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Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has slashed its stake in iPhone maker Apple in half as part of a selling spree in which the billionaire investor dumped $76bn of stocks.
The company cut its position in Apple by more than $50bn to $84.2bn in the second quarter, generating huge investment profits, according to filings published on Saturday.
The data suggested that Berkshire had sold roughly 390mn Apple shares, or about half of its stake, according to calculations by the Financial Times. The sales of Apple and other stocks in the quarter produced an after-tax realised gain of $47.2bn, a sizeable return on an investment that was first initiated by one of Buffett’s deputies in 2016.
The stock sales lifted Berkshire’s cash holdings to a record high of $277bn, up $88bn from the previous quarter. The company ploughed those proceeds into short-term Treasuries, as Buffett scaled back in US equity markets.
Late last year Buffett began to pare back Berkshire’s stake in Apple, and in early 2024 he quickened the pace of stock sales. In May, he signalled to shareholders that he believed Apple would remain one of the conglomerate’s major holdings, listing it among core long-term investments including Coca-Cola and American Express.
“Unless something dramatically happens that really changes capital allocation strategy, we will have Apple as our largest investment,” Buffett said at the company’s annual meeting in May. “But I don’t mind at all, under current conditions, building the cash position . . . when I look at the alternative of what’s available in the equity markets and I look at the composition of what’s going on in the world, we find it quite attractive.”
Apple has been one of Berkshire’s most important equity investments in recent years, as US tech stocks powered the broader market over the past decade.
Previously Buffett and his late investment partner Charlie Munger had long been wary of investing in technology companies, and over the years lamented the fact that they had sat out opportunities in businesses such as Google. The company did poorly when it invested in tech, notably with IBM in 2011.
But his reluctance to invest in the industry shifted in 2016, when Buffett dove into Apple. Berkshire has spent roughly $40bn buying its shares since then, the FT estimates.
That sum includes purchases by Buffett as well as his investment deputy who first put on the trade and an insurance unit Berkshire owns that also bought into the company.
Apple’s stock has delivered a total return of nearly 800 per cent since Berkshire first disclosed its investment.
Berkshire separately disclosed that it had continued to sell out of some of its other positions after the end of the second quarter.
In recent weeks the company has sold $3.8bn of Bank of America shares over 12 consecutive trading days, paring a highly profitable bet. The sales cut Berkshire’s stake in the US bank by a percentage point to 12.1 per cent, according to filings with US securities regulators.
