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Warren Buffett continued to slash his stake in Apple as part of a selling spree that has seen his Berkshire Hathaway dump $166bn worth of stocks over the past two years, with the Oracle of Omaha finding few other opportunities to chase in the US stock market.
The sprawling industrial and investment conglomerate disclosed on Saturday that it had reduced its position in Apple to $69.9bn in the third quarter, indicating it had shed a further 100mn shares in the three-month period.
In just over a year, Buffett has dumped almost two-thirds of his stake in the technology company, which at its peak in 2023 accounted for $178bn of the company’s stock portfolio.
The stock sales are a dramatic shift by Buffett, given in 2022 he described Apple as one of Berkshire’s “four giants”, accounting for the bulk of the company’s value. At the company’s shareholder meeting in May he described the iPhone maker as “an even better business” than Coca-Cola and American Express, two of Berkshire’s longtime holdings.
“Unless something dramatically happens that really changes capital allocation strategy, we will have Apple as our largest investment,” Buffett told shareholders at the time.
“But I don’t mind at all under current conditions, building the cash position,” he added. “I think 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.”
Buffett said that he believed there was a high likelihood the US federal government would raise tax rates in the coming years given the country’s sustained budget deficits, which would reduce Berkshire’s profits on future stock sales. Berkshire reported on Saturday that it had generated after-tax realised gains of $76.5bn on its investment sales this year.
The billionaire investor has been selling more than just Apple. Over the course of the three months to September, Berkshire sold $36.1bn of stocks, including part of its large position in Bank of America.
He has found little else to entice him in the US stock market, buying equities worth just $1.5bn. The 94-year-old has been jettisoning stocks at a remarkable clip, with Berkshire being a net seller of equities for eight consecutive quarters.
Buffett in turn ploughed the proceeds from those sales back into short-term Treasury bills, pushing the company’s cash position to a record $325.2bn.