Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism

seekingalpha2022-03-18

SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...

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Tehsiewdai
·2022-03-19
👍
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Ermmmmmm
·2022-03-18
But can't avoid geopolitical and anti monopoly risks even though it is good business
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KYLeong
·2022-03-18
Great sharing
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Ironman2002
·2022-03-18
Good sharing
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angelo0908
·2022-03-18
Nice
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Zeniv
·2022-03-18
Good article, thanks
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SanWangtikup
·2022-03-18
Good
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Kirton
·2022-03-18
Easier said than done...
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Jeff2022
·2022-03-18
Supporting this article to create awareness!
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Jeff2022
·2022-03-18
Super Agreed! Be a wise investor! Thanks for this posting~[Smile]
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Surewin88
·2022-03-18
👍
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Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":"BK4574","symbol_name":"无人驾驶","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","article_id":"2220742952","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":[],"rights":null,"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"seekingalpha","name":"Seeking Alpha"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"seekingalpha.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4581":"高盛持仓","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","AAPL":"苹果","BK4576":"AR","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4579":"人工智能"},"translate_title":"苹果，Berkshire的年度信和自助主义","themeId":"","isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"AAPL":1},"content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","kind":"news","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":1},"commentList":[{"id":9035737563,"gmtCreate":1647677075465,"gmtModify":1676534258116,"author":{"id":"4094205289094410","authorId":"4094205289094410","name":"Tehsiewdai","avatar":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/2ca6ca2b432f68beb8a9deee6b33300b","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"4094205289094410","authorIdStr":"4094205289094410"},"htmlText":"👍","listText":"👍","text":"👍","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035737563","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035203008,"gmtCreate":1647598131137,"gmtModify":1676534249194,"author":{"id":"4087557783698070","authorId":"4087557783698070","name":"Ermmmmmm","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b89bbeb73fe9212f0b5efc7185ae8a51","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"4087557783698070","authorIdStr":"4087557783698070"},"htmlText":"But can't avoid geopolitical and anti monopoly&nbsp;risks even though it is good business","listText":"But can't avoid geopolitical and anti monopoly&nbsp;risks even though it is good business","text":"But can't avoid geopolitical and anti monopoly risks even though it is good business","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035203008","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035644530,"gmtCreate":1647594146060,"gmtModify":1676534248705,"author":{"id":"3585654473355479","authorId":"3585654473355479","name":"KYLeong","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/111375adba6b10bddbeeb78b9ead7c80","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"3585654473355479","authorIdStr":"3585654473355479"},"htmlText":"Great sharing","listText":"Great sharing","text":"Great sharing","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035644530","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035643145,"gmtCreate":1647592596901,"gmtModify":1676534248555,"author":{"id":"4094301913132990","authorId":"4094301913132990","name":"Ironman2002","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/784449fc945cf9d5c7b81316e20a221c","vip":1,"crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"idStr":"4094301913132990","authorIdStr":"4094301913132990"},"htmlText":"Good sharing&nbsp;","listText":"Good sharing&nbsp;","text":"Good sharing","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035643145","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035654021,"gmtCreate":1647591714279,"gmtModify":1676534248455,"author":{"id":"4097296316103040","authorId":"4097296316103040","name":"angelo0908","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","vip":1,"crmLevel":4,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"4097296316103040","authorIdStr":"4097296316103040"},"htmlText":"Nice","listText":"Nice","text":"Nice","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035654021","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035622326,"gmtCreate":1647588420424,"gmtModify":1676534248158,"author":{"id":"4110527799654552","authorId":"4110527799654552","name":"Zeniv","avatar":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/5aa130e67df4736e07b2ed6a3df065af","vip":1,"crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"idStr":"4110527799654552","authorIdStr":"4110527799654552"},"htmlText":"Good article, thanks","listText":"Good article, thanks","text":"Good