Apple Sapphire Glass Supplier GT Advanced Files For Bankruptcy 171
mrspoonsi writes GT Advanced Technologies is filing for bankruptcy. In an announcement on Monday, GT Advanced, which makes sapphire displays that many investors hoped would be in Apple's newest iPhone, said that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In early September, shares of GT Advanced got crushed after the company's sapphire displays were not in the latest version of Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. GT Advanced, however, signed a multi-year agreement with Apple last November to supply the company with sapphire material. That agreement included a $578 million prepayment, which GT Advanced is set to repay Apple over a five-year period starting in 2015.
How can you (Score:4, Insightful)
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By having to carry that payment as a liability, presumably according to the contract.
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They realized they wouldn't be able to deliver on the contract?
It's not like free money.
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Apple paid the company 578 million dollars up front to supply them with this glass.
Apple then said "sorry, changed our minds, we aren't going to use your glass".
I'm not sure of what your source is but as far as I know Apple is using sapphire for their watch. I assume the supplier is GT because it is not an easily produced material. They are not using it for their phones but it was only Internet speculation that said Apple would use sapphire on the iPhone 6. Maybe Apple intended to but for manufacturing reasons opted not to do so.
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Obvious question: why don't they do a sandwich of sapphire-over-Gorilla-Glass?
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Obvious question: why don't they do a sandwich of sapphire-over-Gorilla-Glass?
Then the Sapphire would crack over top of the Gorrilla glass.
It turns out to not be a very good product to make screens out of.
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Composites don't necessarily behave that way. You could even have a multi-layer composite, if needed - probably a composite where the layer thickness grows as you go from top to bottom, and layers alternate between sapphire and Gorilla Glass, with the bottom-most layer being the thickest and made of Gorilla Glass.
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Composites don't necessarily behave that way. You could even have a multi-layer composite, if needed - probably a composite where the layer thickness grows as you go from top to bottom, and layers alternate between sapphire and Gorilla Glass, with the bottom-most layer being the thickest and made of Gorilla Glass.
True to an extent, but when you are manufacturing something, you have to be really conservative. DEadlines and committments and all. Since the original iPhone 6 was supposed to have a sapphire front, and it didn't perform to specifications, a sandwich of Sapphire on Gorilla glass would be a venture into the uknown.
How would it adhere, would the interface last or delaminate? Would the method for depositing the sapphire on the Gorilla glass change the characteristics of either? My brittle on tough was just
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Perhaps Apple was never interested is using Sapphire glass at all on the iPhone 6, and just planted the rumor in order to get better pricing out of Corning for the Gorilla Glass.
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I'm willing to bet that the problem isn't that Apple made the order for sapphire screens, it's probably that GTAT made promises to deliver screen parts for Apple, then failed to do so within reasonable parameters.
Given this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] ... I'm willing to bet GTAT promised to sell Apple sapphire glass screens but couldn't get production costs down below 30 bucks a part. By contrast, Apple right now I believe spends much less per unit. Something like 5 bucks per unit.
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If you have a debt of more then 578M, and no way to earn more money.
Probably the day after (Score:2)
It seems most likely either:
a) Their contract said that if Apple backed out by date X, GT has to pay back $Y.
b) More likely: GT was going to be a little late on delivering, or would deliver something not quite to spec.
> If I were to pay you $100 to build.. I don't know, a SIX FOOT kitchen table for me, and right as it comes time for you to deliver the table to me, I go "nope, that table is 5.99 feet", do you have to pay me back that $100?
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It might not have just been Apple. Maybe they took the $578MM from Apple, and another $500MM from a bank to build a $1 bn factory. Even if there were protections against Apple cancelling the order and demanding their money back, there might be others who they owed money to.
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Re:How can you (Score:4, Interesting)
get a $578M prepayment and go bankrupt in 10 months?
While many would suspect foul play here, I'm willing to bet it costs more than a nickel or two to ramp up to support one of the most popular electronic devices in existence.
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lend company money for glass
watch them go bankrupt
?
buy them up in BK court and take all the tech for yourself on the cheap
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That's a great recipe for disaster, or in this case bankruptcy.
