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This is the article that I meant to attach. It clearly mentions Foxconn. The photo of the boule is that from a KY process. I did err in mentioning CHES as that is a different process.
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-reportedly-building-chinese-sapphire-plant-with-foxconn
http://www.yole.fr/iso_upload/mag/industryreview_iledmarch_web.pdf
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gtat.com%2Fd7af5388-f488-4077-a18f-cf423c3ff014%2Fdownload.htm&ei=wU1PVeP9BMLBtQW1j4GoCQ&usg=AFQjCNHaFT-X-O53TQcbFbAartzaqQ9AYQ&sig2=cHh1G3h1u4-2EtE-i6m-Bg&bvm=bv.92885102,d.b2wpdf SEE PAGE 10
MMK was the GT internal abbreviation for the Merrimack NH facility..sorry for the jargon!!
Was that substation fed off the grid? If so it was really not "backup" At the Salem facility they had several diesel generators and a huge bank of batteries for backup. The batteries would carry the load during the wind up cycle for the generators to come on line. They were 100% off grid. Not sure how much fuel they stored but I would suspect it was a few days worth. Do not believe that's it was meant to cover a 10 day ice storm outage!!
I would not stop posting as some people do appreciate your insight and with additional other data / info can look at it in the context that it was meant.
I was with GT when they acquired Crystal Systems. There was a major effort to cost reduce the system but not to change anything significant.....management speak!!
Oxford was the supplier of record and it was a spinoff of another company...can not recall now. The compressor was fairly standard but the gas panel had some proprieatary stuff in it...according to Oxford.
Back in mid 2012 there was a huge effort to evaluate and qualify suppliers of alumina and crucibles.....was disproportional to any real need in a lot of peoples opinions. It was not supported by any sales forecast in any case. That may have been in anticipation of an Apple agreement and 2000 furnaces would explain the effort. That was more than a year before the announcement in Nov of 2013
In your reference to Foxconn the attached article shows a CHES or KY boule and both are different processes that the HEM ASF's. GT acquired the KY process from Thermal Technologies a couple of years ago but decided to not continue with that technology.
In these processes the crystal never touches the crucible...only molten sapphire does. This results in a different hot zone and most likely a Tungsten crucible.
There were a bunch on people from MMK that spent a lot of time in MESA. You may have known some of them.
It does not make sense to me either but there must be some business reason to do it. Are we missing something.? In what scenario would this make good sense?
Does the Apple settlement demand that they get out of Sapphire processing...I thought that that was an internal GT business decision. If so they could change their mind although the amount of Myer Berger equipment is WAY more than they would need.
If GT is out of the sapphire processing business what is the advantage of ownership of this equipment which was used to cut the boules into bricks?
Was this strictly a financial liability issue?
It would seem that Myer Burger would be in a better position to sell its equipment than GT. MB sells into the hard materials cutting arena....sapphire, silicon etc. and could reconfigure the equipment for another application easier than could GT.
Your thoughts?
That was a pure coincidence. I do not follow the trading trend and never have. I do not place a lot of substance on technical trading as that is, in my opinion,is a day trading tool and not germane to buy and hold investing. I scan the releases and read those that catch my eye. That one was associated with the employee retention plan in which I had some interest.
If my post was seen as a ploy to move the market I apologize. I had no idea that the market was that sensitive to individual random comments.
I cannot imagine what a planned attack could do...WOW!!
Because I am not investing additional $ in GTAT I do not follow all the postings and docket items as closely as others might.
As far a steering readers to other companies ...the point is to let them know that GT is not unique in their offerings....there are alternatives and if they are not aware of them could get wrapped up in the hype.
As far as the posting that is referenced I am not sure of the implication. It says "after CH 11 reorg or sale of substantially all the assets". How do you interpret that.
My DD and past association leads me to my position. Sort of like beauty being in the eye of the beholder...or the glass being half full vs. half empty.
My "hope" is self serving in that I would like to recover some losses after a successful emergence from BK but am not willing to buy more stock. I am too conservative an investor at my advanced age!!
Seeds were harvested from production boules at the Salem facility back in 2011 2012. I should have omitted the "I believe"
The key point is "what is the status of the Mesa boules"?
Also the "did not meet spec" is debatable in the specifics.
Was it overall net yield or individual boule yield?
These parameters are linked but have different implications.
Some furnaces may have has consistent high yields while other were consistently poor or all furnaces could have had marginal yields. Both would affect net yields but the course of action would differ.
That was an attempt to explain the origin of the seeds and remove the perception that there was some black magic involved......it is a fussy operation but all Sapphire companies need a seed of some form to orient the growth.
The status of the Mesa boules was not mentioned but was a valid question when I wrote the post....and still is. I seem to recall that the boules belonged to GT. Not sure why Apple would buy or own them if they did not meet their specs.
