Thanks for the objective reply. I appreciate the absence of emotion. Yes a lot happens behind closed doors but leaks are bound to happen. You are correct in your statement about rates. With such a small aggregate quantity as with ASF's rates are not as pertinent as they might be with a commodity item like 2x4's or sugar. And again you are correct in that physically moving them should not be a barrier to a sale. At peak production GT approached 25 a week.....that was assemble, test, disassemble, crate and ship. So if the Mesa systems are being disassembled and create for shipment now they should have a big jump on that part of the project.
My concern is that GT sold a total of about 350 to 400 systems during their peak demand period which lasted about 2 years. That was to maybe 8 or 10 customers which were all LED applications I believe. That market was grossly over sold as everyone saw the growing LED demand and wanted to have installed capacity to support the initial orders. Once the initial orders were issued there was a lot of excess capacity with the "losers". If you recall China was funding just about everything during that time frame to assure they were the market leader as they did with Silicon PV. Mesa has 2000+. The primary demand for that quantity of units would be a commercial application...like Apple. So, in my opinion these units are going to go, as a lot, to the new Apple sapphire supplier or other smart phone manufacturer's sapphire supplier. Moving them into the saturated LED arena does not make sense to me......there are too many alternatives to sapphire LED substrates like Silicon and GaN single crystal wafers.
Also there are enough sapphire manufacturers to support a high end sapphire option in the smart phone arena. Sort of similar to what Apple is doing with their watch.
This is probably more info that most want to read and I cannot point to independent third party data for verification. You have to take it on face value or totally discount it all together. My comments are compilation of first hand experiences, press releases, and trade / technical publications including patents releases.
When I get tomorrows WSJ I will send it to you. Sort of like the sign in the bar that says "free beer tomorrow"
