1. Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Warren Buffett’s Stake: $174,347,466,800
Warren Buffett owns a $174 billion stake in Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), which is a stock that offers both dividends and stock price growth opportunities.
During its February 2024 earnings call Apple Inc’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) management talked about dividends and outlook:
“During the quarter, we returned nearly $27 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $20.5 billion through open market repurchases of 112 million Apple shares. We also retired an additional 6 million shares in the final settlement of our 19th ASR. As usual, we will provide an update to our capital return program when we report results at the end of this quarter.
As we move ahead into the March quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. And we expect foreign exchange to be a revenue headwind of about 2 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. As a reminder, in the December quarter a year ago, we faced significant supply constraints on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max due to COVID-19 factory shutdowns. And in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the constraints. We estimate that this impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter’s total revenue last year.
When we remove this impact from last year’s revenue, we expect both our March quarter total company revenue and iPhone revenue to be similar to a year ago. For our Services business, we expect a similar double-digit growth rate to what we reported in the December quarter.”
Read the entire earnings call here.
Horizon Kinetics stated the following regarding Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“The full point is that if BYD has turned its attention from its domestic market to direct global competition, then other Chinese companies can do the same. The next most visible example of Chinese commercially applied technological prowess relates to the 2nd highest-weight company in the S&P 500, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL).
In September 2023, Huawei Technologies introduced its Mate 60 Pro smartphone. It uses its own, internally developed 5G enabled chip that is apparently competitive with the Apple A17 chip. For practical purposes it has the functionality of the iPhone 15 Pro. This came as a great surprise – perhaps even shock – to the U.S. technology community, because four years ago the U.S. placed strict sanctions on China’s access to state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing technology…” (Click here to read the full text)
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