Berkshire Hathaway has upped its stake in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) yet again, Warren Buffett announced on CNBC television Monday morning, lauding the company’s consumer-retaining power.

Written by StockNews.com

In fact, Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick that his company more than doubled its Apple position since December 31, to a massive 133 million shares. A couple of weeks ago, Berkshire had disclosed that it quadrupled its AAPL holdings in a regulatory filing.

As ZeroHedge reports, Berkshire has now quickly rocketed up the list of the largest AAPL shareholders:

At this point, Buffett owns $17 billion worth of the tech giant’s stock, he told CNBC making, him a Top 5 holders of the stock, sandwiched between CapRe in 6th spot and Fidelity in 4th.

The purchases that Buffett revealed on Monday give Berkshire Hathaway about 2.5% of the outstanding Apple shares. It also made Apple one of Buffett’s company’s largest holdings, second only to Coca-Cola.

“Apple strikes me as having quite a sticky product, and an enormously useful product to people that use it,” said Buffett in the TV interview. The Oracle of Omaha also noted he found that consumers had hugely positive feelings toward the company, which also influence his decision to get aggressively long the stock.

...Year-to-date, AAPL has gained 17.99%, versus a 5.91% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.

AAPL currently has a StockNews.com POWR Rating of A (Strong Buy), and is ranked #1 of 29 stocks in the Technology – Hardware category.