Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought an additional 75 million shares of Apple during the first quarter of 2018. That adds to the 165.3 million shares the holding company already owned at the end of 2017.
CNBC:
Wall Street may have had doubts about Apple before the company reported its most recent quarterly earnings, but one of the tech company’s biggest shareholders — Warren Buffett — didn’t.
“It is an unbelievable company,” Buffett told CNBC. “If you look at Apple, I think it earns almost twice as much as the second most profitable company in the United States.”
While Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway have long steered away from investing in technology companies like Apple, he has indicated in the past that he sees the iPhone maker as more of a consumer company.
Apple shares had sagged a bit in anticipation of Tuesday’s fiscal Q2 2018 earnings report, due to numerous reports about iPhone X sales. Apple instead reported stronger than expected earnings for the quarter.
The Cupertino firm posted revenue of $61.1 billion and a net quarterly profit of $13.8 billion in the quarter, up from revenue of $52.9 billion and a net profit of $11.0 billion in the year-ago quarter.
“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 3 month period totally misses the point,” Buffett said. “It’s like worrying about the number of BlackBerrys 10 years ago.”