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On Wednesday, Berkshire Hathaway revealed that it has taken up new investments in Starz and Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. They also decided to sell off some of their shares of Mondelez International Inc., a snack food maker.

There were a number of other adjustments made to the $85 billion US stock portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway during the first quarter of 2013. These changes were recently disclosed in documents that were filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC for short.

At the end of the first quarter, the company owned 6.5 million shares of construction and engineering firm Chicago Bridge & Iron, which has a main focus on energy products, and they also owned shares in the Starz movie network totaling 5.6 million

Chicago Bridge & Iron recently completed their purchase of The Shaw Group back in February of this year. They are the primary contractor at Plant Vogtle’s nuclear expansion. This deal is valued at $3.1 billion. The Shaw Group continues to remain the primary contractor of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River Site.

It’s quite common for investors to closely watch the things that Berkshire Hathaway does when trading so they can copy what Warren Buffett does. But, many of the most recent investments are smaller than $500 million. So these investments are most likely coming from Ted Weschler and Todd Combs, Berkshire Hathaway’s investment managers.

We are unable to learn which investments were made by whom through the quarterly stock filing. We do know that Ted Weschler and Todd Combs each have $5 billion portfolios that they manage for Berkshire Hathaway. Although Warren Buffett continues to make the majority of the investment decisions for the conglomerate based out of Omaha, Nebraska.

The officials at Berkshire Hathaway do not often comment when making their required disclosures, and when left a message on Wednesday afternoon, no one responded immediately.

At the end of 2012, Berkshire owned 12.8 million shares of Mondelez International. It has now cut its stake to 7 million shares. The company also trimmed their shares of Kraft Foods to 1.6 million. It was previously 1.67 million shares.

Berkshire also added on to some of the other investments in their energy portfolio. They bought more shares of National Oilwell Varco Inc. which brings it to 7.5 million shares. They didn’t add to their shares of ConocoPhillips or Phillips 66.

It’s no surprise that Buffett also added onto his favorite bank stock, Wells Fargo & Co. The company now owns 458.2 million shares. This is up from 439.9 million shares.

Berkshire also added onto its investment in Walmart, and brought it up to 49.2 million shares at the end of March. They previously held 47.5 million.

Buffett also increased his company’s investment in Internet registry service VeriSign Inc. They previously held 3.7 million shares, and now own 8.2 million.

The company completely eliminated two of their smaller investments in General Dynamics Corp. and Archer Daniels Midland Co. Both were part of the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio at the end of 2012. Plus, Berkshire reduced its stake in Bank of New York Mellon from 19.6 million shares to 18.9 million shares.

As I’m sure you already know, there are quite a few firms that currently scrambling to give back money to some of their share holders prior to the fiscal cliff. But as usual, Warren Buffett decided to surprise many people on Wednesday by buying back $1.2 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock from one single shareholder.

Prior to the news being released, Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A and Class B shares were halted. But once trading opened in New York, the shares began to rally. Berkshire Hathaway let us know that they bought 9200 class a shares at $131,000 apiece “from the estate of a long-time shareholder.”

Warren Buffett’s investment firm raised its price limits for repurchase to 120% of book value. This means that they can theoretically purchase shares for up to $134,062, which we learned according to Reuters. Warren Buffett had not made any large repurchases such as this during the first nine months of this year.

On a historical level, Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett are typically opposed to making repurchases. They didn’t do so for around for decades, which we learned according to Bloomberg, until Warren Buffett changed his mind during 2011.

There are quite a few companies that have incurred in buybacks and special dividends over the last few weeks so that they can return money to the shareholders ahead of a potential tax increase that will be connected to the fiscal cliff. In quite a few different cases, billionaires are basically paying themselves large bonuses, as is the case with Sheldon Adelson and Las Vegas Sands and Larry Ellison with Oracle.

Warren Buffett, whose company Berkshire Hathaway holds very large positions in Walmart, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, and many others, told us that repurchases make perfect sense when a company is well capitalize, and their stock is trading cheaply based on a conservative perspective. Berkshire is cash on hand is $47.8 billion as of the end of the third quarter, we learned according to regulatory filings.

Based on the news of this buyback today, Berkshire Hathaway’s class a stock rallied in gained 2.3% to reach the level of $133,840 by 12 o’clock in the afternoon in New York.

