Intel Corp. (INTC)

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  • commenter
    fslrte
    Dec 09 05:06 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    These are all very good arguments, congratulations to all participants.
    On the consumption of raw material, comparing silicon and tellurium, I was wondering how you come up with 8 grams of tellurium per 60 Watt panel.
    If we take a 300 microns wafer technology, the use of silicon is around 10 g / Watt.
    Suntech is in the range of 200 microns and is reporting 7 grams / Watt.
    First solar CFO is saying that there usage of material is reduced because they use only a 3 micron layer of material. I would be tempted to conclude that they use 100 times less material, leading to 0.1 grams / Watt or 6 grams / panel.
    Now, we still need to take into account the fact that tellurium is only 1 part of the CdTe compound. It is actually 6 grams of compound, not 6 grams of tellurium.
    I am not sure of this but I believe the CdTe compound is made of a weight proportion of 47 % of Tellurium and 53 % of Cadmium. Can anybody verify this?
    This would mean that the use of Tellurium per panel is 0.47 x 6 grams = 2.82 grams or 0.047 grams / Watt
    We can continue with pricing comparison. Spot market of polysilicon goes up to $300 / kilograms but Suntech CEO says that they now have new long-term contract at $40 / kilograms. At 7 grams / Watt, we then have 28 cents of silicon per Watt.
    If First solar is using 0.047 grams / Watt (I.E. 2.8 grams per panel), to reach cost equivalence with the silicon (28 cents), they would need to pay the tellurium $5,957 per kilograms.
    It is obvious that while polysilicon trend is to go lower in price, Tellurium is taking the opposite direction. Investing in tellurium might be a good idea but it seems a long way before getting to 6,000 $.
    Reply
  • commenter
    Mark Anthony
    Dec 08 01:34 PM
    My Website
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    Have you people listened to the CFO's 20 minues presentation on Dec. 6, 2007. He was in such a hurry that no Q&A was allowed at the end. Or maybe there is an inconvenient reason why he was afraid of answering questions:
    cc.talkpoint.com/LEHM0...

    I noticed this portion of the talk:
    "(8:05)What we are TRYING to achieve, is a 90% confidence that we have 5 years of supply assured post full ramp of these facilities. And that confidence is demonstrated not only through our strategic inventory that we are holding, but also through a long term contract we are engaging with our supply base. ..."

    Note he said they are TRYING to reach the 90% confidence level, that mean they still do not have that confidence. And they are probably counting on maybe some tellurium they hoared from some years ago.

    No business can operate sustainably if it rely on strategic hoarded stockpile for regular supply. Such hoarding is only meant to be used during emergencies, and should never be touched to supplement regular supply. I do not think FSLR has tellurium source to sully its Malaysia factories. And it certainly does not look like they can grow at all, because there is no possibility they can add more factories and find more supply, if they are already relying on strategic hoarding of materials.

    That, combines with the CEO's admission that they now need to find tellurium themselves and pass it to CdTe compound suppliers, in order to obtain CdTe, despite already have a supply contract with the CdTe suppliers, it really shows how bad a shape FSLR is in, regarding tellurium.

    I have send this article to FSLR, and many people have also forwarded the article to FSLR seeking their comment. So far they have avoided dressing the public concern head on, in recent presentations they avoided using the word "tellurium" altogether. That really tells you something!

    I reported the CFO to SEC on his outrageous "terawatts of tellurium" claim, and I made it publically known that I did report the CFO to SEC, and that I got a response from SEC. So far FSLR said nothing about it.

    Why do they let me beat them on tellurium like that and never responded to me so far? The absolute silence from FSLR is deafening!
    Reply
  • commenter
    Mark Anthony
    Dec 08 12:37 AM
    My Website
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    Go to ThomasNet and search for suppliers of tellurium:
    www.thomasnet.com
    Please note, do NOT order powders, order metal ingots for investment. You probably need to wait a few months to receive your order.
    Reply
  • commenter
    parker
    Dec 05 06:04 PM
    My Website
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    I am a chemical engineer and am happy to admit I know absolutely nothing about Te. However - either way you look at this trade, going long or short here, is very speculative. All I can say is that if you think there demise will be in a few years, why not wait to short it until there is some sign of this. They won't collapse overnight, and you would likely still have time to build a large short position. For the time, being the trend might be your friend, although I happen to think all solar stocks are long over-due for a correction, hence why I sold my FSLR position after a big run up back at 165. Don't you think a company of this size would have researched the availablility of their supply chain before investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a business on which it completely relies? While I unequivocably can not dispute the facts/opinions of either argument, I just find it all very hard to believe. But, I suppose Wall Street doesn't have a whole lot of physicists on the payroll either. Again, too speculative either way... Reply
  • commenter
    mnrtrading
    Dec 05 12:43 PM
    My Website
    Intel Upgraded on Strong PC Demand [view article]
    There was never any serious question about AMD "competing" with Intel, even if they designed a better chip, simply because in the actual manufacturing phase, AMD could not implement such designs efficiently. We highlighted Intel in August, specifically their awesome manufacturing capabilities.

