Key insights
- The article highlights two Warren Buffett-favored "wide-moat" stocks, focusing on Apple as a prime example. It emphasizes Apple's enduring brand strength, loyal user base, and growing services revenue as key competitive advantages. While acknowledging Apple's slower AI rollout, the piece suggests these fundamental strengths continue to drive value, implying a positive outlook for the stock and potentially other quality companies with similar characteristics.
Investors study the moves of Warren Buffett for one good reason: The billionaire has proven his investing strengths over 60 years. At the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, he delivered market-beating returns -- and stuck to his investing principles the whole time. Buffett led Berkshire Hathaway to a compounded annual gain over six decades of nearly 20%; that's compared to a compounded annual increase of about 10% for the S&P 500.
Buffett turned over the chief executive officer role to Greg Abel at the start of this year, but even in retirement, he remains a precious ally of the nonprofessional investor. For two reasons. First, Buffett hasn't completely disappeared from the scene, so he may share his thoughts publicly from time to time. As chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, he remains involved in the holding company's decisions and processes. And second, investors still may follow Buffett's investing strategy, which emphasizes value investing, the selection of quality companies, and choosing players with solid competitive advantages, or moats.
Now, speaking of moats, let's check out two of Buffett's wide-moat favorites to buy now.
Apple's (AAPL +1.36%) competitive advantage is its brand strength. Even at a time when the company fell behind in the artificial intelligence (AI) race and rolled out AI features across devices more slowly than investors would have liked, users flocked to its products. Last year, Apple's smartphones took seven of the top 10 positions, including the No. 1 spot, in Counterpoint Research's rankings of global smartphone sales.
On top of this, Apple fans don't mind paying more for an iPhone or waiting for a new release -- they continue to stick with the brand they love.
Meanwhile, this user base, which tops 2.5 billion, has offered Apple a new revenue opportunity -- and one that's recurrent. This is services revenue, which has reached record levels quarter after quarter. The company offers its users a variety of services, from storage to digital entertainment. So, once you buy a new iPhone, your spending probably isn't over; instead, you may sign up for various services, and this creates ongoing revenue for Apple.
Today, Apple shares aren't at their cheapest, but they still are reasonably priced, trading at 33x forward earnings estimates. And that makes now a very reasonable time to buy this wide-moat Buffett stock, which also happens to be the biggest holding in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio.
Alphabet (GOOG +1.19%) (GOOGL +0.60%) is a new addition to the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. Buffett opened the position last year, and Abel increased it in the first quarter of this year. Though Buffett isn't a big investor in technology, it's no surprise that he would appreciate Alphabet for some of its competitive advantages.
The biggest is probably the following. Alphabet is the owner of Google Search, the search engine that has held about 90% market share globally year after year. Google is so much a part our daily lives that it's even entered our vocabulary -- if we don't know the answer to something, we'll "Google it." Now the key point here is Alphabet's main revenue driver is tied to Google Search: Advertisers pay for space across the Google platform, and this accounts for about 70% of Alphabet's total revenue.
On top of this, Alphabet's cloud unit -- Google Cloud -- is one of the leaders in the space. The company has built a business that would be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to copy, so we can count on this as another competitive advantage.
Alphabet stock, like Apple, isn't at its cheapest level. Today, it trades for about 25x forward earnings estimates. But the level actually remains in bargain territory if we consider the company's track record of earnings growth and its long-term prospects. This makes it a smart Warren Buffett wide-moat stock to buy today and hold onto for the long term.