Tuesday, August 8, 2023 9:27 am9 Comments

• News

For many years now, Apple has made good on its history-making buyback program, investing more than $573 billion on share repurchases since 2012. In its most recent quarter, Apple invested another $18 billion on buybacks, which have benefited Warren Buffett’s bottom line for Berkshire Hathaway.

Alexandra Garfinkle for Yahoo Finance:

“At Apple and Amex, repurchases increased Berkshire’s ownership a bit without any cost to us,” Buffett wrote in Berkshire’s annual shareholders letter this year. “The math isn’t complicated: When the share count goes down, your interest in our many businesses goes up. Every small bit helps if repurchases are made at value-accretive prices. Just as surely, when a company overpays for repurchases, the continuing shareholders lose.”

A staggering 46% of Buffett’s portfolio is concentrated in Apple stock, which Buffett’s Berkshire first bought in 2016.

Buffett even penned a fervent defense of buybacks in his annual letter.

“When you are told that all repurchases are harmful to shareholders or to the country, or particularly beneficial to CEOs, you are listening to either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue (characters that are not mutually exclusive),” he wrote.

MacDailyNews Note: In May, Apple’s board of directors authorized an additional buyback program to repurchase up to $90 billion of the company’s common stock (AAPL).

Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!

Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.