Warren Buffet unloads Apple shares

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has significantly cut its investment in Apple, offloading nearly half of its holding since the start of the year, according to a quarterly earnings report released on Saturday.

The value of the holding company’s stake in Apple dropped from $174.3 billion as of the end of last year to $84.2 billion on June 30.

In the final quarter of last year, Berkshire also sold around 10 million Apple shares, or roughly 1% of its holding.

Despite the sell-off, Apple remains the largest investment in Berkshire’s portfolio. Nevertheless, the persistent offloading of Apple shares is notable for Buffett, who is famous for being a long-term investor and a vocal Apple fan. During the Berkshire annual meeting in May, Buffett said he believed the tech giant would remain one of the conglomerate’s core holdings.

However, during the same meeting, he hinted that his selling of Apple stock is partly motivated by tax considerations, and also by his plans to build up Berkshire’s cash position.

In total, Berkshire sold off $75.5 billion in stock in the second quarter, a move that lifted its cash holdings to a record high of $277 billion, up from $88 billion in the first quarter of 2024. It was the seventh straight quarter in which the company sold more stock than it bought. Cash now represents roughly 30% of Berkshire’s market value of over $900 billion.

Some analysts say the company’s cash buildup may signal Buffet’s concerns about the US economy.

“I would be getting a little worried,” Jim Shanahan, an analyst for Edward Jones told MarketWatch in a note. Buffett’s recent moves “make me concerned about his outlook for the markets and economy. It’s incredible how much the cash has grown,” he wrote.

Apple stock had a rough start to this year amid concerns over weakness in iPhone sales and competition from other tech majors, but started rapidly gaining after the company unveiled Apple Intelligence, its batch of new AI features, in early June.

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A rally last month pushed the iPhone maker’s stock price to over $230 per share and its market cap to over $3.5 trillion, the highest any publicly traded company has ever achieved. The shares have since given back some of the gains, closing at roughly $219 per share on Friday.

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