Third Solar Maker In A Month Goes Broke

[karl]

10 years from now some 20yr old kid working at MIT is going to grow a crystal in a fish tank and a 100 billion dollars of subsidized solar panel business in China will be worthless. Its too fast, to quick to think about a business infrastructure. We're going to leap-frog over this.

Sorry but China has hundreds of engineers reading every patent filed in the U.S. They will see that crystal, copy it, and have it in production before the kid at MIT gets a pat on the back.

 

[mbcijim]

"so Wall Street bought them" AFTER the owners to the cool, profitable alternative energy company agreed to sell to them. Yes, there was mismanagement in the new owners, but the original owners did not have to sell to the buyers they accepted.

This is a problem in every industry, not just alternative energy.

Medium sized companies 8-9 figure top line sells to private equity. Private equity buys them out but puts major loans on the company books. I'll use the pipe industry as an example that I just saw. $125 million in sales, bought the company for $75 million, but borrowed $125 million. $75 million went to the original owners, $50 million went to the private equity buyers. The guys in private equity just know how to borrow money. You think the sellers would have just borrowed the $125 million in the first place? Yep, if they knew how!

3 years later sales are down, declare bankruptcy, loan is wiped off the books, the banker becomes the owner, and the private equity company still gets paid to manage the company.

This is typical for 75% of all companies of that size today. I see their books all the time.

 

[webbie]

Of course it you draw parallels to the early automotive industry, hundreds of cars companies went out of business and the survivors were built on the remains of several failed companies. Maybe that will happen again but unfortunately the companies will have Chinese names.

I think this is somewhat accurate....production capability is so vast today that there is no need for hundreds or thousands of companies. The winners will not always be the best - some of it is luck. Look at VHS, much worse tech than BetaMax..but it won.

Production today is amazing. Look at Apple - this one company, if it came to it, could probably supply 100% of the worlds smart phones and touch pads. The same goes for a lot of other things - Intel could supply most of the computer chips for Planet Earth.

Who knows? Things are changing too fast for any of us to do much more than hang on.