Sounds like the name of the world’s strangest law firm, right?

Car accident?  Call Dino, Berk, McCormick & Acacia, justice will be served and we’ll make you rich!

Maybe not.  But those are the things that caught my eye this week — that’s Dino Polska, some more mild updates on Berkshire Hathaway, a slouching dividend leader in McCormick that’s now getting to an interesting valuation, and some progress at Acacia Research that investors don’t seem to really appreciate yet. We’ll go through them in roughly that order, with a few other tidbits thrown in.

Dino Polska (DNP.WA, DNOPY) took a pretty big hit over the past week or so, falling down below my average purchase price for the first time in a while.  It looks like the primary reason for that drop is the weak performance report from Biedronka, one of Dino’s closest competitors in the grocery market in Poland (Biedronka is owned by a Portuguese company, Jerónimo Martins).

Dino has had extraordinary revenue growth over the past couple years, but a part of that growth is just the pass-through of food inflation, which has been extra-high in Poland, and that has helped Dino a little bit but is not the core reason for their operational success and their ongoing bottom-line growth.  And it may well be squeezing their margins and slowing their expansion, at least temporarily.

One of the fears is that as food inflation slows down, the cumulative impact of that inflation over the past couple years is still hurting consumers, and they’re buying less and being more price-sensitive, and therefore the days of massive growth for Dino (and Biedronka) are over. Biedronka’s update this week indicated that they’ve seen food inflation drop, which is mostly good, but also that like-for-like sales growth dropped considerably more, which is bad (“like for like” is similar to the more familiar “same store sales” number we often hear from US retailers)… the numbers have come down from the highs of mid-2022 (20-22% food inflation, 24% like-for-like growth for Biedronka and much faster growth for Dino), and now we’re told that food inflation in Poland was down to about 7% in the latest quarter, with the expectation that like-for-like sales growth will likewise drop, maybe to well below 10%, for these two Polish grocery leaders.

We don’t know what Dino’s numbers will be yet, but Biedronka for the third quarter in a ...