Historically GT sold Sapphire furnaces with seeds as part of the performance warrantee. They would only honor performance issues if GT seeds were used. The cutting of the seeds uses standard cutting equipment...what is critical is the orientation of the crystal lattice to the cutting plane. I believe that they use xray diffraction and polarized light for orientation. I understand that they would get out of custom coreing and waffering activity but seeds seem to be pretty integral to furnace sales unless they change their business model.
I seem to recall reading that there were 100's ....maybe 1000's of boules at the Mesa facility that had some amount of usable material. Any ideas as to why that material has not been processed into seeds. These seeds are puck shaped single crystal sapphire. GTAT would cut good material into seeds to supply with furnaces. That way they could offer some yield warranty./..and make $ selling seeds. The seeds were harvested from standard boules I believe.
I am not certain of the exact reporting requirements. I would assume that if they had a firm sale...not just an agreement in principal..that it would be reportable in the next MOR.
That would be in the sprit of the BK court requirements.
You are right...I was only referring to the MOR part of the article. If needed to ref the article as cutting and pasting just the MOR sentence would not be the right thing to do. I assumed that the context of the reply would be obvious but apparently not.
the point was that GTAT has to report furnace sales in their monthly reports to the court counter to what was said in an earlier post. It had nothing to do with furnace prices at all.
The only part of the attachment was in reference to the reporting.
I believe that there is a requirement to report all sales of assets including furnace sales. They may not have to report pending sales activity as that might hamper sales but post sales are part of the monthly reporting requirements.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2015/02/09/gtat-wrote-down-the-value-of-its-furnaces/
First news about Foxconn in a long time from Yahoo.
http://finance.yahoo.com/mbview/threadview/?&bn=d3d890f0-7105-4eb4-9854-6e71b2d4fd5a&tid=1427903379832-88949637-2c6b-449a-9e5b-eef55b4a3738&tls=la%2Cd%2C5%2C3
I heard that she was released in late June 2014 in one of the pre BK cost reduction measures. She had spent a lot of time in Mesa and may have been one of the sacrificial lambs.
In docket 652 TG said that he believed that they would hit target performance in late December of 2014...that was in late Aug.if I recall correctly. If that is the case it was probably recipe tweaks with minor physical changes. The boule size was much greater (265 Kg)and they were using thinner cricibles....all of which greatly affect the thermal balance of the system. All the heat is extracted by flowing Helium gas thru a cold finger that contacts the bottom of the crucible where the seed is located.
Math modeling can only go so far and random, unpredicatable crystal plane dislocations can occure due to convection currents in the melt, minor contamination in the feed stock..etc. etc....
The point is that there is a high likely hood that this work continued after BK but work on a "next gen" system is not likely.
I never saw anything on which crystal plane the boule was cut for these phone covers. LED substrates are cut perpendicular to the boule growth axis...the C axis. the parallel direction is the R plane. The minimum boule diameter would be the diagonal of the iPad screen size so there would be a lot of waste in either plane. A layout of screens layed out within the boule dia would give you some insight in to the number of iPhone screens vs. iPad screens you could expect.
If they are working on a new and improved version and they are successful the announcement may affect their ability to sell the 2000 Mesa units. If the changes are software based it will be alot easier to convince a customer. A hardware change could be much more expensive to implement.
I was referring to acceptable yields specifically for IPhone covers. I have no doubt that yields would be OK for LED substrates.
Meant to post the link: https://www.kccllc.net/gtat/document/1411916141202000000000001
I believe that everyone should go back and read Docket 652 posted 12/1/2014. Exhibits 5 and 6 specifically but all of them.
They were making some usable sapphire in the 165, 242 and 262 boule sizes. On Sept 23, 2104 GTAT.....TG.....said that they would have the formula by late Dec. 2014 for the 262 Kg. On Aug 24, 2014 in a Williams email he states that boules greater than 165 are nit going to work......I suspect he meant ..work to Apple's schedule.
Given that TG's comment was made about two weeks before BK I would doubt that there has been much work towards the 262 Kg boule.
GT could make Sapphire in their furnaces but not with sufficient yields, nor sufficient quantities and at an acceptable cost.
GTAT supposedly is getting out of the KY Sapphire business per the attached link. NOt everyone put a lot of cred in their releases. This is fairly dated news.
http://seekingalpha.com/news/1822835-gt-advanced-launches-restructuring-as-apple-production-ramps
Was the CNET article worth reading?
Interesting article that explains the difference between screens and cover glass. GT was going to make cover glass and not screens based on this article's definition.The screens are the active display component and the glass is a protective cover for the screen.
http://www.cnet.com/news/abcs-of-smartphone-screens-1080p-and-more-smartphones-unlocked/
The article that was in the earlier post listed virtually all of GTAT's ASF customers during the go-go days back in 2011 2012. It must be one of those. Maybe a little Googling might shed some light on who it might be.
This might be a repeat of an earlier post but making screens has several choke points. Boule yield is the obvious first one.
The second one is in the cutting and polishing of the boule to get the final screen. The challenge comes with cutting the holes.
The process of cutting the holes creates stress in the screen which give rise to areas that could let a crack propagate or leads to areas that show color bands due to the stress. These are typically visible under UV light but might be visible under fluorescent light as well. This would be a cause for reject.
