of nine dollars per share in cash EPS.

Andreas Halvorsen, billionaire investor from Viking Global, owns DVA shares in the amount of 1.5% of his entire portfolio worth $14.4 billion.

DirecTV

We will now shire our company spotlight on DirecTV. When 2012 began, Warren Buffett owned 23 million shares of the company. By the end of 2012, Buffett owned 34 million shares. This roughly equates to a 50% increase.

Stifel Nicolaus upgraded the digital television provider to a buy during the middle of April. This upgrade is in addition to Guggenheim’s buy rating, which the company received during March 2013.

At the time of this writing, DirecTV shares rose 10% in value so far during 2013. The shares currently trade near the 52 week high. Recently, DirecTV dropped its bid to purchase Vivendi’s Brazilian unit. The move would have increased their South American and Latin presence. Shareholders recognized the bid drop as a relief. DirecTV’s share price rose 6% in value immediately following the announcement. Jim Simons, famed investor of Renaissance Technologies owns $200 million worth of DTV shares.

General Motors

Buffett continued to purchase shares of GM throughout 2012. Berkshire Hathaway’s share size grew by 150% during the previous year. In the first quarter of the prior year, Berkshire only owned 10 million shares of the automaker. By the end of 2012, their position size increased to 25 million shares.

General Motors came through with a fantastic annual return during 2012. Investors netted 37% even though sales dropped heavily during the summer.

The company plans to increase its capacity to produce vehicles. They intend to increase production to 5 million automobiles per year, and plan to open four plants in China during the next three years.

Greenlight Capital billionaire investor David Einhorn owns roughly the same amount of shares as Warren Buffett. Both investors currently own over 20 million shares each.

Liberty Media Corporation

In the entertainment industry, LMCA makes many high profile moves. It fits perfectly that Buffett chose to increase the size of his position by 87% from the first quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter. The media company sold off Starz, its premium movie channel and the business worked deals with companies such as Charter Communications, Sirius XM Radio and Barnes & Noble.

Liberty Media plans to buy a 27% stake in Charter Communications. The deal will cost $2.6 billion. But that’s not all, as the company may have further interest in mergers and acquisitions.

James Dinan, billionaire investor of York Capital Management owns more than 1 million shares of Liberty Media Corporation. This company represents 3% of his investment portfolio.

The Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

BK outranks all of the previous stocks mentioned in regards to position growth. Berkshire Hathaway increased its position in the Bank of New York Mellon Corp. by 250% in 2012. They went from 5.6 million shares to a whopping 19.6 million shares throughout that period.

During 2012, BK shares climbed 24% in price, and the shares have risen another 5% since we’ve moved into 2013. The company reported earnings on April 17. They missed earnings-per-share estimates by 2%, and also missed revenue expectations as well.

Investor sentiment remains positive on the sell side. But, mean price targets remain a year out, and the company’s growth potential could increase by 4.4% during that time. Mario Gabelli, billionaire of GAMCO Investors, owns roughly 6,000,000 shares of the Bank of New York Mellon.

As DaVita continues its expansion, Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway is expanding their holdings right along with them. On January 9, 2013, Berkshire Hathaway increased their stake in the company by 1.3%. This is the 12th time they purchase more shares since last October, which we learned according to GuruFocus. This is the second purchasing move made by Berkshire Hathaway during the new year. They are even more interested now that DaVita is partnering with its competitor Fresenius Medical Care, and they are making great headway in the European market.

This most recent purchase now puts Berkshire Hathaway in control of 14.65% of the company, and they are the largest shareholder of DaVita. The Vanguard group is next in line, and they only own 5.52%. This company is in the number eight position in Warren Buffett’s high-quality, predictable and selective portfolio of companies he buys for the long-term.

2013 has barely begun, and yet DaVita has already made two significant steps in their growth. This past January 8, 2013, they announced their partnership with Fresenius Medical Care, another leading company in the dialysis services sector, and they have provided this type of care to 33% of the market in 2011. Under the agreement made, FMC will use DaVita Rx prescription drug services in order to fulfill and then ship their oral medications to Medicare patients in the United States of America.

DaVita Rx was created back in 2005, and is the first and biggest full-service pharmacy exclusively dedicated to patients with kidney troubles. The partnership is going to help Fresenius comply with a mandate by Congress that says all oral end-stage renal disease medications be part of a bundled payment model by the year 2016.

