Buffett craves more shares of Apple

omaha (Nebraska) — Billionaire Warren Buffett has been buying a boatload of Apple shares and on Saturday suggested he would buy even more shares at the right price.

At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, Buffett credited Apple with developing “extremely sticky” products to which consumers become attached and endorsed Apple’s decision to buy back its own stock, saying it was the technology company’s most productive use of cash.

“We would love to see Apple go down in price,” Buffett said. Berkshire is now Apple’s third largest shareholder, behind Vanguard Group and BlackRock.

“I’m delighted to see them repurchasing shares,” Buffett said, just two days after he revealed having bought 75 million additional Apple shares, and four days after Apple said it may repurchase $100 billion of stock. At the end of 2017, Berkshire had owned 165.3 million shares.

“I love the idea of having our 5 per cent, or whatever it is, maybe grow to 6 or 7 per cent without our laying out a dime.”

And Buffett described it as a mistake that he never thought Alphabet’s Google and Amazon. com made sense as investments for Berkshire. Buffett, 87, and his longtime partner and fellow billionaire Charlie Munger, 94, also took pointed questions on China, Wells Fargo & Co, guns, healthcare and their investment choices from shareholders, journalists and analysts at the morethan-six-hour meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. —