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It's cashflow. I guess it halted after this: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/... [macrumors.com]
You have to be able to pay your staff, overheads and other costs etc. The new iPhone is at least a year away, I guess they couldn't secure a loan.
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Except that sapphire production is not the largest part of their business.
Re:How can you (Score:4, Insightful)
What I don't understand is how to burn through 578 million dollars in 10 months.
Bankruptcy does NOT mean you have $0 in your checking account. It simply means that your liabilities exceed your assets, your business prospects are unlikely to change that, and your creditors are unwilling to take a voluntary haircut. So you declare bankruptcy, and get a court imposed settlement between you and your creditors. You can usually continue to do business both during and after the bankruptcy.
At least in America, having at least one bankruptcy under your belt gives you some street cred with future investors, as long as you appear to have learned from your mistakes.
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What I don't understand is how to burn through 578 million dollars in 10 months.
Bankruptcy does NOT mean you have $0 in your checking account. It simply means that your liabilities exceed your assets, your business prospects are unlikely to change that, and your creditors are unwilling to take a voluntary haircut.
Thank you, geez these comments are preposterous. It's a pretty simple situation: they took a huge pre-payment and it became a short term loan. I just read that they were starting to build up production capacity, probably using that pre-payment, that they will no longer need. But even if they didn't, that big of a liability plus a big hit in stock price (35% drop even before they declared bankrupcy) when everyone found out Apple dropped them...that's a pretty massive hit to the balance sheet. They'd hit
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Re:How can you (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly give me the $578M... I'll burn through it in a matter of days.
Of course what I'd be spending it on is probably quite different than what they did (if they spent it at all... could be scam)
Just an off the top of my head guess:
Get large, lucrative, long term contract with Apple to deliver a component. Get large advance to get production up to speed. Spend all of it (or more... high tech factories are expensive) ramping up said production only to have your first expected large order get pushed to "undefined future". Realize you didn't budget for that and file bankruptcy.
I've seen posted that this isn't the biggest part of this company's business plan but I could easily see a company like this 'betting the farm' on this deal and screwing themselves in the process. Happens a lot. Bankruptcy is also a variety of different things so this isn't them being broke or going out of business necessarily but an acknowledgement that they are unable to fulfill their current level of liabilities. Apple may lose a bit or a lot on their investment but not really a big deal due to a combination of A) They more than anyone else in the world right now can afford it. B) They probably haven't lost as much as you think. Apple made the choice to not include this component in the '6. I'm sure they were aware of such an issue when they made such a decision. Just beans being counted.
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Except they didn't get all of it up front, it was being given in chunks smaller than $30 million per quarter. Apple has probably given them less than $60 million, possibly a little over $80 million. Pocket change for Tim Cook.
And if you actually understood what was happening, they GT Advanced) are operating business AS USUAL during the bankruptcy. Its not like the company is closing up shop and sending everyone home and shutting down production. This is unlikely to have any effect on their production un
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Industrial machinery is hecka expensive. Especially if you're working at high volumes, which anyone supplying Apple has to do.
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Because when Apple's plans changed, they became obligated to pay that 578 million back. Apparently even the part they already spent preparing to ramp up production for Apple.
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I know that some people love to blame everything on our Muslim, Kenyan, black president but...
Probably best not to blame Solyndra on Obama since Bush started it.
http://www.politifact.com/trut... [politifact.com]
http://thinkprogress.org/clima... [thinkprogress.org]
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Probably best not to blame Solyndra on Obama since Bush started it.
I see. So let me summarize your logic:
Bush looked at Solyndra, but didn't invest.
Obama looked again, and decided to invest.
Therefore it is Bush's fault.
Re:How can you (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah...you missed the non-partisan view of the logic stream. Allow me to show how things played out without the republican or democrat filters. Bush looked at Solyndra and tried to push to invest in it...but the administration ran out of time during a political time sink. Obama's administration took over and continued the efforts of the previous administration to invest. So basically you have the fact that the idea was started by one round of idiots and pushed forward (or at the very least, not stopped) by the next round of idiots and through both rounds of idiots the American people got shafted. Same story as what always happens in politics...with the supporters of idiot circle A blaming idiot circle B for the issue, and idiot circle B supporters blaming idiot circle A...perpetuating the huge ass political circle jerk of finding someone to blame for a problem instead of working on actual solutions and thus letting things continue to spiral out of anyone's control all the while blaming the other guy for not taking responsibility of the control stick and letting the flat spin continue.
