Is this confirmed that they have Engel machines at prometaltech? A few conference calls ago Steipp slipped and said there were machines purchased by someone else, and they knew about or were involved with it somehow, but wouldn't say how many or where. If this is the case I've had this theory...
Indulge me a little... If li was buying machines before getting shares, this could be part of a bigger plan, not just that he could potentially be using the machines for his own formulations, but that he could one day be a partner commercializing LQMT, doing fabrication. My theory goes like this. If there were something big in the works, LQMT would need some bigger production capabilities than the two machines in california. If he bought some machines and was getting them up and running, that's money LQMT didn't have so couldn't spend, but also inactivity would drive the pops down and after loosing vissor, has nobody to produce parts for them. Li can use the machines himself anyway, so not a bad investment, but if he can be the production partner he could make some money there. If he becomes manufacturing partner he could even sell the machines back to LQMT and get his money back, and technically jobs aren't being lost overseas because they were never here in the first place.
Now let's go a little deeper, if Apple needed to produce parts, there's no reason they'd have to go with LQMT, they could go anywhere, but if prometaltech already had machines that could do the work, even better right? Apple has tons of money and could invest in another company to retool to produce parts for them. But they aren't stupid, if they don't have to invest in machinery, they can make more money. Li wouldn't want to buy machines he couldn't use, and he certainly wouldn't want to buy stock that won't pay off. But if he buys machines he could use anyway, what's the reason for buying the stock. If he gets a contract to produce from Apple, he makes good money, but if LQMT gets the contract, and he produces it, he gets paid for producing, probably supplying the material, but also suddenly 63M in stock is worth in the billions. In this scenario, he doesn't want the contract directly, he makes more money being the middle man.
If li were going to just dismantle LQMT for the IP, he could have done so for cheaper... Had he waited a little longer the stock would have gone down and he could have just bought shares at the door as people were walking out of the shareholder meeting.
My point is these guys that do this type of stuff usually want their hands a little more in their investments. And if this theory were to pan out, li would be basically in vertically integrated control of LQMT. Also making him some serious money in the process. I don't know how much money he has, but I can't think of many ways to turn that much of a profit in that short of an amount of time. This isn't a day trade, he knows much more than any of us do, and he had this information a long time ago. I'm sure he visited the center for excellence several times and had several one on ones with management to arrive at the decision to buy this.
And 1000 shots at 100g, for a little 2 gram part in the home button of a phone... 1000x50x365=18,250,000 per machine per year if 20 machines 365,000,000 parts. Those are iPhone numbers.
I'm going to get dumped on for this, I know, but that's what the Internet is all about. Hiding behind a computer while belittling others ideas. At least come up with a counter argument.
