GT sapphire glaziers: You signed WHAT deal with Apple?

Dear lord, who let these chumps out of the playpen

Who will buy my sweet red roses

And that then brings us to the second problem. The sheer lunacy of the contract it actually signed. The company managed to miss the entire point of those take-off contracts. Those contracts which, again, are entirely normal in certain corners of the minerals word. And the point here is that the aim of those contracts is to reduce the risk that you make gazillions of these new things and then no punter wants to buy them. You're trying to align the bloke who wants gazillions with the bloke who can make gazillions.

The usual answer here is to have what is called a “take or pay” clause in any such contract. Essentially, we agree to build whatever to this standard and by that time. Excellent. If we do so then you have to either take them and pay for them or if you don't take them you've still got to pay for them. If we don't make them to standard or in time then here's the damages we'll pay. But if we hit the spot then you're committed to pay for them.

But here's what it actually did sign up to:

Those agreements, said Daniel Squiller, GTAT's chief operating officer, were almost entirely one-sided. By the time Cupertino's lawyers were done, he said, GTAT was presented with an deal that, among other terms, required it to: commit to producing millions of units of sapphire, even though Apple was not obligated to buy any of them.

Be sure to talk to the suckers at GTAT after I’m gone Tim

I really do have a three-year-old (step) grandchild and she really does negotiate for her lolipop deals better than that. It missed the entire point of bringing Apple in as the contractual partner with that clause. And no, don't go around saying that Apple treats everyone that way. We're all damn sure that Apple doesn't order 30m processors a quarter from Samsung on the basis that, well, maybe we'll buy those A7 processors, A7 processors entirely specific to us, and maybe we won't. Just go build them and we'll see?

It's been mentioned around here by more than one Reg reader that the people at GTAT who agreed to this contract need to be drummed out of business entirely, never to darken the door of a commercial organisation ever again. And it's difficult to argue with that thought really.

Because what appeared to happen is that it had its big boy pants pulled down, its botty severely spanked and then said 'thank you sir, may I have some more?'

Unbelievable. If Apple did this to an actual child it would be behind bars by now, but this was all among consenting adults where of course anything goes. The closest I can get to it is that German case where the bloke turns up agreeing to be murdered so that the other can be a cannibal. And they slice a bit off first and sit down to a bit of human-derived fried sausage (quite le mot juste) together before completing the deal.

Seriously, what were these people thinking? ®