Government Business v. Private Business
Carolyn
We all heard the news last week that yet another company on the President’s tour of success has declared bankruptcy. Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer and, according to President Obama “a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism,” has sought bankruptcy reorganization.
In December of 2010, with less than one month’s reserves on hand, Solyndra sought to refinance by asking the Energy Department to subordinate $385 million of the $535 million guaranteed by the government. This would allow them to obtain an additional $75 million from outside sources. The Energy Department agreed, putting taxpayers behind new investors if things were to go wrong.
T.J. Rodgers, founder of Cypress Semiconductor and former Chairman of Sunpower, said on The Kudlow Report that on the day of President Obama’s visit to Solyndra in 2010 a secretary asked him what it meant that the President was there, visiting their competitor. He says that his response was, “Set your watch. That company will be out of business in one year.”
According to Solyndra President and CEO, Brian Harrison, “Regulatory and policy uncertainties in recent months created significant near-term excess supply and price erosion.” Regulatory and policy uncertainties? Huh, hadn’t heard that anywhere before. Looks like it might be a deeper problem than that, though.
According to Rodgers, the thin-film technology used by Solyndra is “lousy,” low efficiency and the cost per watt is double other technologies. He noted that the typical Silicon Valley startup is full of great ideas in a “crappy” building; Solyndra, on the other hand, built a palace which, according to reports, cost $700 million. The company also made the mistake of building their manufacturing facility in California, the worst state in the nation to manufacture, Rodgers added.
Solyndra’s cost per job amounted to $1.5 million, and now those workers are without jobs at all. Money well spent, or simply another attempt to override private markets and supplant them with an uninformed bureaucratic vision of utopia?
Rodgers, on the other hand, knows a thing or two about the solar panel business. In 2001, he invested $750,000 in SunPower, a solar panel manufacturer which uses a technology much more efficient and easier to manufacture than most others. Within a matter a months, Cypress Semiconductor, the company he built, had invested $168 million in SunPower, including the purchase of additional plants and equipment (Solyndra’s new plant alone cost $700 million . . . in this economy?). That company, by the way, is still around and growing despite management and R&D shakeups over the past couple of years.
Reminds me of the comment made by the Social Security judge, David Daugherty, who pretty much hands out Social Security Disability like candy (nearly 100% approval rate v. an average of 60%), “Some of these judges act like it’s their own damn money we’re giving away.”