“Warren Buffett, was on CNBC‘s Squawk Box this morning for a special three-hour segment with Becky Quick, taking people’s questions across a number of topics,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barons.
“He was asked by Quick about Apple (AAPL), and about pressure to raise the dividend, do splits, etc., etc.,” Ray reports. “Buffett’s advice was to basically ignore all of it:”
I don’t own any Apple and I haven’t, though I did talk with Steve Jobs a few years ago about what they might do with the cash. The best thing you can do with a business is run it well, and the shares will respond. There have been all kinds of times when people have criticized us [Berkshire], saying you could do this thing or that thing. – Warren Buffett, March 4, 2013
Read more in the full article here.
“Buffett addressed two burning issues in the minds of Apple (AAPL) investors: Apple’s depressed stock price and what to do with the $137 billion in cash burning a hole in David Einhorn’s pocket,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “On David Einhorn’s push to get Apple to issue preferred shares:”
“I would ignore him. I would run the business in such a manner as to create the most value over the next five to 10 years. You can’t run a business to push the stock price up on a daily basis. Berkshire has gone down 50% four times in its history. When that happens, if you’ve got money you buy it. You just keep working on building the value.
“I heard from people each time [Berkshire shares went down], saying why don’t you do this or that. Pay a dividend. I think Apple’s done a good job of building value. They may have too much cash. Now one reason they have so much cash is two thirds of it has not yet been taxed.
“When Steve called me, I said, Is your stock cheap? He said, yes. I said, Do you have more cash than you need? He said, a little. [laughs] I said, then buy back your stock. He didn’t. Now, when our stock went from $90,000 to $40,000 to $45,000, I wrote about, we wanted to buy the stock. We didn’t quite manage to.
“But if you could buy dollar bills for 80 cents, it’s a very good thing to do. – Warren Buffett, March 4, 2013
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “If you’ve got money you buy it.”
Does Apple really need to have 939,060,000 shares outstanding?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]