Why did Warren Buffett buy into Apple?
Because consumers don’t care about the price of smartphones, the investing titan told CNBC Monday morning, two days after Buffett appeared at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder’s meeting over the weekend.
“People want the product. They don’t want the cheapest product,” Buffett said, noting that smartphones aren’t price sensitive in the way that furniture may be, meaning investors will choose to buy an Apple iPhone for $700 even when faced with a cheaper alternative.
“It’s a very, very, very valuable product to people that build their lives around it,” Buffett said.
In a way, Buffett was late to the party when it came to Apple. When Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, shares of the company were trading at about $18 a share. By the time Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed a stake in the company roughly nine years later, Apple was considerably pricier, about $109 a share. Still, the stock has done pretty well since the Oracle of Omaha first revealed his stake in the company.
At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, Buffett also acknowledged that he had made a mistake not buying two other FANG stocks—Amazon and Google-parent Alphabet—when they were cheaper. In fact, he noted that Alphabet now has attributes of a monopoly.