Warren Buffett’s investment firm Berkshire Hathaway has acquired a $1 billion stake in the technology giant Apple.
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Berkshire held 9.81 million Apple shares worth about $1.07 billion as of March 31, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission detailing the company’s U.S.-listed stock holdings.
Gilbert, who also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers National Basketball Association team, teamed with Buffett one other time – when Quicken Loans and Berkshire Hathaway offered a $1 billion March Madness prize for ideal brackets in the 2014 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Berkshire Hathaway has historically avoided tech investments, although the firm has been gradually upping its position in IBM over the last few years.
Shares of Apple have fallen by almost one-third since April 2015.
And his poor-performing $10 billion investment in International Business Machines Corp. He has always said he would not invest in companies he doesn’t understand. He has several top lieutenants that have the autonomy to make the call, and Buffett told The Wall Street Journal in an email that one of these lieutenants indeed pulled the iTrigger.
Some investors have expressed concern that declining iPhone sales, which prompted Apple’s first quarterly drop in revenue in 13 years, are indicative of a broader slackening in demand for smartphones.
As nice as the dividend payments are, I doubt that sort of money is what motivated Berkshire Hathaway to buy AAPL. Berkshire slightly increased that stake again in the first quarter of 2016.
Shares of Apple got a boost from the Berkshire imprimatur, rising more than 3 percent on Monday. Buffett’s company exited a stake in AT&T and reduced its investment in Wal-Mart Stores. Buffett has stuck with IBM even though it continues to sell for less than the roughly $170 a share he paid for most of the shares.
Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Apple, was not immediately available to comment.
Apple recently invested $1 billion in China Didi Chuxing, which accounts 87% share of the private car-hailing service market in the country.
Berkshire bought 9,811,747 shares of Apple stock, to be exact.
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Buffett’s potential backing comes as the process to sell Yahoo, the Silicon Valley darling of the dot.com bubble in 2000, enters its second round.
