He might still use a flip-phone, but billionaire investor Warren Buffett is a big fan of tech giant Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL).
The Oracle of Omaha shared Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s (NYSE:BRK.A) largest stock positions in his 2017 annual letter to shareholders over the weekend.
Buffett now has a US$28.2bn stake in the iPhone maker, making it Berkshire’s second-biggest holding behind US bank Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE:WFC).
When asked about which company he would put all of his money in today, the 87-year-old hinted it would be Apple.
Wells Fargo and Apple his top holdings
“If you look at our holdings, you would assume that we like them in the order in which they rank by dollar value of holdings, but if you look at them in terms of recent purchases over the last year we've bought more Apple than anything else,” he said in an interview with CNBC.
Explaining why he likes Tim Cook’s tech firm so much, Buffett said Apple has an “extraordinary” customer base.
“I see how strong that ecosystem is, to an extraordinary degree ... You are very, very, very locked in, at least psychologically and mentally, to the product you are using. [The iPhone] is a very sticky product.”
Buffett’s other largest positions include a US$20.6bn interest in Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) shares, as well as US$18.4bn invested in The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO).
The annual letter also revealed that Berkshire had stock holdings totaling US$170.5bn in value at the end of 2017.
Huge acquisitions on the cards
Cash certainly isn’t a problem for the investment group either - quite the opposite.
Buffett said his goal is to make “one or more huge acquisitions,” with Berkshire sitting on US$116bn in cash and government bonds.
Can we please acknowledge that Warren Buffett's biggest position in 2018 is cash? His company made $36B from operations and his cash position increased by $29.6B over the same period of time (82% allocation to cash). Don't watch his lips, watch his balance sheet people!
— Preston Pysh (@PrestonPysh) February 25, 2018
“Our smiles will broaden when we have redeployed Berkshire’s excess funds into more productive assets,” he wrote.
“Berkshire’s goal is to substantially increase the earnings of its non-insurance group. For that to happen, we will need to make one or more huge acquisitions.”