article, thanks","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035622326","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035623359,"gmtCreate":1647586754790,"gmtModify":1676534247974,"author":{"id":"4087452914358580","authorId":"4087452914358580","name":"SanWangtikup","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c7f061d50a9f915d0ce8e8c879871960","vip":1,"hat":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b073a07f77dbe6b3bec6b12311fde6bd","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"4087452914358580","authorIdStr":"4087452914358580"},"htmlText":"Good&nbsp;","listText":"Good&nbsp;","text":"Good","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035623359","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035620786,"gmtCreate":1647586370421,"gmtModify":1676534247932,"author":{"id":"3559451184746752","authorId":"3559451184746752","name":"Kirton","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e41d69df3ca33182d7a527fc4f4ce0cb","vip":1,"hat":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b073a07f77dbe6b3bec6b12311fde6bd","crmLevel":8,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"3559451184746752","authorIdStr":"3559451184746752"},"htmlText":"Easier said than done...","listText":"Easier said than done...","text":"Easier said than done...","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035620786","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035663354,"gmtCreate":1647583715722,"gmtModify":1676534247740,"author":{"id":"4109979272507442","authorId":"4109979272507442","name":"Jeff2022","avatar":"https://static.itradeup.com/news/e3c358e9995749d218a540214c2210c2","vip":1,"hat":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b073a07f77dbe6b3bec6b12311fde6bd","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"idStr":"4109979272507442","authorIdStr":"4109979272507442"},"htmlText":"Supporting this article to create awareness!","listText":"Supporting this article to create awareness!","text":"Supporting this article to create awareness!","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035663354","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035663920,"gmtCreate":1647583687176,"gmtModify":1676534247733,"author":{"id":"4109979272507442","authorId":"4109979272507442","name":"Jeff2022","avatar":"https://static.itradeup.com/news/e3c358e9995749d218a540214c2210c2","vip":1,"hat":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b073a07f77dbe6b3bec6b12311fde6bd","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"idStr":"4109979272507442","authorIdStr":"4109979272507442"},"htmlText":"Super Agreed! Be a wise investor! Thanks for this posting~[Smile]&nbsp;","listText":"Super Agreed! Be a wise investor! Thanks for this posting~[Smile]&nbsp;","text":"Super Agreed! Be a wise investor! Thanks for this posting~[Smile]","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035663920","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":9035660429,"gmtCreate":1647583400355,"gmtModify":1676534247701,"author":{"id":"4087523981616520","authorId":"4087523981616520","name":"Surewin88","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/bc2b5ac3bd474e2d61d69726fecb1516","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"4087523981616520","authorIdStr":"4087523981616520"},"htmlText":"👍","listText":"👍","text":"👍","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9035660429","repostId":2220742952,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"2220742952","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1647570216,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2220742952?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-03-18 10:23","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2220742952","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain t","content":"<html><head></head><body>Summary<ul><li>The annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.</li><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.</li><li>Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.</li><li>Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0b453a4320329f807fb9106707398dc8\" tg-width=\"750\" tg-height=\"500\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It&#39;s still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:<ul><li>Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEO</li><li>Evaluation of its economic moat and pricing power</li><li>Evaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul>Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:<blockquote><ul><li>We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.</li><li>Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.</li></ul></blockquote>I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.<blockquote>Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.</blockquote>However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/63e37a1ea890007710d7b8ee11fec1ac\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it&#39;s developing. The various R&amp;D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I&#39;ve studied many high stake R&amp;D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I&#39;ve learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&amp;D’s process? The short answer is that it&#39;s extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&amp;D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it&#39;s intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&amp;D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&amp;D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&amp;D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&amp;D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&amp;D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&amp;D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/AONE.U\">one</a> dollar spent on R&amp;D. This level of