Sloppy Management Partly Caused GT Advanced to Miss Apple's Sapphire Deadlines

Much has been made lately of Apple's harsh terms for third-party suppliers in the wake of the bankruptcy of GT Advanced, the company that was working with Apple to create sapphire displays for the iPhone 6 and other devices. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal (via Cult of Mac), however, much of GT's failure to meet Apple's demands ultimately sprang from sloppy management.

Photos in the report show that GT always struggled with production of the material, and quotes from employees reveal a company that was far from the model of efficiency necessary for bearing the Apple logo. In those shots, reportedly taken just days before GT signed its deal with Apple, we see evidence that most of the 578-pound sapphire cylinders (called boules) the company produced were unusable owing to multiple flaws.

Once the deal was in action, allegedly, only half of the boules GT produced were usable — a dire situation, considering that it takes 30 days to make a single boule. Worse yet, each boule cost GT around $20,000.

Source: Wall Street Journal

GT's failure in this regard isn't that hard to understand in the context of how poorly the staff was trained. The report claims that around 100 employees didn't even know who they were supposed to report to, and an open-ended attendance policy meant that workers were taking an excessive amount of "sick days."

"We just kept sweeping the floors over and over," said one employee. "I just saw money flying out the door."

At times the story of GT Advanced seems more akin to farce than tragedy, as in the case of 500 missing sapphire bricks newly cut from usable boules. Had they already gone to shipping? Hardly: employees later learned they'd been sent to recycling by mistake.

The story of GT Advanced is surely a devastating lesson for Apple, which has made long strides toward once again producing products in the United States rather than sending them off to China. Apple claims it's going to try to repurpose the GT Advanced's Mesa, Arizona facility so the employees there can keep their jobs, but even that remains in doubt after Bloomberg reported today that Taiwanese supplier Foxconn plans to contribute $2.3 billion toward building a display-producing plant specifically for Apple.

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