BUFFETT’S MEGA BET ON APPLE AND YAHOO

WARREN Buffett has taken a major gamble on the tech industry by making a £695m bet on Apple and offering to bankroll a bid for struggling search engine Yahoo. Tycoon Buffett is the world’s most successful investor. Nicknamed the Sage of Omaha, he is worth £46.4bn. He bought 9.81m Apple shares through his firm Berkshire Hathaway. The investment was disclosed in a regulatory filing and prompted a rise in Apple’s share price of 2.5pc. This compares to a fall of 19.6pc in the past six months. But it comes as other investors, most notably hedge fund boss Carl Icahn, have ditched the stock. And though Buffett, 85, has investments in IBM, he has largely shunned investments in tech companies until now, saying in 2012: ‘I just don’t know how to value them.’

Apple revealed in April that iPhone sales fell by 10m in the first quarter of this year, and last week it made a £700m investment in the Chinese equivalent of taxi-hailing app, Uber, named Didi Chuxing.

Yesterday Apple boss Tim Cook appeared in China to trumpet the partnership, which has sparked speculation that Apple could soon move into services or into other areas of tech, such as driverless cars.

As well as taking a stake in Apple, Buffett yesterday offered to back a bid for Yahoo by fellow billionaire Dan Gilbert, who founded America’s second largest mortgage lender.

Yahoo is valued at £27bn but its core business was put up for sale in February, after ditching plans to spin off its £21.7bn stake in ecommerce group Alibaba.

Yahoo has struggled in recent years against rivals such as Facebook and Google, and reported a loss of £3bn in its latest accounts.

Buffett told CNBC: ‘Yahoo is not the type of thing I’d ever be an equity partner in. I don’t know the business and wouldn’t know how to evaluate it, but if Dan needed financing, with proper terms and protections, we would be a possible financing help.’