Following the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting over the weekend, Warren Buffett revealed information on a significant Apple stock purchase made by his company lately. Buffett also said that if the price is good, he would continue to acquire as much AAPL as feasible.
AAPL shares fell from near-$180 highs in early March to $150 by mid-March. Buffett admitted to CNBC’s Becky Quick that Berkshire Hathaway acquired $600 million in Apple shares after it fell for three days in a row.
Notably, he said that if the price had remained low in Q1, he would have continued to purchase. However, by the end of March, it had risen to about $180.
“Unfortunately the stock went back up, so I stopped. Otherwise who knows how much we would have bought?” the 91-year-old investor told Quick on Sunday after Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting.
Buffett lauded Apple CEO Tim Cook for how he addresses consumers, as well as the influence of his managerial expertise, in Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting letter:
Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.
Buffett also backed Apple’s stock buyback program, which was recently raised by $90 billion during the company’s earnings call.
Surprisingly, after Buffett’s $600 million AAPL acquisition in Q1, Apple shares have slid back to near-March lows. If Berkshire’s purchase range was $150, the conglomerate may be buying additional shares right now.
This contrasts with Buffett’s disclosure last year, around the time that Berkshire sold over 10 million AAPL shares, conceding that it was “probably a mistake.“
Outside of ETFs and other funds, Berkshire Hathaway is the biggest single owner of Apple stock. Apple accounts for 47.5 percent of Berkshire’s interests, with a market value of just under $160 billion.
