Berkshire Hathaway's holdings in listed companies and their return on equity

Berkshire Hathaway's holdings in listed companies and their return on equity:

I've been spending a bit of time recently reading over large cap US stocks. I tend to look over the following information to get a quick overview of a company: Return On Equity (ROE), Debt to Equity, Price to Earnings Ratio (PE Ratio).

S&P have some good information so I decided to look over Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway's largest listed holdings from their latest 2012 annual shareholder letter and analyse their Return On Equity (click to enlarge image).

Here are several of Berkshire's holdings in which I found their Return On Equity from Standard & Poors data:

Sample Berkshire Hathaway holdings ROE
Year	2012	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004	2003
American Express	23.8	27.8	26.7	16.5	24.3	37.6	35.4	24.2	22.4	20.6
Coca Cola	28	27.4	42.5	30.2	27.5	30.9	30.5	30.2	32.3	33.6
IBM	85.2	73.4	64.9	74.4	58.8	36.6	30.6	24.7	29.3	30.1
Procter & Gamble	13.9	18.5	17.8	17.2	17.9	16.3	22.1	45.7	41.8	37.9
Wal-Mart	23	23.5	22.1	21.2	20.4	20.4	21.2	21.9	22.1	21.3
Wells Fargo	13.1	13.1	11.1	14.3	4.9	17.2	19.8	19.7	19.5	19.3

Note this is only a sample but quick look at these selected companies shows they all have 'high' Return On Equity. By 'high' I mean above 20% with the only exception being Wells Fargo.