`New Hampshire sapphire and silicon crystal growth company`

A New England company sold several hundred crystal-growth machines to China after China's $30 billion solar-cell investment decision. Used to illustrate how exporting capital equipment can destroy domestic competitiveness.

How valuable is all this stuff? [Tom shows a polycrystalline silicon sample.] This is polycrystalline silicon, heated and cooled over a six-week period in a furnace to make very large grain size. They make a boule of it that's about this big, and they cut it up into little chunks and make solar cells out of it. All this technology was developed right here in New Hampshire, by a company. They make the equipment, and they sold several hundred of these machines to China, because the government of China decided to invest 30 billion dollars in solar cell technology. That's not structural material, that's a functional material. Once you saturated China with the equipment, that's going to cause them to knock our socks off in competitiveness. Right now all the solar cell companies in the United States are going out of business.