Ram, Tickertype, re: yields:
We may never get the full story until the day arrives that Lev is producing consistently at high yields. One has to wonder how he can claim 'we never had yields that low' on the one hand, and then explain away one Q's high cost of sales as being due to QC issues.
To be fair, his prior comment may have been for a window of time where he was considering only the G* order, and was performing automated packaging, and everything ran smoothly for a few weeks, and he collected statistical data which justified his claim.
Something in his language suggests that in the last reporting period there were episodic events that forced him to toss large batches of cells and/or materials away. These may be singular events that won't reoccur, but only time will tell. Recall that on the last CC he related a story of something that had recently taken place (possibly during the current Q, and not the prior Q under discussion at the time), wherein a new worker who was substituting for another one who was on holiday, made a grave error and inserted the rolls of materials for lamination upside-down. This was not monitored effectively (!) and not caught until the cells were made and tested at some later stage, and by that time, large quantities of materials were wasted. (Just my speculation, but I believe that only the films can be reprocessed, once the different materials are laminated together, there would be no means to separate them, and the 'cross contamination' would make the individual film materials unrecoverable.) How could this have slipped past the QC? Maybe they had to modify their QC approach to include the possibility for human error such as this.
Lev also alluded to some hand-packaging, and this led to lower yields. Once again, we don't know if this was perhaps to make up time on a delivery schedule for G*, or for a modest sized batch of cells for an initial order. I had wondered whether they could easily modify the packaging equipment for different sizes of cells. Maybe he only had one set, and it was set up for G*, so everything else was being done by hand by necessity... and resulted in a very low yield factor for that step of the process alone.
Hopefully the business model going forward includes the capacity to automate the packaging for any cell size, for any size order.
Just some thoughts. |