Round and Round she goes, where she stops nobody knows. So goes American Roulette
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Solyndra was 'buying drinks in DC'.
Both parties drank, only one delivered, they both had plenty of time. Anything else is false equivalence.
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Re:How can you (Score:5, Insightful)
Care to expand on this?
Plenty of private investors had looked at Solyndra and declined to invest. It was already apparent that Solyndra had bet on the wrong technology, and their manufacturing costs were uncompetitive. They were using questionable accounting to cover up their problems. When news got out that the government was thinking of giving them a half billion taxpayer dollars, lots of people started raising red flags. Many people, both inside and outside the company, already knew that Solyndra was a sinking ship.
Two lessons that should have been learned from the Solyndra debacle, but were not:
1. The government should stick to funding basic scientific research, and refrain from "picking winners" by investing in private businesses. It is far better to leave that to people investing THEIR OWN MONEY.
2. If the government ignores lesson #1, and wants to invest anyway, on the theory that politicians are smarter than markets, then they should pair tax dollars with private investments, and only invest a limited percentage, in businesses that have been vetted by private investors.
Re:How can you (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't the government fail, just like a 'regular' investor? While I actually don't disagree - I think the role of government is in basic research, but the analogy holds. Both basic research and applied investing can fail. The former might result in an idea that didn't pan out, the latter results in an investment that didn't pan out. Investments are never guaranteed.
This doesn't mean that Solyndra wasn't screwed up for reasons that you mention, but I have no real beef about the government losing money on investments. It is something they're good at (losing money, that is). Always work to your strengths.
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The government doesn't have any consequences when they make a bad investment, so the due diligence is going to be lower.
It also opens the door for the money to just be funneled into companies owned by campaign donors or which employ lots of union labor or which happen to be located in an influential senators district.
On the other hand, funding basic science at universities and other pure research organizations is something that is much less open to abuse, and something that private investment is less able t
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The government doesn't have any consequences when they make a bad investment, so the due diligence is going to be lower.
Even if the government is careful, they will still do poorly. Government loans require lobbying and dealing with a lot of bureaucracy, both before and after funding. Most companies see it as a last resort. They go to the government only after being rejected by private investors. So the government has to select from a collection of stinkers, after private investors have skimmed off the cream.
But the problems go even further. Any sensible investor is familiar with the concept of a "sunk cost". Yet there
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The amount of solar energy you can capture is determined by the projected surface area perpendicular to the rays of sunli
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Because a regular investor is investing their money
Spoken like someone who has no idea how the banking system works.
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GM, AIG?
I obviously dislike that the U.S. lost money on Solydra, but it seems far "less bad" than those other investments.
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I presume you mean *wouldn't* have the need?
Also, as was noted by someone else, you're blaming the Solyndra mess all on Obama, and apparently the process was spread across multiple administrations.
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You mean a company that was hacked by an offshore power, its trade secrets stolen, then six months later, the same panels exported to the US
The Chinese use a completely different technology. Solyndra used CIGS [wikipedia.org] which was a technological dead end. The material costs alone ensured it would never be cost effective without deep subsidies. Their high manufacturing costs only made it worse.
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A lot of companies used CIGS or CdTe. Because you can more easily use print and roll technologies and get fabrication costs down. Examples include FirstSolar and NanoSolar. What the Chinese managed to do was lower the costs enough using conventional technology pushed to the limit that the advantages of low temperature manufacturing without requiring silicon ingot formation, etc of the other models wasn't good enough to compete. Although some also claim the Chinese are practicing dumping. Which may also be t
Re:How can you (Score:4, Insightful)
"Used" is the key word here.
In theory. In practice, almost everybody who has tried it has failed. Thin film PV requires very large sheets of very thin layers that are also very uniform. It's not an easy task, and those who have solved it have not been eager to share how they did it. Nor have they been able to maintain their cost advantage against silicon PV.
I'll grant you that First Solar is doing just fine, but not only has Nanosolar been unsuccessful, it doesn't even exist anymore. The only reasonably successful CIGS manufacturer to date (as defined by having a production volume similar to that of mid-sized silicon PV companies) has been Frontier Solar, and they ain't exactly cheap.