On January 7, 2013, the company announced that they purchased nine dialysis centers from Fresenius, and they were located in Poland and Portugal. With these acquisitions, the company now has 33 total dialysis centers outside of the United States, and 1,912 centers within the United States.

This is a company focused on high-growth, and their revenue has increased annually at a rate of 19% over the last 10 years. During this same time period, their EBITDA grew at a rate of 21.4%, their free cash flow rose 9.8% and the company’s book value grew at 34.7%.

Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett now own more than 14% of the company stock in DaVita Inc., a kidney dialysis firm.

In a filing this past Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Berkshire Hathaway let us know that they now own a total of 13.6 million shares of the company based out of Denver.

At the end of last year, when Berkshire Hathaway first disclosed information about their investment in DaVita, it only owned a total of 2.7 million shares at that time. In the beginning of this past October, Berkshire Hathaway only had around 10 million shares.

Very typically, the officials at Berkshire Hathaway do not comment or discuss the SEC filings. So we do not know if this is an investment specifically from Warren Buffett, or if it comes from one of his investment managers currently sharing some of the stock picking burden with Warren Buffett.

Last week, Berkshire Hathaway bought a total of 635,633 shares of the company at a price range between the amounts of $104.58 and $107.38.

At the time of this writing, DaVita currently runs about 2000 outpatient dialysis clinics.

It’s no secret that Warren Buffett is a legendary investor. The decisions that he makes when trading on the stock market have been predominantly spot on for many years. That’s why investors pay attention to the moves that Berkshire Hathaway makes.

One recent move is that Berkshire Hathaway bought 217,597 shares of DaVita Inc. They paid a total of $109.76 per share. The total value of this purchase is $23.88 million. They made this trade last Friday, and it brought their total holding up to 10,483,112 shares of this company, and they are worth a total of $1.15 billion.

This isn’t the first time that Berkshire Hathaway increased their position in this company. As a matter of fact, they have been steadily adding to it over the last few months. Warren Buffett and company have actually added a total of 350,349 shares of DaVita between late September of this year, and early October. The price they paid for the shares were between $100.96 and $108.21 per share.

What does DaVita do? It’s actually the leading company in the United States for kidney care. They have clinics set up all over the country (even other parts of the world) and they help patients with chronic kidney failure. The patients go to the clinic if they can’t get the proper dialysis treatment when living with later stage renal disease. This company serves a total of 149,000 patients.

It’s no surprise that Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are making a long-term bet that the frequency of diabetes in the United States of America will increase.

Do you think it’s a good idea for Buffett to increase his bet in this company? Do you think it might be worth looking into for yourself? If you are a follower of Warren Buffett, then I highly recommend that you do so.

As of September 28, 2012, Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. have purchased another 282,403 shares of DaVita Inc. The total share price purchase for this transaction was $103.83 per share.

This brings the amount of shares that Berkshire Hathaway owns all way up to 9,582,403 shares. It’s also a 28% increase from the amount of shares that they reported owning on June 6. This makes Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway currently a 10% owner in the company.

If you’re not aware of this already, DaVita Inc. actually delivers a dialysis service to those individuals suffering from chronic kidney failure, as well as end-stage renal disease. The service provides clinical care, as well as integrated treatment plans, health management services and teams that are capable of putting together personalized care. The company actually has 1800 centers for outpatient dialysis across the nation, as well as 19 other centers for dialysis outside of the United States of America in four different countries. We learned this information from the company’s website.

Other than the large purchase just made by Berkshire Hathaway, there was actually more insider activity going on at DaVita throughout this month. Pamela Arway, the DVA Director sold four thousand of her shares during September. David Shapiro, who is the DVA Chief Compliance Officer, sold over 15,000 of his shares. Leanne Zumwalt, DVA Group Vice President, sold over 4900 of her shares as well.

Some of the other big guns in the financial world that own shares of this company are as follows: Steve Mandel of Lone Pine Capital currently owns about 3.2% of the company. Andreas Halvorsen, from Viking Global Investors LP, owns roughly 3.34% of DVA. And last but not least, Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital owns 0.73%.

The net income of DaVita is roughly $2.8 million, and we base this on the figures that the company reported this past June for their six-months quarterly report.

DaVita’s current P/E ratio is 17.3. Their P/S ratio is 1.4, and they have an annual earnings growth of 18.6% over the last 10 years. Their market cap is $9.8 billion. They are currently trading at their highest price in the last three years.