Throughout this article, we are going to take a look at a group of UK companies backed by billionaire Warren Buffett.

Warren Buffett is a legendary investor in the United States of America, and he is currently worth over $50 billion. He’s recently been giving a great deal of his fortune to charity, so he’d be worth even more than where he currently stands. It’s not often that Mister Buffett invests in businesses outside of the US, but he and Berkshire Hathaway will do it on occasion.

Like I already mentioned, Berkshire does have a few solid investments in the UK. It certainly can’t hurt to take a look at the Oracle of Omaha’s investment strategies in this country. We might learn a thing or two. So what companies convinced Warren Buffett to step out of the United States comfort zone?

Supermarkets

The biggest investment for Berkshire Hathaway in the United Kingdom is the top supermarket in Britain named Tesco. This is an investment that they have been building over quite a few years now.

Berkshire first opened its position in Tesco during 2006. Sir Terry Leahy was the CEO at the time the position was opened, and Tesco was a major player in the UK supermarket game. They even had plans to expand on a global scale. Buffett really appreciates the quality of the managers in every investment that he makes, and Sir Terry Leahy definitely fits the bill. Warren Buffett also likes to invest in dominant players in their market, and that also attracted him to Tesco since they were the top dog in the UK with plans on international expansion. That will drive growth in the company for many years to come.

Sir Terry announced that he was going to retire in 2010, and he named Philip Clark as his successor. Berkshire Hathaway purchased more shares at the time of Clark’s succession. Clark was a veteran at Tesco for many years, and he was also the chief of international operations for the company prior to being named the CEO. It’s quite obvious that Warren Buffett was satisfied with the change in management, and even looked at it as an opportunity to further expand his investment in the company. I’m sure he also appreciates the experience that Clark brings to the table, as well as his skill in navigating the international markets which are a big part of their expansion strategy.

Berkshire Hathaway most recently purchase shares of Tesco in January of 2012. Oddly enough, they purchased when Tesco provided their first profit warning in over 20 years. But that didn’t deter Berkshire Hathaway whatsoever, and they increased their stake in the company from 3.2% to 5.1%. They have 408 million shares of the company, and it is valued at the time of this writing at 1.3 billion pounds. Warren Buffett took his own advice when he made his most recent purchase, and chose to be “greedy when others are fearful.”

As I’m sure you already know, Warren Buffett invests for the long-term, so we won’t know whether or not his recent addition of shares will be a great triumph or a dud. If you decide that you want to follow the advice of Warren Buffett and invest in Tesco, you’ll pay 9.5 times the forecasted earnings for this year, and the current share price is 313p. Also, the expected forward dividend yield is 4.6%.

Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett also have a smaller investment in the number two supermarket in the UK, Asda. But this investment comes in the form of shares in Asda’s owner: Walmart, the US retail giant. The 541 stores that Asda owns is roughly 5% of the global estate of Walmart.

Big Pharma

Berkshire Hathaway also owns shares in the UK public company GlaxoSmithKline. They are the biggest Pharma group in Britain, and the fifth largest pharmaceutical company in the world.

Berkshire Hathaway is invested in GSK via 1.5 million ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) which they took on in early 2008. The current value of this holding is $69.5 million, or 43,000,000 pounds.

This situation is basically another area where Warren Buffett decided to be greedy while other people were afraid. Berkshire had a lot more faith in GSK then the rest of the market. Most were worried about the competition, regulatory clampdown and generic drugs in the United States. GSK has actually increased their earnings-per-share by a compound annual growth rate of 4%, and its dividend has also increased by CAGR of 7%.

The share price of GSK is currently trading at 12.5 times the forecasted earnings for this year, which is roughly 1430 pounds. The dividend yield forecast is over 5%.

Utilities

Big Pharma and supermarkets are traditionally known as stable investments, and part of the defensive sectors. This means that these companies are expected to perform relatively well during any economic condition, even a negative one. This also holds true for Berkshire Hathaway’s stake in a different type of UK company.

It’s not currently listed on the stock market, but it is owned by a private holding company in the US known as MidAmerican Energy. Berkshire currently owns a 9.5% of MidAmerican, and they have a large variety of utility companies. But the one we’re specifically talking about is Yorkshire Electricity and Northern Electric. This is the third largest distributor of electricity in the UK, and it makes around 25% of the total profit for MidAmerican.

