Henry Singleton

“Among over 1000 major American companies, Teledyne ranked 12th in profitability, 15th in growth, and sixth in market performance. In the multi-companies category, Teledyne was first in return on equity, first in return on total capital, and second in growth in…”

“Singleton is extremely intelligent. He tries to work out the best moves, and maybe he doesn't like to talk too much because when you're playing a game, you don't tell everyone else what your strategy is.”

“From 1963 to 1990, Teledyne, the company that Henry Singleton helped build from scratch, delivered annual returns of 20.4%, while the S&P 500 managed a mere eight percent. If you'd invested 10,000 dollars in Teledyne in 1963, by 1990, you'd have over 1.8 Milli…”

“In 1939, he was on a three-man team that won the William Lau Putnam Prize, an elite math competition. It was MIT's first time winning this award. His teammate? None other than the future Nobel physicist and outlier Richard Feynman.”

“With an internal capital of 450,000, they launched what was originally called Instrument Systems.”

“Throughout the 19 sixties, Teledyne aggressively acquired more than 130 companies. But by 1969, Henry Singleton saw the acquisition prices head soar beyond rational value. Therefore, he slammed on the brakes, stunning Wall Street by making zero new deals.”

“During the 1968 to 74 period, when most investors considered bonds safe and stocks risky, Singleton took the opposite view. He instructed his insurance companies to move away from fixed income securities and toward equities when the stock market was depressed.”

“In the end, what made Teledyne remarkable wasn't just Singleton's financial wizardry or Robert's operational discipline, but the seamless integration of the two, while most conglomerates of the era were ultimately dismantled or vastly underperformed the market…”

“Cooperman also noticed that Argonaut's investment portfolio contained only government securities, high grade municipals and corporates with zero junk bonds, a testament to Singleton's conservative investment philosophy that had transferred to the spun off comp…”

“I won't pay 15 times earnings. That would mean I'd be only making a return of six or seven percent, and I can do that in treasury bills.”

“When American TV manufacturers still dominated the US market, Singleton anticipated the coming Japanese competition and exited the business entirely. This shocked industry observers. Packard Bell had a good market share and solid profits, but Singleton saw the…”

“And they purchased these companies using Teledyne's highly valued shares, often trading at 40 to 70 times earnings. They more than doubled the share count in the late sixties. But the financial results that followed more than made up for the shared dilution, t…”

“There are tremendous values in the stock market, but in buying stocks, not in entire companies. Buying companies tends to raise the purchase price too high.”

“The same year, Singleton conducted his eighth and final major stock buyback, acquiring 8.6 million shares at 200 dollars per share, approximately 30 dollars above the market price. This reduced Teledyne's outstanding shares to just over twenty million.”

“Well, Cy, he replied, I figured most of these millions of expected potential computer customers would at first be intimidated by computers, but could anyone be intimidated by a computer named Apple? Besides, he said, all the others except Apple, if they failed…”

“Subsidiary presidents had real authority, but they were measured on the Teledyne return, the average of the cash flow and reported profit, ensuring that they couldn't hide behind accounting tricks.”

“Shareholders who stayed with Teledyne from the first buyback in 1972 achieved gains of approximately 3000% by 1983, transforming many patient investors into multi-millionaires.”

“Warren Buffett once said that Henry Singleton had the best operating and capital deployment record in American business, bar none.”

“Roberts noted that before the spinoff of Argonaut in 1986, Teledyne's stock price peaked at 367 dollars a share. By 1999, the combined value of all the companies was 691 dollars showing the lasting value Singleton had created.”

“There was a whole team of people at Teledyne who had been taking care of the acquisitions, helping find these companies, working through the acquisition process, integrating them, And they were just laid off all at the same time.”

“Decades later, he'd become one of America's largest landowners.”

“Companies that will sell one division and buy another because today this division generally sports a low multiple, and the one they're buying has a high multiple, and they think that may rub off on the whole company. That absolutely turns me off. The whole con…”

“One technique he used was borrowing against the physical inventories of the companies that they had acquired.”

“In an era when virtually no companies bought back shares, Teledyne would conduct eight major share repurchases over the next 12 years, reducing the number of shares outstanding by more than 90%.”

“Over the next 12 years, he bought back 90% of Teledyne shares. The result earnings per share exploded a 311% increase in just five years.”