Hi. This is Matt Brundage here at Bridgehouse, and I recently had a chance to speak with Paul Greene, lead portfolio manager for the T. Rowe Price U.S. Blue Chip Growth Fund. I asked him for his thoughts on one of his top holdings, which is Apple. Here's what Paul had to say.
Yeah. I think Apple probably, one of the things that I think is a little different about this company versus sort of the other ones in that group is, you know, most of their growth has come through just growing units, historically. I think we've shifted into an environment for that company where the growth has been less about units. I think most people have a smartphone at this point in time.
Now there's still share for them to take, especially if you look at a market like India, for example, is predominantly Android. They're having some real success in India. So there's still gonna be unit growth but, and I think what that means is that the overall growth of the company is still fine and still healthy but it's not going to be quite as dynamic as these other companies are. That said, I think it's also viewed as a staple.
So if you look at the staples sector, for example, those tend to hold up as companies that are very stable and they don't have a lot of volatility. And I think Apple is kind of viewed that way with within the IT sector. And so it probably has, maybe other than Microsoft, it has a higher multiple than some of these other companies even though it doesn't grow as fast.
And so, for us, if you look at our positioning in the company relative to some of the growth benchmarks or the other growth funds that are out there, and we probably have on a relative basis versus those benchmarks, I'd say we have lesser weight in this company than we do some of the others. But, still, I think it's a company that is extremely durable, extremely high quality. We feel pretty good about its ability to continue to compound earnings.
And if you look over the last 18 months, these other stocks have performed really well and Apple's done okay but it's really lagged some of these other some of these other large, hyperscale mega cap type companies in the Mag 7. And so, it started to look increasingly attractive. So we feel good about it but it probably is goint to be a slower grower and, kind of, quote-unquote, boring compounder.