There’s no real way for you to personally invest in Yorkshire Electricity and Northern Electric directly, but you can technically buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway since that stock price is certainly affected by this particular business.

These are the main UK investments that Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway has made over the last few years. I recommend you study these investments and try and determine why Warren Buffett may have chose these companies. We provide you with a few reasons already, but you never know what else you might dig up on your own.

Between the years 2002 all away through the end of 2011, shares of Walmart Stores Inc. basically went nowhere. Their price remained somewhere in the upper range of $50 per share. As a matter of fact, in 2012 FPA Capital Advisor member Stephen Romick called Walmart an “infinite duration bond with a rising coupon.” Very recently, many investors have jumped on the bandwagon for Walmart as the stock has increased in share price a total of 21% year to date. It’s currently approaching its fair market value, as well as making Warren Buffett and his Berkshire shareholders that much richer.

Buffett increased Berkshire Hathaway’s holding of Walmart by 7,892,342 shares in quarter three of 2009 at average price of $50 per share. He did this again during the fourth quarter of 2009 where he purchased 1,200,500 shares at an average cost of $52.50 per share. Not to outshine his own brilliance, he also bought another 7,671,000 shares at an average price of $61 during the first quarter of the year 2012. This was right before Walmart’s stock price rose about $12 per share to the price of $72.98 according to their latest quote at the time of this writing.

At the current price of nearly $73 per share, Walmart is steadily approaching its fair market value. Even though its stock price has remained flat for a decade, Walmart EBITDA actually grew at a rate of 11.3%, and it reached record earnings per share at $4.54 per share in the fiscal year of 2012. Back in 2003, Walmart’s price to earnings ratio was at a height of 33. When Buffett decided to add on to his portfolio in the first quarter of 2012, the P/E was only 13 and very near to its ten-year low. Walmart’s P/E has currently risen to 15.5.

The revenue of Walmart has steadily increased each year consecutively, and this is especially telling since we have gone through a recession during part of the last decade. The revenue has reached a record-breaking height of $447 billion in the fiscal year of 2012. Walmart’s gross margin has also been on a trend that is ever-expanding.

Another thing to note is that Walmart is going to continue to increase its dividend in 2012. The board approved a dividend increase from $1.46 per share to $1.59 per share for fiscal year 2013. This equals to a payout of $5.52 billion. The company has steadily increased its dividend every year since the year 1974. Last year Walmart’s dividend was raised by a total of 20.7%. The company also bought back $6.3 billion worth of shares during the fiscal year 2012.

GuruFocus valued shares of Walmart at a fair market value of $78 per share last year, and they based this off of an assumption that Walmart would have a 10% earnings per share growth rate over the next 10 years. They also based it off of a 3% terminal growth rate. Today the stock trades at around $73 per share, which is right near its fair market value. This makes it an increasingly risky investment for those who are thinking about getting in at the current price.

Currently, GuruFocus has Walmart valuation showing that the current stock price is actually higher than its valuation numbers. The Graham number for Walmart is $39.26 per share, and the Peter Lynch fair value is $38.10 per share, while the intrinsic value is $58.63 per share.

Berkshire Hathaway’s share prices rallied recently as well, and they reached their 16-month high. Berkshire share prices are up about 10% year to date, and the current value of one share is worth $125,321. Berkshire made an announcement on May 4 which says they improved their operating earnings of $2.7 billion, which is up from $1.6 billion in the first quarter in 2011. They also said their net earnings were $3.2 billion, which is up from $1.5 billion in the prior-year quarter. This is the third consecutive year of increases for Berkshire Hathaway.

During an interview that Warren Buffett did on CNBC recently, he commented that he was actually a lot more worried about the US economy potentially shrinking, which would slow the growth of consumer spending and would obviously slow down and affect many businesses in the US. He’s also concerned that this might push investors to more “safer” stocks of the larger companies. Another thing that Buffett believes is that the housing market is also picking up, which would be a large benefit to Berkshire Hathaway, since it owns Clayton Homes, which is one of the largest homebuilders.

The current Graham number of Berkshire Hathaway stock is $116,768. There is no intrinsic value or Peter Lynch value.

One bright spot is that Buffett is still very optimistic about the US economy even though it is going to slow down. He said “I love owning businesses in the United States. We’ll invest $9 billion almost in the United States almost at Berkshire this year. I am a bull on America. We have to run it right, that’s all.”