Huh? Low-temperature manufacturing? No ingots? I monitor Chinese PV manufacturing practices like it's my job. Because it is my job. I've been inside the fabs. I know the people who develop the technology. I assure you that they process their silicon and their wafers at the same temperature as everybody else, and that every single one of them is using ingot-based wafers. What the Chinese managed to do was develop an extensive local supply chain, then squeeze the crap out of everybody's profit margins when times got tough. Low labor cost played a role too, though with rapid wage inflation, the low labor intensity of solar cell production, and the increasing automation of solar module production, labor cost is not really much of a factor anymore.
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Apple seems to be flexing their celebrity status a bit - inventing boom 'n' bust stocks that suck money out of potential investors while simultaneously incurring no net losses. Next: Apple agrees to buy GT assets for pennies on the dollar thus getting a sapphire processing facility and inventory on the cheap. GT staff will be laid off until Apple decides when the right time to check boxes on the marketing sheets. GT have no choice in this because, heck, they're already bankrupt. Apple can name their own pri
Re: How can you (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple seems to be flexing their celebrity status a bit - inventing boom 'n' bust stocks that suck money out of potential investors while simultaneously incurring no net losses.
You mean like expecting a working product, and not getting it because it doesn't work, but you expect them to pay for it?
I think you're just pissed that the sapphire screens didn't ship with the iPhone 6, so you can't go "See? SEE? Apl Sukz! Android! Rulez!"
So now you're reduced to complaining that they aren't going to pay for something that doesn't work.
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I agree about celebrities. I am a celebrity so I speak from experience.
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Possible sequence (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know that this is what happened, but it seems likely.
1) Apple wants to use sapphire for main glass in Iphone.
2) Apple signs contract with GTAT to supply the sapphire, including a pile of money to build sapphire production facilities.
3) Apple pushes all risk onto GTAT. IOW, if Apple decides not to use the sapphire for the displays, GTAT has to repay the pile of money from step 2.
4) Apple does not use sapphire. GTAT can't repay money because they already spent it building sapphire production lines which no have no demand.
5) GTAT declares bankruptcy.
Re:Possible sequence (Score:5, Insightful)
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According to TFA the sapphire was never intended for the iPhone. That was just stupid investors hoping it would be, and then being disappointed when it wasn't.
The iWatch will use sapphire glass, as many watches already do. This is bad for Apple and anyone else who uses GTAT though, because through no fault of their own they were forced into bankruptcy and may now find it hard to meet demand when iWatch production ramps up.
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According to TFA the sapphire was never intended for the iPhone. That was just stupid investors hoping it would be, and then being disappointed when it wasn't.
$578 million seems like an expensive set of dice.
Those are investors that probably shouldn't go to Vegas...unless they want to help "invest" in that town too. That's one hell of a wing-it attitude.
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You get ~1k investors each putting $500k in; the trick being that they invest $500k into something every month and operate on a 5 year time scale, so they actually have something like $30M in investments. Every so often they get the equivalent of facebook, ebay, or amazon to make up the occasional failure such as this.
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"No fault of their own"?
Other than signing a contract that didn't have some level of binding/protection in it for GTAT.
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So, basically never.
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The iWatch will use sapphire glass, as many watches already do. This is bad for Apple and anyone else who uses GTAT though, because through no fault of their own they were forced into bankruptcy and may now find it hard to meet demand when iWatch production ramps up.
Bankruptcy comes in many different forms. For a corporation, chapter 7(liquidation) is pretty rare, most of the time it's chapter 11 - restructuring. The courts and creditors are smart enough to realize that a business selling things for a profit will get them more of their money back than one that isn't. So the health of the company is a concern. Heck, in some cases(see GM for an example), the company may end up reorganized with the creditors being the new owners. So again, a healthy business is bette
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Re:Possible sequence (Score:5, Informative)
Having been on the receiving end of a contract written by a company the size of Apple, I can tell you that by "specifications" the contract likely said "...and any other reason that Apple Inc. so chooses..." Companies the size of Apple have so much weight they can literally just bankrupt you.
