Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate holding company that is led by the legendary billionaire investor, Warren Buffett, published its fourth-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be seen here. Berkshire owns a wide variety of businesses, some in their entirety, some only in part. The second group largely consists of marketable common stocks of major American companies. Additionally, the fund owns a few non-U.S. equities and participates in several joint ventures or other collaborative activities. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.
Berkshire Hathaway, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and discussed its stance on the firm. Founded in 1976, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a Cupertino, California-based technology company with a $2.8 trillion market capitalization, and is currently spearheaded by its CEO, Tim Cook. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) delivered a -1.61% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 44.15%. The stock closed at $174.72 per share on March 25, 2022.
Here is what Berkshire Hathaway has to say about Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in its Q4 2021 investor letter:
“Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) – our runner-up Giant as measured by its yearend market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million. We spent no Berkshire funds to gain our accretion. Apple’s repurchases did the job. It’s important to understand that only dividends from Apple are counted in the GAAP earnings Berkshire reports – and last year, Apple paid us $785 million of those. Yet our “share” of Apple’s earnings amounted to a staggering $5.6 billion. Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.”
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Our calculations show that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) ranks 9th on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was in 134 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 120 funds in the previous quarter. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) delivered a -0.88% return in the past 3 months.
In March 2022, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
