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Billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s big bet on Apple now appears to be the whole lot bigger.
In his recent interview with Squawk Box, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and the 3rd richest person in the world, Warren Buffet has said that the long-term investors of Apple’s stock shouldn’t obsess with near-term iPhone sales.
Buffett believes that Apple’s amazing business is likely to grow. as he said; “The idea that you’re going to spend loads of time trying to guess how many iPhone X … are going to be sold in a three-month period totally misses the point. It’s like worrying about the number of BlackBerrys 10 years ago.”
Buffett states that Apple has “a wide, wide gap. I mean it’s an amazing business […] You can put all of their products on a dining room table.”
At the end of 2017, Berkshire Hathaway owned 166.7 million shares of Apple, valued at $28.2 billion, which made it the second-biggest holding behind Wells Fargo, according to Buffett’s 2017 letter to shareholders released in February.
Apple this week reported first-quarter earnings that topped Wall Street expectations. It booked sales of $61.1 billion and grew earnings by 30%. It sold 52.1 million iPhones and also returned a lot of cash to shareholders, announcing a $100 billion stock buyback plan and raising its dividend.
The stake in Apple, which Berkshire began building in early 2016 with a $1 billion investment, a decision that at the time was driven by one of the money managers Buffett hired to manage the stock side of Berkshire’s investments. And above all, Berkshire had $116 billion in cash at the end of last year, so has plenty of spare money to make big investments.
Image Source: Bloomberg
