“Stock and bond market partisans of sapphire screen maker GT Advanced Technologies Inc. (GTAT) saw their loyalty turn costly yesterday,” Callie Bost and Matt Robinson report for Bloomberg News. “”
“After opening at $11.06, the stock plunged to 80 cents by the close, wiping out about $1.4 billion of market value after GT Advanced shocked investors with a Chapter 11 filing. Of 14 equity analysts that followed the maker of mobile phone screens, four considered it the equivalent of a buy at the end of last week, according to data compiled by Bloomberg,” Bost and Robinson report. “‘I can’t recall one like this before,’ Lawrence Creatura, a fund manager at Pittsburgh-based Federated Investors Inc., said in an interview. Federated did not own GT Advanced shares as of its most recent filing, he said. ‘Ordinarily, bankruptcies are a ‘slow death by a thousand cuts’ type of affair. This one is unusual in its suddenness.'”
“Jeffrey Osborne, an analyst at Cowen & Co., suspended coverage of GT Advanced yesterday. He had rated the stock outperform, the equivalent of buy, since August, when he began coverage with a price target of $19,” Bost and Robinson report. “‘We have gotten this call wrong,’ Osborne wrote in a note to clients yesterday. ‘We did not appreciate that the company appears to have bitten off more than it can chew in regards to the relationship with Apple.'”
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MacDailyNews Note: Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition will offer sapphire crystal displays. Apple Watch sport features a strengthened Ion-X glass display.
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