I wish I could find some time and some speculative money to short them as a group. Not just based on your reservations but my own. Such huge engineering inputs and robust gear waiting around for Spectrolab to get the triple junctions price down. And all that front-side risk just to hand themselves over to utility companies (who have access to cheap aperture and have to mark it up for retail) to get roughed up. And the redundancy of the work from company to company. They all have their own proprietary but indistinguishable stuff it seems. I have a licensing exit as my goal but most of these VC types want to build a soup-to-nuts company. So I considered (as an exercise) just suggesting we develop my product while staying as virtual as possible and then buy a concentrator company for pennies on the dollar when we need a manufacturing arm. While we work on our value - we'd let them grow wild (and let the herd thin while we got our act together.) Finally, we'd harvest the best bargain when and if we needed it.
Grim, I know, but there you have it.
