Warren Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., sold about a third of his company’s investment in computer-services giant IBM, CNBC reported.
The sales came in the first and second quarters, CNBC said, citing Buffett.
Berkshire started building its International Business Machines Corp. stake in 2011, eventually becoming the company’s largest shareholder, with an investment valued at almost $13 billion.
IBM’s shares gained about 21 percent in 2016 after a run of three straight annual declines, and are still more than 25 percent lower than the company’s 10-year peak in 2013.
The shares have lagged behind both technology peers and the S&P 500 Index in 2017.
“I don’t value IBM the same way that I did six years ago when I started buying,” Buffett told CNBC. “I’ve revalued it somewhat downward,” he said.
"When it got above $180 we actually sold a reasonable amount of stock," he said.
IBM's stock touched $180 on Feb 14 and reached a high of $182.78 during Feb. 16 trading. IBM shares closed on Thursday at $159.05 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Buffett owned about 81 million shares of IBM at the end of 2016 and sold about a third in the first and second quarters of 2017, CNBC reported, citing Buffett.
Berkshire Hathaway still owns more than 50 million shares of IBM and Buffett said he has stopped selling.
"I think if you look back at what they were projecting and how they thought the business would develop I would say what they've run into is some pretty tough competitors," Buffett said. "IBM is a big strong company, but they've got big strong competitors too."
IBM in April reported a bigger-than-expected decline in revenue for the first time in five quarters due to weak demand in its IT services business, a sign that the company's turnaround could take longer than expected, Reuters reported.
IBM's revenue of $18.16 billion in the first quarter missed analysts' estimate of $18.39 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Revenue in the technology services and cloud platforms business dropped 2.5 percent to $8.2 billion. The business accounted for about 45 percent of total revenue.
With demand for its legacy hardware and software businesses stagnating, IBM has been shifting towards cloud-based services, security software, data analytics and artificial intelligence such as its supercomputer Watson, which once defeated human contestants in the quiz show Jeopardy.
Berkshire Hathaway and IBM could not be reached for comment outside regular business hours.
(Newsmax wires services Bloomberg and Reuters contributed to this report).
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