R&amp;D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&amp;D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/640fa642a02ef783610050c999c02598\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"340\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&amp;D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&amp;D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&amp;D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&amp;D dollars you have. It&#39;s not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&amp;D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&amp;D expenses since he took over. The R&amp;D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&amp;D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It&#39;s a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:<ul><li>Apple&#39;s iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That&#39;s a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.</li><li>Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.</li><li>Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.</li></ul><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/db9296a250813c27fea315a6be035ee1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"565\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,<blockquote>Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.</blockquote>To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&amp;P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&amp;P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It&#39;s about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&amp;P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9a74efb1d7e9697c5f8baeec54992c9a\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"124\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"/>AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It&#39;s especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.<ul><li>Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&amp;D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.</li><li>Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.</li></ul></body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple, Berkshire's Annual Letter, And Buffettism\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-03-18 10:23 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BK4512":"苹果概念","BK4170":"电脑硬件、储存设备及电脑周边","BK4515":"5G概念","BK4554":"元宇宙及AR概念","BK4532":"文艺复兴科技持仓","AAPL":"苹果","BK4553":"喜马拉雅资本持仓","BK4571":"数字音乐概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4507":"流媒体概念","BK4576":"AR","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4566":"资本集团","BK4575":"芯片概念","BK4527":"明星科技股","BK4501":"段永平概念","BK4559":"巴菲特持仓","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4550":"红杉资本持仓","BK4574":"无人驾驶","BK4573":"虚拟现实","BK4505":"高瓴资本持仓","BK4581":"高盛持仓"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4496197-apple-berkshire-annual-letter-buffett","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2220742952","content_text":"SummaryThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers.Pick meaningful investments in businesses with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification.Apple is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism.Stephen Lam/Getty Images NewsThesisThe release of the annual Berkshire (BRK.A) (BRK.B) letter has become a major market event. And for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. The thesis of this article is really simple - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a quintessential example illustrating the cornerstones of Buffettism. The Berkshire annual letter just reiterated why for us. It's still an ongoing embodiment, and will remain so for many years to come, for the timeless wisdom of investing.The remainder of this article does nothing more than add a few footnotes on the following:Evaluation of AAPL’s first-class CEOEvaluation of its economic moat and pricing powerEvaluation of its relative valuation to show why his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.Be business-pickers and pick businesses with a first-class CEOIn the annual letter, Buffett emphasized again that “Charlie and I are notstock-pickers; we are business-pickers.” Then he went on to clarify what that means and how he and Charlie picks good businesses. Being a business picker means:We own stocks based upon our expectations about their long-term businessperformance and notbecause we view them as vehicles for timely market moves.Whatever our form of ownership, our goal is to have meaningful investments in businesseswith both durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO.I have written several times before on the long-term economic advantages of AAPL (ranging from its astronomical high return on capital employed to its scale and scalability). Here I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the CEO.Buffett spent no efforts to hide his high praises for Tim Cook – his capital allocation decisions, love for Apple users, and managerial touch.Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud. Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.However, on the other hand, Buffett has also always promoted the idea of holding CEOs responsible. He cautioned multiple times to not only “listen to what they say but look at what they do”. To help ordinary investors who do not have access to evaluate the CEO personally, he invented the so-called $1 test.The idea of the $1 test is based on the use of the most easily obtainable data with the least amount of ambiguity: Retained earnings and market capitalization (“MC”) of the business. And for readers following my writings, I always prefer the use of a few reliable data points to the use of many uncertain data points. And the test is to see the CEO can at least generate $1 of stock price appreciation for $1 retained earnings.And here we will put Tim Cook through this test.The following table shows the scorecard of Tim Cook on this $1 test. The first two rows show the annual retained earnings and the average market cap, respectively. And the third row shows the annual retained earnings as a percentage of the average market capitalization for that year. Because the market price is obviously volatile, the table shows the average MC over a period long enough (five years) to filter out the noise and be able to draw meaningful conclusions. The fourth row shows the five-year cumulative retained earnings (in $B), and the fifth row shows the five-year cumulative MC change (in $B). Then finally, the last sixth row shows the ratio between the cumulative retained earnings and MC change.As seen, Tim Cook has passed the test with flying colors. The business has created an average of $1.58 of MC for every dollar retained from 2015 to 2019. And the ratio further shot up to astronomical levels of $5.48 and $6.35 in the recent two years. Overall, during the period of 2011~2021, AAPL has retained a total of $433B of earnings (a mindboggling amount of cash) and its MC has increased for a total of $1.96T (almost 1/10 of the annual US GDP). So during the past decade, since he took over as CEO, Tim Cook has created $4.52 of shareholder value for every $1 of earnings retained.To put things under perspective, BRK itself has created $1.17 worth of shareholder value for every dollar of earnings retained in the past decade – a very respectable level by itself already but still nowhere near the level of AAPL. And if you consider that a good part of the $1.17 of shareholder return created by BRK per dollar of retained earnings actually just came from its AAPL holding, this consideration would make the comparison even more favorable toward AAPL.AuthorPick businesses with durable moatOf course, the above is history now. The future of AAPL lies in its lab and the new products it's developing. The various R&D initiatives AAPL is undertaking have been detailed in some of my earlier articles and even more so by other Seeking Alpha writers. Here, I wanted to focus more on a global and process-level discussion.I do not invest in AAPL (or high-tech business in general) because I have high confidence in certain products that they are developing the pipeline. In other words, I do not bet on a few particular ideas. Instead, I feel more comfortable betting on the process. I've studied many high stake R&D cases in detail and have been involved firsthand in quite a few of them myself. There are a few key lessons that I've learned. First, the success or failure of a given project is largely a matter of chance and luck - no matter how much resources we throw at it and how high a priority management has assigned to it. Second, the successful cases are only made to appear as a planned success - after they become successful.So instead, I focus more on the process with the understanding that if the process itself is sound and efficient, sooner or later a good idea will be developed into a successful project as long as there are plenty of ideas to be tried. And I am betting Buffett is thinking along this same line.Then how effective is AAPL R&D’s process? The short answer is that it's extremely effective as shown in the next chart.The purpose of any corporate R&D is obviously to generate profit. Therefore, it's intuitive to quantify the yield by taking the ratio between profit and R&D expenditures. This way we can quantify how many dollars of profit has been generated per dollar of R&D expenses. However, in reality, the analysis has a few caveats that need to be ironed out before we take the ratio. Firstly, I used the operating cash flow as a measure of profit (which in my mind, is the best representation of a company’s earning power). Secondly, most R&D investments do not produce any result in the same year. They typically have a lifetime of a few years. Therefore, this analysis assumes a three-year average investment cycle for R&D. And as a result, we use the three-year moving average of operating cash flow to represent this three-year cycle.With this background, now you can see, the R&D yield for Apple has been more than $10 in 2013, and it has declined to a range between $4.0 and $5.0 in recent years. You might interpret the decline of its R&D yield as bad news. However, keep in mind that A) the level of profitability AAPL enjoyed in the early part of the decade is simply unsustainable, B) the decline is only relative to its own glorious past. In recent years, Apple has been generating on average $4.7 of income for every one dollar spent on R&D. This level of R&D yield is still very competitive even for the overachieving FAAMG group. Take Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Meta (FB) as examples, their R&D yields have “only” been averaging about $2.0 to $2.9.AuthorFurthermore, Tim Cook also changed the philosophy of R&D at AAPL. AAPL does not spend that much on R&D earlier in the decade. Partly because AAPL products were so disruptive at that time and enjoyed a quasi-monopoly status. Partly because Steve Jobs himself did not believe in R&D spending. He commented that “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money.”Tim Cook transitioned to a different model, a model that Buffett obviously thought to be more sustainable in the long term. In terms of R&D, Cook’s followed a different philosophy. He more than doubled the R&D expenses since he took over. The R&D expenses are on average about 5.7% of sales now, on par with other large tech