Billionaire investor Warren Buffett sees the value of Apple differently than most Wall Street analysts, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Friday.
“Analysts after analysts said if you look at the mosaic of [iPhone] orders, it’s got to be a bad quarter,” said Cramer, whose charitable trust owns shares of Apple. “[Buffett] obviously does not think about the quarter. He thinks of this as a consumer products company with 99 percent satisfaction.”
“[Buffett] thinks very young,” Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street.” He often talks about “how every kid he knows has one and they would never use anything else. That’s good enough for him.”
Apple stock rose more than 3 percent Friday to an all-time high midmorning Friday after Buffett revealed that Berkshire Hathaway bought 75 million shares of the tech giant during the first quarter. That adds to the 165.3 million shares Berkshire already owned at the end of 2017.
Wall Street analysts had been worried about a potential slowdown in iPhone sales and speculation that Apple might be looking to wind down the iPhone X prior to the company’s quarterly earnings report Tuesday. The company beat earnings expectations but sold fewer iPhones than expected.
But in a “Squawk Box” interview that aired Friday, Buffett told CNBC that long-term investors in Apple’s stock shouldn’t obsess over near-term iPhone sales.
“The idea that you’re going to spend loads of time trying to guess how many iPhone X … are going to be sold in a three-month period totally misses the point,” the Oracle of Omaha told CNBC’s Becky Quick.
Berkshire first made an investment in Apple in 2016 after a person at the company bought about 10 million shares. Buffett then looked at the stock and purchased considerably more, the billionaire recalled in August to CNBC.
