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renewabullinvestor • 1 hour 18 minutes ago
Whispers: The Move by GTAT to New Much Larger Furnaces Did Them In
GTAT believing that they could setup the biggest Sapphire factory the world has ever seen AND switching to the new 200+ Kilogram ASF Furnaces did them in.
On Nov. 4th, 2013, GTAT announced their Multi-Year Supply Agreement with Apple. AT the time the company said, "GT expects this arrangement to be cash positive and accretive to earnings starting in 2014." and then added:
"GT has accelerated the development of its next generation, large capacity ASF furnaces to deliver low cost, high volume manufacturing of sapphire material. These R&D efforts will support its non-LED initiative with its new customer and are expected to enable the expansion of GT's LED, industrial and specialty sapphire businesses by positioning GT and its equipment customers as the industry's lowest cost sapphire producers."
Then on May 5th 2014, (6 months later), GTAT announced...
"GT Advanced Technologies (Nasdaq:GTAT) today announced that it will be making its next generation ASF®165 sapphire growth furnace, for the production of high volume and high quality sapphire material, commercially available in Q3'14.
The new system will deliver a 40% increase in boule size when compared to the ASF115. The ASF165 is expected to be the only commercially available sapphire production furnace capable of producing 165 kilogram boules in high volume.The product is currently in the beta testing stage and is expected to be ready for volume shipments beginning in Q3 2014."
But then GTAT added the key part to the press release, "The company indicated that it has developed more advanced ASF technology capable of producing boules significantly greater than 165 kg. The company intends to keep this more advanced ASF system captive for some extended period of time."
This "advanced ASF technology capable of producing boules significantly greater than 165 kg" which most in the industry believe to be about 230 Kilograms is what GTAT used for the Apple factory.
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mk54321 • 35 minutes ago
More short FUD ...ignore
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rudedude_2k • 1 hour 4 minutes ago
Who whispered this? You have a reference?
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renewabullinvestor • 48 minutes ago
Nope. Take it or leave it. Apparently the move to equip the factory with all new furnaces at 230 Kilograms or so, made it much harder to get the factory up and running smoothly, and they have had all kinds of problems, not only because of the new furnaces, but also because of the different processes for the larger size boules, i.e. going from 16-18 days cycles to 28-30 day cycles....the longer cycles caused warping, and other problems. Also newly trained (or poorly trained) workers were responsible for other "mishaps"....one example given to me was that a "manager" sent perfectly good boules to be recycled into crackle. Like I said, take it or leave it. I'm not getting this from a direct source, but down the line so don't make investment decisions based on it, just though I would add what I heard. I'm obviously not going to tell you what I do, or who I'm talking to but I don't have anything to do with GT or Apple, I know of this through a different channel.