Apple should spend more cash buying its own shares, says Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett

A day after multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway acquired another 75 million shares of Apple , its CEO Warren Buffett said the iPhone maker should spend more cash buying its own shares.

“They are not going to find $50 billion or $100 billion acquisitions that they can make at remotely a sensible price,” ReCode quoted Buffett as saying at the company’s annual meeting held at Omaha city in the US state of Nebraska.

It is a better idea than spending that money on other companies which have the disadvantage of not being Apple, he added.

Apple posted a healthy revenue of $61.1 billion and net quarterly profit of $13.8 billion globally for its second quarter for fiscal 2018, defying global reports of a weakened demand for its iPhones.

Following this, Berkshire Hathaway acquired more shares and now owns a large slug of Apple stock and has 5 percent stake in the company.

At the end of the first quarter of 2018, Berkshire owned $40.7 billion of Apple’s shares — up from $28.2 billion at the end of 2017, The New York Times reported.

He also said he likes Apple’s plan to spend $100 billion buying its own shares.

“I’m delighted to see them repurchasing shares. We own 5 percent of it. With the passage of time, we may own 6 or 7 percent because they repurchase shares,” he was quoted as saying.

On having never invested in Microsoft , Buffett said that “in the earlier years, the answer is stupidity”. He stayed away from investing “because of the inference” that could be drawn.

On e-commerce firm Amazon , he said: “The truth is that I’ve watched Amazon from the start and I think what (Amazon CEO) Jeff Bezos has done is something close to a miracle. The problem is if I think something will be a miracle, I tend not to bet on it.”

Buffett said he had “made a mistake” on conglomerate Alphabet. He said he was unable to conclude that at Alphabet’s present prices, its “prospects were far better than the prices indicated”.