    mnrtrading.blogspot.co...
     Reply
  • commenter
    FSLR
    Analysts
    Dec 05 12:38 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    It looks as if First Solar is also concerned about the supply. They are vertically integratrating when demand for their products is well above their ability to supply. The Acquisition of DT was a bit odd for them. They are above 20% OM, which gives them cash to do two things - lower the solar price further or expand the business. Instead of preparing for further GW capacity increases, they are moving verticle. To me, this signals a hint of risk. They are moving into the US market with the acquisition but they are also moving away from PV manufacturing as the sole source of revenue. It looks like Te supply is a concern for FSLR afterall. Reply
  • commenter
    Augustus
    Dec 04 03:40 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    Where can someone purchase Tellurium? Reply
  • commenter
    Pouting
    Thomas
    Dec 03 11:30 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    I am, in fact, a EE who has done work from IC layout to abstract signal analysis. I have worked with light conversion materials that cost over $1,000/gram, which tends to focus one's mind on efficient use of material.

    The comparison to indium is bogus. Indium is not widely used as a trace dopant. It is used for bulk materials like solders and semiconductor substrates, and in indium-tin-oxide transparent electrodes on LCD displays. LCDs apparently use a lot: the layers are thin, but they make 'em literally by the acre. So yeah, they zip through a ton at a time.

    By comparison, the phase-change material in memory devices is only used on small dice in an extremely thin layer.

    Incidentally, my numbers are ridiculous, but not for the reasons you think. They are way, way conservative. The market for memory devices is a lot less than US$100G/year. Memory cost will be a lot more than US$0.10/GB, at least for the next couple of years. Practical memory cells are likely to be considerably smaller than 150 nm. Only around 25% of the chip area will be covered with phase-change material; the balance being etched off and recoverable from the waste stream.

    If you disagree with the assumptions I listed, please state which ones, what you think they should be, and why. This is physics. If you're not calculating hard numbers from first principles, you're lying.

    "As for FSLR, from head to toe it started as a CdTe based company, and has no other product. There is no feasible way for it to switch to a different technology, other than liquidate all existing assets and start over again from scratch on a different technology."

    No. First Solar is a glass panel company having a fling with CdTe. All plausible high-efficiency materials will be rather fancy and expensive. To keep costs in hand, they will HAVE to be used as thin films, sandwiched between sheets of inexpensive glass for protection and mechanical strength. And First Solar has that problem SOLVED. Can they handle acres of glass? Check. Can they get the glass extremely smooth and clean? Check. Can they put electrodes on that glass that don't block too much sunlight? Check. Can they make electrodes that have acceptable electrical resistance? Check. Can they make reasonably rugged assemblies that stand up to weather? Check. Do they have a customer base and distribution channels? Check. That's no guarantee they will pull off the transition to a different film composition, but they have as good a chance as you could ask for.

    One-trick ponies like CdTe are generally regarded as a stop gap solution. It's just not plausible that any simple material will have a good match to the entire visible spectrum. To get light conversion efficiencies up in the 50-75% range will take layers of multiple materials, or a fancy structures (keep your eyes on the folks growing vertical nanotubes on surfaces). Those technologies are being developed right now and will become increasingly practical over the next 10 years. Whoever has a glass panel plant sitting around waiting for them will have tremendous first mover advantages.

