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There are certainly more than five reasons to buy Apple stock and keep it a permanent part of your portfolio, but we will focus on just a quintet of core points to demonstrate why this stock is a must-have.
Smartphones are here to stay, and the use of them continues to grow. Apple dominates the phone market and already has more than 1 billion active iPhones around the world. The company continues to innovate and improve its offerings, which convinces buyers to upgrade–and users of competing products to switch to Apple.
Some might think that Apple’s other products, such as its Mac lines and Apple TV are its next main source of revenue – but that would be wrong. Apple’s second-biggest breadwinner is its services, which include Apple Music, the App Store, Apple Pay, and Apple TV+, Cloud Services, AppleCare, Payment Services, and others. Just four of these (music, store, pay, TV+) generated 19 percent of Apple’s total revenue in the most recent quarter.
Starting in 2012, Apple resumed paying shareholders a dividend. Over those ten years, the amount went from a split-adjusted $0.095 to 143 percent, according to the Motley Fool. Earlier this year, Apple boosted the quarterly payout to $0.23 per share, an increase of 5 percent for 2022. Noteworthy, Apple is using less than ten 15 percent of its profits to fund the dividend payout, leaving lots of room for future increases.
In 2013, Apple began a share-repurchase plan in which it buys back shares, and the company has continued to do so ever since. As a result, with every passing quarter, Apple shareholders own a larger share of the company. Over the past decade, Apple’s share count has decreased by almost 39 percent.
If all the above wasn’t enough to convince you, then consider that the largest holding of Warren Buffett, the world’s most legendary investor, is Apple stock. His investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, ended the second quarter withholdings of nearly 895 million shares of Apple stock, or a net worth of approximately $122 billion. This holding amounts to roughly 41% of Berkshire Hathaway’s entire portfolio. This is a company that generated a return on its overall investments of 3,641,613% by the end of 2021.