The contracts I've seen were generally between parts manufacturers and automakers. The lure of all the money from GM or Ford is very enticing. But the contractual agreement you enter in is very precarious.
You will increase your production capacity by 1000% Here's the money to do that.
You will deliver parts on demand, we will not store any parts.
If we chose not to use those parts, we do not have to pay you.
If we chose to leave this agreement, you have to pay our entire investment back.
What they're basically doing is putting their entire parts chain into its own company, forcing that company to store all of the parts and all of the liability. If they suddenly decide not to go that route anymore, the company and all of the parts dispersers. Because they have to refund your investment, you can ensure that the vast majority of all the assets you invested are returned to you while all of the liability lands on others outside you company. It's all good for the Parent company and all bad for the supplier. The banks lose money, the employees get fired, the owners lose their business.
I've seen agreements like this where the parent company demanded some change that the supplier couldn't pull off as quickly as desired. The parent company owned the tooling, per the contract, and literally pulled it within hours and had it over at some other company. The supplier was bankrupt and laying people off withing 48hrs. That's how asynchronous these deals have become.
And don't think this is just Apple or automotive companies. This is how things are done now. I would not want to own a parts supplier in these times.
Being a parts supplier (Score:2)
I would not want to own a parts supplier in these times.
It's ok to be a parts supplier but you may not want to be a Tier 1 parts supplier to a large company. When you do that much business with a single enormous company you are pretty much their bitch and there isn't much you can do about it. The product volume when dealing directly with big companies is hard to resist but can bankrupt you if you aren't careful.
One of the big problems you didn't note about dealing with big automotive companies is that they seem to have never heard of the bullwhip effect [wikipedia.org]. My c
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You probably mean 'asymmetric,' but what the hell. Very good post.
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There was a lot of money involved so they decided to play the game. They played, and they lost.
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The current rumor going around [cultofmac.com] is that the sapphire itself is fine, but that the two companies contracted to take the sapphire boules (165 kg sapphire crystal blocks) and do the finishing work to cut them into screens suitable for the iPhone were having lower-than-expected yields (~25%), simply because of problems on their end.
Which is to say, while GT Advanced Technologies is to blame for not taking proper precautionary steps to ensure that they'd remain stable if the deal didn't happen, they aren't appare
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The risk was not pushed onto GTAT so much as their creditors. Let's hope the investment community was as good at assessing the risk of GTAT as they were for subprime mortgages/Countrywide Financial, or Greece/Iceland/Argentina/etc, or Black Scholes/Long-Term Capital Management, or Lehman Brothers, or , or ... oh wait.
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So back onto Apple. You don't think bankruptcy was a scenario they all considered when they were writing the contract. Sure Apple pushed the risk onto GTAT, but they damn well knew that bankruptcy was the inevitable counter move if the deal fell apart.
Pricing this risk into any other loans GTAT got in the interim is the kind of problem that puts bankers into the anal diamond manufacturing business.
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6) the governments socialize the losses of GTAT onto all of the companies that GTAT owes money to. Had GTAT and Apple succeeded, all of the profits would have been private, mostly recognized in Cork.
Three cheers for corporate welfare!
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Wait. What?!
The part of the profits that would change hands if they succeed is called "interest". All the companies that GTAT owns money to would get some of it.
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All of GTAT's creditor's (like all creditors) presumably knew there was a risk that GTAT (like all companies) couldn't pay their bills. The creditors should have (and, probably did) factor that risk into either the loans they made to GTAT (such as via higher interest rates), the price of the products they sold GTAT (i.e., higher prices), or the terms on which they sold to GTAT (such as C.O.D. or net-10 vs. net-60).
It's a stretch to say that GTAT's losses are being "socialized" by the government onto their c
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Actually, that can't happen because the GTA plant Apple paid for (and bought the equipment for) is in Arizona (I think). So any profits GTA makes has to be reported in US dollars and both Apple and GTA have to pay US taxes on it.
To exploit it in Cork requires Apple to then sell the panels at cost to Apple's subsidi
Re:Possible sequence (Score:5, Interesting)
You forgot:
6) Apple obtains GTAT through bankruptcy proceedings in lieu of being repaid for cheaper than what it would have cost before #2
7) Apple vertically integrates a component of supply chain using change it found in their lobby's couch cushions.
