Charlie Munger Quotes

Wrigley is a great business, but that doesn't solve the problem. Buying great businesses at advantageous prices is very tough.

If Dell's going to be a fast follower, then we'll continue to innovate.

The biggest cost of my business is competition - promoters bidding against each other to get a tour.

The only real way to differentiate yourself from the competition is through service.

We try to buy businesses with good-to-superb underlying economics run by honest and able people and buy them at sensible prices. That's all I'm trying to do.

You want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can't get a monopoly, in a big market right away; too much competition for that.

Sure, but competition is good for the user.

What does the name Virgin mean? We are a company that likes to take on the giants. In too many businesses, these giants have had things their own way. We are going to have fun competing with them.

Ignore the stock market, ignore the economy, and buy a business you understand.

In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.

Our investments continue to be few in number and simple in concept: The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph. We like a business with enduring competitive advantages that is run by able and owner-oriented people. When these attributes exist, and when we can make purchases at sensible prices, it is hard to go wrong (a challenge we periodically manage to overcome).

It may well be that creativity is the last unfair advantage we're legally allowed to take over our competitors.

Competition is the most promising means to achieve and secure prosperity. It alone enables people in their role of consumer to gain from economic progress. It ensures that all advantages which result from higher productivity may eventually be enjoyed.

Competition always tends to bring about the most economical and efficient method of production. Those who are most successful in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their production still further; those who are least successful will be forced out of the field. So capitalist production tends constantly to be drawn into the hands of the most efficient.

[In picking stocks] You really have to know a lot about business. You have to know a lot about competitive advantage. You have to know a lot about the maintainability of competitive advantage. You have to have a mind that quantifies things in terms of value. And you have to be able to compare those values with other values available in the stock market.

There are only two sources of competitive advantage: the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition and the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition.

Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.

As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.

The investment game is getting more and more competitive.

You'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you 'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening.

We have found in a long life that one competitor is frequently enough to ruin a business.

It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.

I study my competition for at least an hour a day. I get on the internet, look at what they doing, then I look at ways to defeat them.