While digging into this idea, I bumped into the fact that Apple has been the largest common stock holding of Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK.A / BRK.B) portfolio for quite some time now. I kind of knew that they were heavily long into it, but it had not hit home how sizable the position was even for the Omaha-based legend.
Accoding to the datasource I used (Dataroma) Buffett's 252 million Apple shares makes it now close to 26% of Berkshire's U.S stock portfolio.
Since I recalled IBM (NYSE: IBM) was the first technology company where Buffett had a sizable position, I wanted to make a small comparison on the two positions and how they have evolved in last 5 years (IBM is in blue and AAPL is in yellow).
Table: Top 20 U.S common stock positions of Berkshire Hathaway [data source: Dataroma]
Clearly IBM was a favourite for a long time and then Apple replaced it in top 20. The interesting thing behind the top 20 table is that the value of the entire common stock portfolio has grown from 105 billion to 221 billion USD during the five years. Therefore, it is likely that many of the positions have grown in absolute monetary terms moving from left to right in the table.
I wonder what is the average cost of Apple share in Berkshire's portfolio.
According to various sources Buffett accumulated some 57 million shares by end of 2016. Then by Q1/2017 the total of Apple shares was 133 million and year later 240 million.
Let's look at Apple share price during the same timeperiod:
Apple share price during the time Buffett has accumulated it [Chart courtesy of StockCharts.com]
It can be concluded that Buffett accumulated 57 million shares of Apple in 2016 in the neighborhood of USD 100 +/- 15. Then 76 million shares in Q1 2017 between USD 110 and 140 and in the year that followed (until end of Q1 2018) 107 million shares more between USD 137 and 182.
Looking closer to the information at hand from various sources, it can be seen that bulk of 107 million shares were accumulated in Q4 2017 (31 million) and Q1 2018 (75 million).
This is now purely quesswork, but it looks like average purchase price per share of Berkshire could be somewhere in the ballpark of USD 140 +/- 10.
Disclosure: At the time of writing the author did not have position in Apple, but was seriously considering initiating one in near future.
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