14 DAY TRIAL // A court filing signed Daniel Squiller, COO of GT Advanced, reveals one side of the Apple & GTAT story that makes one pity the Arizona-based sapphire manufacturer and hate the iPhone maker in California.
The media got its hands on some interesting information from Squiller this week, information suggesting that Apple has been a control freak throughout the duo’s collaboration to produce sapphire for its iDevices, causing GTAT to imminently fail at fulfilling its obligations.
We finally hear GTAT’s side of the story
By now, everyone keeping close tabs on the tech industry must know that Apple and GT Advanced had a fallout less than a year after the duo entered a partnership to produce vast amounts of high-quality sapphire crystal for use in iDevices.
Soon after they began to cook up the exotic material using some expensive furnaces bought by Apple, GTAT discovered that some of their contractual agreements conflicted with the operations inside the factories. Not only that, but Apple started making amendments and things started to go so awry that GTAT ended up bankrupt.
So, that’s what the media knows today. To set the record straight, GTAT’s chief operating officer now reveals in court papers what really happened. The problem, as he puts it, was Apple and its forceful nature.
GTAT, he outlines, is of the opinion that its inability to achieve production targets was directly tied to many of the tools not meeting Apple's stringent performance and reliability requirements.
Many of these tools had to be replaced with alternatives because of a change in plans, which forced GTAT to spend extra cash and lose months’ worth of sapphire output.
"The fabrication cost was approximately 30% higher than planned, requiring nearly 350 additional employees and significantly higher consumption of diamond wire and other wear items than originally planned. GTAT was required to absorb these additional costs. By the time it sought protection from its creditors, according to a separate court filing, GT was losing $1.5 million a day," says Squiller.
Squiller even anticipates Apple’s answer
Squiller’s declaration also includes tidbits regarding Apple’s ill-fated orders, power outages that caused the factory / factories to stop operations, and a number of contractual agreements that GTAT apparently took a bit too lightly before shaking hands with the big kahunas in Cupertino.
However, it is worth pointing out that Squiller ended his testimony by actually offering the Court Apple’s objections to his story. His closing statement goes like this:
“Based on my own discussions with Apple executives (or on recent press statements by Apple), I would expect Apple to forcefully contend, among other things, that (a) the failure of the sapphire project was due to GTAT’s inability to manufacture sapphire in accordance with the terms of the agreements between the parties,” and the document continues with up to six additional bullet points, all explaining Apple’s side of the story.