Rapidly, Buffett Secures a Deal for .5 Billion

Warren E. Buffett may be a choosy shopper, but when he sees a firm he likes, he moves fast.

After just two weeks of negotiations, Mr. Buffett, who has been looking for acquisitions on which to spend his company’s billions of dollars, snagged an industrial conglomerate in a deal announced Tuesday. The Pritzker family of Chicago will sell to Mr. Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, a 60 percent stake in Marmon Holdings for .5 billion.

The deal would go a long way toward unwinding the business holdings of the Pritzkers, a process that started in 2001. For Mr. Buffett, the deal represents his largest acquisition outside the insurance industry and suggests that he is finally finding some deals he can get excited about.

Berkshire will acquire the remaining 40 percent of Marmon over the next five or six years at a price that will be based on the future earnings of the company. In 2006, Marmon posted revenue of billion and profit of billion from operations like wire and cable, railroad tank cars and water treatment systems.

Showing the speed at which Mr. Buffett likes to operate and the disdain he has for the trappings of deal-making, the acquisition was concluded in just two weeks. A banker from Goldman Sachs, which advised the Pritzker family, contacted Mr. Buffett in the second week of December at a rally for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in San Francisco.

“The next morning, we delivered a phone book-size document describing Marmon, literally at his plane,” Thomas Pritzker, the chairman of Marmon, said in an telephone interview. “He read it on a plane going back to Omaha. He landed and called the Goldman guy and said: ‘Tell Tom we have a deal.’”

Mr. Buffett, who could not be reached for comment, later met with two executives from Marmon for more information. Berkshire Hathaway owns such diverse businesses as Geico insurance, Benjamin Moore paints, Borsheim’s jewelry and the NetJets fractional jet ownership company. Frank Ptak is to remain chief executive of Marmon.

“Our transaction was done just the way Jay would have liked it to be done — no consultants or studies,” Mr. Buffett said in a statement, referring to Jay A. Pritzker, a scion of the family who died in 1999. Mr. Buffett met Jay Pritzker in the 1950s and for many years served on the board of Grinnell College in Iowa with Marian Pritzker, who was married to Jay and is Thomas’s mother.

The deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

For the Pritzker family, which founded and still controls the Hyatt hotel chain, the deal will help advance a plan to liquidate its holdings, which are estimated to be worth about billion. Proceeds from the sales are to be distributed among 11 cousins.

This year, the family sold a minority stake in Hyatt to Goldman Sachs and an investment firm affiliated with S. Robson Walton, chairman of Wal-Mart Stores. That transaction is expected to lead eventually to a public offering of Hyatt shares.

The Pritzker plan has not advanced smoothly. In 2005, the family reached a 0 million settlement in a dispute between Liesel and Matthew Pritzker and their father, Robert Pritzker, whom they had accused of robbing their trust funds.

Thomas Pritzker, 57, said that the family was no longer feuding and that the Hyatt and Marmon deals put it within about four years of completing its plan. “I think I have found an elegant solution to a series of responsibilities that I had to the family, to the companies, to the management,” he said. “This is a solution that works for all of those.”

The family’s rise to prominence began in the late 1800s, with a penniless Ukrainian immigrant named Nicholas Pritzker who taught himself English by reading The Chicago Tribune. He became a successful lawyer, but it was his grandson Jay who began the family’s real estate business when he purchased the first Hyatt hotel in 1957. The family acquired Marmon in 1953. It also has investments in a number of other businesses, including the Royal Caribbean cruise line.

For Berkshire, Marmon will make only a small dent in its billion in cash. Mr. Buffett has lamented the paucity of good, well-priced firms. At Berkshire’s shareholder meeting in May, he said he would consider a deal as large as billion.

Excluding debt, the Marmon purchase will be Berkshire’s largest deal outside insurance.

Michael J. de la Merced and Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.