Warren Buffett’s investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc (NYSE:BRK.B) has more than doubled its holding in tech giant Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) so far this year.
At the end of 2016, Berkshire revealed it held around 57mln shares in Apple, but Buffett told CNBC that the group went on a spending spree in January and topped up its stake to around 133mln shares.
That’s equivalent to an interest of just over 2.5% in the tech firm, worth a cool US$17bn at current market value.
It also means that Apple is now one of Berkshire’s largest investments, second only to the company’s long-term stake in The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO).
In the past, Buffett had been known to avoid tech stocks given his mantra of ‘invest in what you know’. Asked why he loaded up on Apple at the start of the year, he simply replied: “Because I liked it!”
Although he’s still using an old-school flip phone, Buffett likes Apple’s products and praised the company’s consumer-retaining power.
"Apple strikes me as having quite a sticky product, and an enormously useful product to people that use it,” the billionaire investor told CNBC.
Apple shares opened modestly higher at US$137 on Monday.