    The real structural risk is that someone could invent laminated plastic PV cells that are distributed on a roll. The glass panel business would be toast.     Reply
  • commenter
    Mark Anthony
    Dec 03 10:55 PM
    My Website
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    JSY:
    I am sorry, the tellurium documents at the NREL site are NOT about FACTs, but about speculations, a pretty naive and amateurish speculation at that. They have already been proven wrong by the tellurium market trend in recent years.
    This research paper is way much more credible, and it questions the original NREL assessment:
    www3.interscience.wile...
    Of course the actual global tellurium market itself is way much mroe credible. Price has been going up fast and furious. Supply is tight and hard to come by. I wanted to buy a couple hundred pounds and I need to wait several months to get it.
    Reply
  • commenter
    Mark Anthony
    Dec 03 10:46 PM
    My Website
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    Saturn V:

    There is no tellurium stock to buy. The only way to speculate on tellurium is to purchase and hoard physical tellurium metal ingots.

    Tellurium contained in chalcogenide material as used on CD-RW and DVD-RW discs is a commercial reality. You can buy them at any electronics store. And I see a whole lot more in stores than a few years ago. That alone is a huge tellurium demand.

    Intel already announced and probably released the phase change memory. It is a reality NOW, not in the remote future. Samsung also released phase change memory. So things are happening right now.

    Tellurium price has been going up fast, way much mroe than 2% up per week. That is a fact. So we are experiencing global tellurium shortage right now and see a rapid price raise.
    Reply
  • commenter
    JSY
    Dec 03 09:52 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    For the fact about cdte PV please visit the following web site and read the article before you make any judgement.

    www.nrel.gov/pv/cdte/


    Reply
  • commenter
    saxonglass
    Dec 03 09:25 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    Mark,
    Sorry Mark - but you are wrong. It's not just a dictionary definition. Go to any scientific journal - Chalcogenide is not a product - - it is a family of glasses/crystals that contain Se, Te, or S, or each. I have researched chalcogenide glasses for more than 3 decades, and rarely did they contain Te. There are dozens of technical uses beyond memory - for instance infrared lenses, infrared fiber optics, Hundreds of compositions can be used - but it is true that right now glasses containing Te makes the best phase change memory material. That does not mean that Te cannot be replaced. It is not a magic material that imparts some heretofore unknown property to the glass.
    If the cost goes up - it will be replaced.     Reply
  • commenter
    Saturn V
    Dec 03 08:25 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    [...minor edits of same post]

    Ovonics has had the same "potential" for the last 35 years.Intel worked with Ovonics in the early 70's, and scrubbed it. Almost 10 years ago, Intel went back to Ovonics, and it is still a no-show.

    I am skeptical about the claims.I have seen so many technologies claim that they were going to dislodge DRAMs, and waste a lot of investors money in the process.The pace of progress in the semiconductor memory is so fast, the volumes and the economies of scale are so huge, that it has been impossible for any challenger to make an impact.Unless the traditional memory technologies run into a major roadblock, the prognosis for a challenger is grim.

    NAND FLASH memory is also on a tear, but it has some performance limitations like number of erase cycles etc.That may present an opening for Ovonics style devices to exploit, since the new technology will inevitably cost more, and it needs a strong foothold in the performance area to have any chance of survival.If it can meet the write erase cycle challenge at almost the same cost of NAND FLASH, it may end up replacing rotating memories for ultraportable computers.

    But I would not buy Tellurium stocks as yet.     Reply
  • commenter
    User 127383
    Dec 03 08:22 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    FSLR P/E is 167.31
    Market Cap: 17.8 billion
    EPS (ttm): 1.37

    Overvalued and bloated and bound to fall. When is the question...Smart guys will take profits now and wait for dip
    Reply
  • commenter
    Saturn V
    Dec 03 08:16 PM
    The Tellurium Supernova [view article]
    Ovonics has had the same potential for the last 35 years.Intel worked with Ovonics in the early 70's, and scrubbed it. Almost 10 years ago, Intel went back to Ovonics, and it is still a now show.

    I am skeptical about the claims.i have seen so many technologies claim that they were going to dislodge DRAMs, and waste a lot of investors money in the process.The pace of progress in the semiconductor memory is so fast, the volumes and the economies of scale are so huge, that it has been impossible for any challenger to make an impact.Unless the traditional memory technologies run into a major roadblock, the prognosis for a challenger is grim.

    NAND FLASH memory is also on a tear, but it has some performance limitations like number of erase cycles etc.That may present an opening for Ovonics style devices to exploit, since the new technology will inevitably cost more, and it needs a strong foothold in the performance area to have any chance of survival.     Reply
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