companies. Particularly in 2020, Apple spent a record $18.75 billion on R&D, equivalent to 7% of its sales.By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat has only become more durable. And the following chart provides a glimpse into it. It uses iPhone as an example to showcase AAPL’s pricing power. It's a busy chart with quick a bit of information. The key takeaways are:Apple's iPhone prices have skyrocketed over the past 14 years, iPhone 13 is 81% more expensive than the original iPhone. That's a 4.3% CAGR maintained over a 14-year period, far exceeding the inflation (about 2%) over the same period.Put in absolute terms, this means that an iPhone is on average US$437 more expensive now than in 2007. AAPL sold more than 234 million iPhones last year, and the $437 price hike translates to more than $100 billion of additional revenue.Again, the secret behind the pricing power is the wide moat created by the lover its users and highly innovative products - innovations that nobody asks for, but then everybody wants once they see.Source: GSMARENADo not mistake diversification with deworsification.Another cornerstone of Buffettism is concentration. Do not overstress the importance of diversification, and do not diversify for the sake of diversification. Buffett is comfortable with his oversized AAPL holdings (which represents about 47% of his equity portfolio as of this writing), and he calls AAPL the runner-up of Berkshire’s Four Giants,Apple – our runner-up Giant as measured by its year-end market value – is a different sort of holding. Here, our ownership is a mere 5.55%, up from 5.39% a year earlier. That increase sounds like small potatoes. But consider that each 0.1% of Apple’s 2021 earnings amounted to $100 million.To be completely objective – part of the reason he owns so much AAPL is that he has no other better alternatives at his scale (an advantage smaller fishes like you and I enjoy).But on the other hand, AAPL IS a good investment – both in absolute terms as detailed above and also in relative terms as shown below. The next chart shows a comparison of the fundamentals between AAPL and the S&P 500 index. The chart compares them in terms of valuation, financial strength, and profitability. First, as you can see, the valuation of AAPL is only slightly higher than the overall market, by about 4% in terms of the PE ratio. In terms of the EV/EBIT, AAPL is actually valued the same (within the margin of error) as the overall market because of its lower debt ratio as we are going to see next.In terms of financial strength, AAPL is far superior to most of the businesses in the S&P 500 index. Take its debt coverage as an example. Here the debt coverage is defined as EBIT income divided by net interest expenses (“IE”). It's about 25.2x for AAPL, compared to less than 10x for the S&P 500 index. In terms of profitability, AAPL again is far superior to most of the businesses in the index. Letting alone the scale and pricing power discussed above, its operating margin and net profit margin are, respectively, more than 2x and 3x better than the average of the index.So to sum up, despite his lack of alternatives at his scale - AAPL isa good investment both in absolute terms and also in relative terms. In particular, the overall market is a deworsification in comparison under the current market conditions. As a result, his concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.AuthorRisksMacroeconomic risks.AAPL is facing short-term risks associated with several ongoing macroeconomic risks. First, the pace and degree of the post-COVID economy recovery are still uncertain. Although the vaccination is progressing extensively and the economy is re-opening at a steady pace. However, the pandemic is far from over yet and uncertainties like the delta variant still exist and can interrupt its operation and also the global supply chain.Competition.In the longer term, APPL has no lack of competitors on all fronts. It currently operates and enjoys leading position in an amazing array of segments, ranging from smart phone, desktop, laptop, tablet computer market, wearable electronics and associated services. But the reality is that none of the big companies stay in their own corner these days. For example, the Samsung Galaxy and Note series have been responsible for reductions in iPhone sales for many years. Its streaming businesses (Apple TV+) are in direct competition with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, to name just a few.ConclusionsThe annual Berkshire letter is a market event, for good reasons, especially under uncertain times like ours. It's especially important for investors to stay disciplined and stick to well-understood and well-proven approaches under confusing times this like. AAPL is an ongoing embodiment of such approaches and Buffettism.Do not be stock pickers. Be business pickers. And AAPL is a business with durable economic advantages and a first-class CEO. By a combination of Tim Cook’s love for Apple users, his emphasis on new R&D, and his managerial touch, AAPL has enjoyed tremendous economic advantages and the moat is only becoming more durable.Do not overstress diversification and do not mistake diversification with deworsification. AAPL is a good investment – both in absolute terms and also in relative terms as compared to the overall market. Buffett concentrated bet on AAPL is actually less risky than owning the overall market.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"}],"hasMoreComments":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":129,"commentSize":11,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":8,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false}}