Warren Buffett reaps $40 billion from Apple stake

Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffett and CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son who recorded the worst performance in the first quarter of this year have hit jackpot with their recent investment in technology and bio stocks.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Apple stake is up a whopping 40 billion dollars since the market bottom in March, now worth more than 95 billion dollars , CNBC reported on Thursday (local time). With such performance, the company can recoup most of its 49.7-billion-dollar loss in the first quarter. Berkshire Hathaway made a large purchase of U.S. airline stocks in February at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak only to sell all of its stake worth about four billion dollars in April after their prices collapsed.

Berkshire Hathaway’s investment portfolio, which was concentrated on banking and retail businesses before investment in Apple, is expected to focus on large technology stocks for now. Apple is about 40 percent of its portfolio, up from around 25 percent in November 2018. Berkshire Hathaway also has 533,300 shares of Amazon worth about 1.6 billion dollars, Fortune reported.

“It’s probably the best business I know in the world,” Buffett said in a CNBC interview in February. “I don’t think of Apple as a stock. I think of it as our third business.”


jyr0101@donga.com