Prior to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting held on Saturday, Warren Buffett disclosed that he sold about a third of his 81 million shares in IBM during the first half of this year, according to last week’s Bloomberg.
In April, the company reached its 20th straight quarterly revenue decline that, the article says is because it has been “slow to adopt cloud-related technologies and has had to play catch-up to the likes of Amazon.com Inc.” In discussing the move, Buffett identifies IBM’s “tough competitors” as a factor in the company’s lackluster performance.
Berkshire began investing in IBM in 2011 and eventually became the company’s largest shareholder, the article says, because of Buffett’s confidence in its expertise in information technology services to drive growth. According to the article, Buffett said “I don’t value IBM the same way I did six years ago when I started buying.”
While the Oracle of Omaha is known for sticking to his guns when choosing to invest, even when performance dips, he wrote in this year’s shareholder letter that Berkshire has “made no commitment that Berkshire will hold any of its marketable securities forever.”