The final screens...with holes...need to be annealed to fix these issues and there in is the problem / challenge. They can be annealed in small batches but to make thousands at a time with acceptable yields was difficult. Any tooling used to support the parts led to contact points that resulted in rejects.
Some of the early Court Docs referred to Apple keeping the IP associated with annealing as they apparently making some progress.
I would guess that the "customer" is one of the ones listed in the article.
Below are links to what seem to be the largest
http://www.ghtot.com/index.php?shownews-2091
http://www.teraxtal.com/english/product_page/product_page2.html
http://www.compoundsemiconductor.net/article/89241-oci-aspires-to-become-a-top-provider-of-sapphire.html
Again this may be old news or not significant to some people's DD.
Tera Xtal was one of several customers in Asia. HTOT was a large customer that ordered 360 systems and only received 150. Link to other customers are in the attached link for reference. The link is dated.....October 2014......but the customers mentioned should be valid.
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20141014000114&cid=1102
The seeds are hockey puck shaped cylinders of single crystal sapphire that are typically harvested from a boule. Getting the initial material in the proper crystal orientation can be a challenge. GT typically required customers to buy seeds from them in order to assure that proper yields were met. Off axis seeds could result in reduce yields. Picture stacking LEGOS in a barrel.
If the bottom is not flat the LEGOs will stack at an angle to the side walls while they are supposed to stack parallel to the side walls.
The single crystal seed is placed in the bottom of a crucible...typically made of Molybdenum. The crucible is then topped off with 99.999% pure Al2O3 crushed to various sizes to optimize packing density.
The crucible is then put in the furnace and heated to melt the feed stock......the crushed Alumina. The trick / art is to fully melt the stock without melting the seed as the seed defines the crystal orientation of the boule. As the liquid Alumina freezes it follows the crystal lattice of the seed. The recipe for the heat extraction is a trial and error process .......once a thermal baseline model has established a starting point.
Each boule size had its own recipe and could have had varying size seed pucks to compensate for the larger charge and melt time.
This may be old news to some and informative to others.
Interesting background on proton therapy similar to Hyperion.
Does not get into the technical details but talks about the current and projected availability and benefits.
http://discovermagazine.com/2014/oct/14-precision-vs-profits
The largest impact would be with Hyperion and the magnets used in the beam focusing. Cost of materials will be the largest impact but in the grand scheme of things Hyperion uses a VERY small % of available material and magnets are probably 1% or less of factory cost. Impact on the rest of their product offering would be minimal I believe.
Larry...My post was meant to be a new post an not a reply to RG's post. My mistake. I did follow that long tedious saga which seems
to have stopped.
Given that I thought my post was a new one I hope you understand why I was confused by your reply.
I guess that "good citizen" is the best category. I have several 1000 pre BK shares so do have a vested interest in GT succeeding...but I am not buying any new shares. Worst case I have a long term capital loss or they successfully recover and the stock exceeds my cost basis. I do have some first hand knowledge about GT and try to pass it on....not everyone appreciates or understands my comments. I really try to not bias my comments and be a objective as possible. Apparently I am not always successful!!
The time line for medical applications is pretty long and they have competition that is already in clinical trials...look up Mevion. Maybe a licensing agreement with a GE or other major player could happen by mid year but I do not believe that GT can do this alone.
Not sure how your response fits with my post....overthrow GT???
strongarm???
Did I link this to a prior posting? It was meant to be a standalone new post.
My only point was to say that there are other companies out there with comparable technologies and investors should know that.
GT has stated that they are reducing their product portfolio to Silicon, PV, Sapphire and medical applications for Hyperion...by mid year for Hyperion. See their SEC 8K
The attached link is about Ferrotech, a large Japanese company with a portfolio that mirrors much of that of GTAT. They make DSS and Single crystal Silicon furnaces and Single crystal sapphire furnaces for the LED industry......which could be used as smart phone screens with proper scaling...as GT attempted.
http://www.bridge-salon.jp/report_bridge/archives/eng/6890/20120626.html
Terra Xtal was / is still trying to collect their arbitration award from last year.(see docket items 791 and 1071 and 1467).
1467 is a motion filed to protect their position.
Was there some PR that said that they were looking to buy more GT systems. They seem to be in an adversarial position.
I had a business relationship with several people inside of GT in sourcing and engineering as well as several key suppliers so had a good understanding of their operations and philosophy.There are no links to their internal business practices that I know of.
Apple may have approached them but they were unwilling to accept the terms and GT was probably able to ramp faster. Apple did not buy the Mesa systems...only lent the startup $ to GT. The ave open market sell was $550000 +/- where the ave per unit loan was $288000 which is probably below the China market price.
There are Chinese competitors that are selling identical "clones" to the GT ASF and DSS systems. They do not need any assistance from GT. This may not be ethical but we are talking in China and not the US. A lot of GT suppliers were left with unwanted inventory on their hands when GT went CH 11 and would love to recover something.