GT Advanced earnings call signals sapphire ahead for Apple

“GT Advanced has been one of the most hyped tech stocks in 2014. It’s up 76% for the year. Thursday it closed at $15.36, up 2.37% on a day when the rest of the market sagged and over 76% for the year to date,” Eric Jackson reports for TheStreet. “Although it signed an agreement with Apple last year to build a sapphire-producing plant within a property already owned by Apple, most analysts didn’t really pay much attention to the company, which had about a $1 billion market capitalization coming into 2014.”

“Until we know there’s really sapphire in the new iPhone 6 phones coming this Fall, it’s hard for GT Advanced investors to give the company full credit,” Jackson reports. “When Corning reported earnings last week, GT shares sank right away because Corning said that its Gorilla Glass — Apple’s current alternative to sapphire — would grow sales by 20% next year. Even though Corning didn’t say anything specific about Apple or sapphire, investors reacted to the news by selling GT because they concluded that any growth for gorilla glass must be bad for sapphire.”

“What we learned during the GT earnings call this week is, while no specifics about Apple, their guidance that their 2014 revenues would come in at the low end of their prior guidance but their earnings would be at the high end. They also outlined that they’d receive their final payment for setting up the sapphire plant from Apple by the end of October for $139 million,” Jackson reports. “The bottom line here is that there were no signs from the GT earnings call of any kind of delay in the company’s ability to be able to ship sapphire to Apple in time to sell it starting with a September announcement date of the next iPhone.”

Read more in the full article here.

Related article:
iPhone 6 will have sapphire glass thanks to GT Advanced’s hoard – August 7, 2014

5 Comments

    1. It certainly is, IMHO, a safe default to consider information handed to you to be nonsense, if not outright deceit. IOW: There is a healthy level of paranoia. The positive balance to that is to seek out those you can trust and encourage them in their extraordinary behavior. I find that to be very uplifting.

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