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Why would Samsung be involved at all? GT Advanced owes Apple several billion dollars for the machinery Apple purchased on GT's behalf. That's why Apple is in a position where they may just outright takeover the company, since if a company like Samsung decided to buy GT Advanced, they'd be on the hook for that debt and would also have to deal with any contracts GT Advanced made with Apple already...and Apple tends to love their multi-year, lock-in contracts.
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Bill Gates? is that you?
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7) Apple vertically integrates a component of supply chain using change it found in their lobby's couch cushions.
Except that Apple does everything they possibly can to avoid having to own any component of their supply chain...
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7) Apple uses sapphire for iPhone 6S or 7
8) (even more) PROFIT!!!!
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6) Profit!
Slashdot is no more what it used to be...
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6) Apples turns around and buys company with a discount for the debt owed.
Why you ask? The stock at at 10 before today and 20 not that long ago. At 10, the company is 1.43 Billion dollars. So they get the whole thing for 600 million. If they had try to outright buy them, it could have easily cost 2 Billion dollars.
Lucky I don't work for Apple, because that is what I would have done and that would truly be Evil.
Hmm maybe this is the reason (Score:2)
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Way to go out on a limb with that though.
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There is also the fact that the crystal on a watch has different properties as the glass on a phone or tablet. A watch crystal needs to be a lot harder to resist scratches, while a larger display needs to be more resilient to deter shattering.
If GT does a good job on the Apple Watch, they will have a permanent niche in the market.
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I think sapphire is used for the Apple watch will require much less material.
Because the watch has smaller area, or because the only people who will be buying it are the fanboys because it's a watch.
Did Apple screw GTAT? Or vice versa? (Score:2)
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Or is the screw yet to be turned (Score:2)
We've got all this capacity and technology but, you know, Tim, we could use a little extra grease to keep things moving while you ramp up for the next device rollout, if you catch my meaning. I'd hate for all of this to get mired in the courts and for you to miss a crucial delivery date on a ctrical component in your pretty toys...
Chapter 11 is not business death. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Chapter 11 is not business death. (Score:4, Funny)
It might be important to consider that a company filling for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is not terribly uncommon.
Well yeah. Just look at Donald Trump. He turned bankruptcy into a hobby, and it doesn't seem to have affected his hairstyle budget whatsoever.
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Indeed. Since their re-payments to Apple are technically debt, and Apple is now one of many creditors, I'm curious if it will be "restructured" so they don't have to pay Apple back as much as originally contracted.
578 million. (Score:2)
Less a 15% restocking fee, of course.
So is this GT the same glass we saw in the youtube video of the glass the guy bends almost 180 degrees without it breaking, and scribbles the sharp end of his knife all over and nothing bad happens to it?
They have some interesting tech (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in BNCT research and some guys from GT advance have presented at a couple of recent conferences. Of interest to us was their 'hyperion' (yes, like Borderlands) accelerator they'd been developing. Huge amounts of beam current from a fairly compact and easily maintained package. They were planning on using it to peel off very thin layers of sapphire via ion implantation, we could use it as the first stage of a neutron generator and I'm sure there are tons of other industrial applications. The senior guys I met seemed very good - proper engineers with the minimum of marketing bullshit. I think they'll do ok even if this is a pretty major set back.
Rumor mongers face no conequences, learn no lesson (Score:2)
The bullshit baseless Apple rumors have real-world consequences. However, the people that spread them are not touched by those consequences so they will keep making shit up.
Google buys it. Screws Apple. (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be funny if Google bought the company just to screw Apple? I mean they have a multi-year agreement in place so that would be a few years of thumb in the eye like fun. Oh, I can dream...
Al Jaffee, thou art vindicated! (Score:2)
Fuck everything, we're doing diamond glass!
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How do we know that Apple let this rumor slip unlike other controlled leaks?
That's the problem with these kinds of rumors. Sometimes they're well sourced, like someone at the Wall Street Journal could be tipped off by an Apple engineering manager, and sometimes they're horribly sourced, like some schmuck tries to extrapolate from shipping and sourcing documents that product A will have part B from supplier C.
Since we don't know the exact source of the leak, we have nothing to go on.