If a company made you $2.6 billion in a single day, you’d probably want to continue investing in it. That’s what Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway firm has done with Apple, according to its latest regulatory filing.
In the second quarter of 2018, Berkshire Hathaway boosted its stock in Apple by 5 percent, upping its holding from 239.6 million shares to 252 million. According to current valuation that means the firm’s Apple investment is worth around $47 billion.
The firm owns around 5 percent of Apple, which passed the $1 trillion value earlier this month.
One of Apple’s biggest cheerleaders
The particularly impressive part of Buffett’s Apple investment is that he has historically steered clear of technology stocks. However, he made an exception for Apple, and has repeatedly spoken out about his faith in the company.
“Apple has an extraordinary consumer franchise,” Buffett said on the CNBC program Squawk Box earlier this year. “I see how strong that ecosystem is, to an extraordinary degree. You are very, very, very locked in, at least psychologically and mentally, to the product you are using.
Buffett is also an ideal investor because he’s less of an activist investor than the likes of Carl Icahn, who previously made over $3.4 billion investing in the company a few years back — only to cash out his entire Apple stake, worried about the difficulties of Apple doing business in China.
In addition to Apple, Berkshire Hathaway upped its investments in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. over the past three months. Berkshire spent a total of $6.08 billion on equities in the quarter.
Source: Economic Times
