By Mariam Sunny and Shashwat Chauhan
(Reuters) -Shares of UnitedHealth Group surged more than 9% on Friday after a fresh investment from billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway boosted investor confidence in the troubled health conglomerate.
The company is dealing with multiple challenges that have emerged in the last two years, including rising costs, a federal investigation into its government-backed health plans, a cyberattack at its technology unit that affected the personal information of over 192 million Americans, and the murder of its insurance unit chief in December.
Long hailed as a reliable earnings performer, UnitedHealth missed Wall Street’s profit expectations for the last two quarters, and its shares have dropped nearly 46% in 2025, making it the worst-performing stock on the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average this year.
The shares were last up 9.3% at $296.64 in early trading.
Buffett has swooped in with big investments in companies, in which he sees a long-term strategic value, during their periods of struggle.
He invested heavily in Occidental Petroleum in 2019 as it tried to finance a merger with Anadarko Petroleum and has kept adding to his stake despite the company’s weak stock performance. He famously took a stake in investment bank Goldman Sachs at the height of the global financial crisis in 2008.
“Buffett’s purchase is a psychological reassurance to many investors that saw UnitedHealth as ‘untouchable,’ given the massive turbulence in the stock over the past few months,” said Kevin Gade, chief operating officer at UnitedHealth investor Bahl & Gaynor.
Berkshire owned 5.04 million UnitedHealth shares worth about $1.57 billion as of June 30, it said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday. Buffett owned about 1.18 million shares in UnitedHealth between 2006 and 2009, before selling his entire stake in 2010.
Several other prominent hedge funds, including David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management, Lone Pine Capital and Two Sigma Investments, also bought UnitedHealth’s shares, regulatory filings showed on Thursday.
While the “vote of confidence” from Buffett’s investment validates the long-term value of UnitedHealth shares, the “management needs to regain trust and credibility with investors, and get back to its beat and raise reputation of the past,” said James Harlow, senior vice president at Novare Capital Management.
In May, CEO Andrew Witty abruptly stepped down amid rising operational and financial pressures, and Stephen Hemsley, who had run the company from 2006 to 2017, took over.
Last month, the company projected full-year adjusted earnings per share of at least $16, well short of analysts’ already lowered estimate of $20.91.
UnitedHealth’s shares are currently trading at about 15.8 times forward earnings estimates, below their five-year average of 19.
“While UnitedHealth still faces elevated uncertainty, it is good to see that this renowned investment firm also believes the market is discounting assumptions that are too pessimistic for the long term, which is similar to our view,” said Morningstar analyst Julie Utterback.
Shares of rivals Centene, Humana and Molina Healthcare gained between 2% and 4%.
Berkshire on Thursday also disclosed new stakes in steel maker Nucor, security products provider Allegion and outdoor advertiser Lamar Advertising.
(Reporting by Shashwat Chauhan and Mariam Sunny in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Shinjini Ganguli)
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