The closure of Apple Inc.’s sapphire glass plant in Mesa is a done deal, but it’s unclear how much the public will ever know about what went wrong.
The bankruptcy court in Springfield, Mass. approved the closure on Tuesday after Apple and its sapphire glass supplier GT Advanced Technologies Inc. reached a settlement agreement, which GT’s attorney Luc Despins called an “amicable parting of ways” less than a year after the pair entered a $578 million contract.
The settlement also allows GT to sell more than 2,000 furnaces at the plant and use the proceeds to help pay off its roughly $439 million in debt owed to Apple. Last week, GT alerted the city of Mesa that all 727 employees would be laid off by December.
GT is slated to file more details of the settlement by Friday. Those filings could shed some light on what drove the company into bankruptcy, but not entirely. Court documents filed on Tuesday show GT has requested that some documents, which detail its relationship with Apple and are currently under seal, be completely erased from public record.
The court is expected to decide on whether to approve the settlement at another hearing next month.
The level of secrecy in this instance is quite unusual and has drawn criticism from GT’s other creditors and the state of New Hampshire, where GT's Chapter 11 bankruptcy was initially filed.
Usually in a bankruptcy case, documents that explain what led to a company going broke are disclosed.
But in this case, nearly everything has been under seal. In earlier court proceedings, GT said disclosing such information would violate its confidentiality agreements with Apple, and therefore trigger $50 million in fines.
GT, which filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Oct. 6, is already about $1 billion in debt.
Analysts speculate GT went bankrupt because it wasn’t meeting production targets of the sapphire glass, which may have triggered early repayment of its loan to Apple.
Apple currently uses the glass for its iPhone camera lenses and it was rumored that its iPhone 6 screens would to sport the material. That would’ve involved making the glass on a larger scale than ever before, a task assigned specifically to GT. But to the tech-world’s surprise, the iPhone 6 didn’t include the glass when it was unveiled last month.
After GT's surprise bankruptcy a few weeks later, it raised suspicions that Apple had to change course with the new iPhone because GT was having trouble making the material on such a large scale and volume.
