“Mark Hibben, writing in Seeking Alpha about the GT ‘debacle,’ has a plausible narrative — and a pretty smart take on where Apple has to go from here,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “For Hibben it starts with GT’s announcement in May that it was building a new generation of furnaces capable of producing 40% larger sapphire boules.”
P.E.D. reports “‘My working hypothesis,’ he writes, ‘is that GTAT committed to the larger experimental furnaces for the Mesa plant, and this is how they got themselves into trouble. They built the larger furnaces assuming that they would realize production scale economies and then discovered that the quality of the sapphire produced by the furnaces wouldn’t meet Apple’s requirements.'”
“Meanwhile Apple still has a watch to build,” P.E.D. reports. “Hibben points out that the low end of the Watch line, Watch Sport, isn’t in jeopardy because it doesn’t use sapphire. But the models with sapphire crystals — the steel and gold Apple Watches — may be delayed.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]
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