“Apple is being sued for allegedly poaching employees from lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems,” Stephanie Mlot reports for PC Magazine.
“According to the filing, Cupertino snagged five employees, all of whom had signed non-disclosure agreements with A123 that prevented them from working with a competitor for one year after leaving A123,” Mlot reports. “However, four A123 employees made the switch to Apple within the last month; the fifth left A123 and headed west in June 2014.”
Mlot reports, “Apple also reportedly hired workers from LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Johnson Controls who have ‘experience in A123’s battery business,’ the filing said.”
Read more in the full article here.
“A123 specializes in lithium-ion battery technology for large machines, including cars,” Gina Hall reports for The Silicon Valley Business Journal. “Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has several hundred employees working secretly toward creating an Apple-branded electric vehicle. The project is code-named “Titan” and has an initial design of a vehicle that is similar to a minivan, the Journal article said.”
“Apple has been tipping its hand as of late, as it hires employees from Tesla Motors Inc. Data on LinkedIn show that Apple has been snapping up automotive engineers and experts from the luxury electric car company,” Hall reports. “More than 60 former Tesla employees are now employed by Apple, including dozens of hardware, software, manufacturing and supply-chain engineers, recruiters, sales specialists, attorneys and product managers, according to a Reuters report.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Lawsuit claims Apple poaching auto engineers to build large-scale battery division – February 19, 2015
Apple poached workers for new battery division, A123 Systems lawsuit claims – February 18, 2015
I don’t think “non-disclosure” means what she thinks it means. May I suggest “non-compete”?
Well non-compete agreements are illegal in most states. You can give a severance that is contingent on non-compete (I took one of those from HP myself years ago). However, non-disclosure is perfectly legal. Most senior level management jobs in the valley require you to sign one. If you sign and then leave the company and they can then prove you used knowledge from the non-disclosure covered items they can sue.
I thought Tesla was winning the pouching war.
But number of Tesla employees coming Apple is quite a few.
There will come a point where the other Tesla employees will figure out which company has the money to actually fulfill their goals and an exodus might start to happen.
The question: Why is Apple building a large-scale battery division?
Because they buy &/or make over 100 million cells a year and figure it is a strategically critical component they must control for existing high quality products.
And that doesn’t even count new product lines.
And because the battery tech has not improved substantially enough… I keep my fingers crossed for Apple to help pull a rabbit out of the hat and come up with new tech allowing an iPhone last multiple days or an iPhone last all day in constant use.
Exactly; plus, there is nothing that points that Apple uses those engineers necessary for “large-scale” batteries. And even if they do, they could be developing batteries for Apple’s multiple solar power plants. Just as Google, Apple has a lot of engineers purely for self service and ad hoc purposes.
Of course, this all might theoretically mean “electric car”, but it also may not mean that at all.
May be they would develop some kind of “ULTRA” batteries for electric cars and will be a supplier for all Auto Industries.
Think about it. Along with it, they may be able to develop long lasting batteries for smart phones and smart watches and be a global supplier.
When Apple bought PA semiconductors, some observers looked at what those chip designers had done so far and concluded that they would be used to develop exactly the same sort of chips for Apple. As we have seen, those engineers used their skills in optimising CPUs for very low power consumption combined with high performance and made it possible for Apple to develop world-leading chips to power IOS devices.
Those battery engineers come with proven skills and expertise in designing large batteries, but there’s no reason to believe that those skills couldn’t be deployed in a different type of battery.
Large scale refers to the battery form factor. I don’t think Apple plans to make phones with electric car batteries.
I think it might be related to the need for huge power sinks for their solar power plants at their facilities. They need to store the excess power these solar arrays absorb from the sun for use during night and days of low sunlight. What better than large scale Lithium-ion cells? That would not be a competing usage for engineers from A123. Other non-competing usages would be for high-efficiency cells for Apple devices.
Just a reminder that Apple already own and run a lithium battery division they bought from Duracell/Mallory several years back.
I have to admit that adding the lithium battery development hires along side the automotive engineering hires does make this all intriguing. I’m glad a few journalists are actually bothering to do some hardcore research instead of boring us all to death with endless vacuous spinning.
Apple must improve battery tech because it’s such a key feature for their products. I definitely think that is money well-spent. It would be beneficial if Apple also got into the research and development of fuel cells which so far hasn’t yielded great results. I believe I’ve read that there isn’t being that much money invested in fuel cell research. Almost nothing compared to the amount that Apple could afford to invest.
My guess is Apple’s car will start to bring financial fruit in the autumn of 2016. This means that Apple will achieve a greater than 20 percent earnings growth and possibly a greater than 30 perecent EPS growth for many years to come.
So, the P/E today should not be 17ish, but should be no less than 25. This means a P/E of 25 would value the shares at $185. Going forward, as earnings and buybacks increase the share price will appreciate past this $185 a share.
A question for the engineers out there: what would be more efficient in storing solar power: banks of lithium-ion batteries, or using solar power to create hydrogen to power fuel cells?
If you want some interesting considerations on hydrogen fiel cells, have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_e7rA4fBAo
Of course Elon Musk is an opinionated man, but he is also achieving things so he may have a point.
The bit about fuel cells is at around 10’30
It might not be as simple as which would be more efficient. The real choice might be which is the better use for the limited amount of lithium that’s available ?
My feeling is that using large amounts of lithium in stationary devices is a poor use. Portable devices are a more important use for lithium. Excess solar energy would be better stored using technology that doesn’t use large amounts of lithium and which needn’t be portable.
Conversion of excess power to hydrogen is certainly interesting, especially if that hydrogen is used to power fuel cells during the hours of darkness.