The Founding Fathers Weren't FinishedBy Joel Litman, chief investment officer, Altimetry
 American Superconductor's biggest customer disappeared... along with $1.7 million worth of trade secrets...
At the time, the company – commonly referred to by its ticker, AMSC – was one of Wall Street's favorite clean-energy companies. It made power converters that helped transmit energy from wind turbines to the grid. The hardware was nothing special. But its parts generated around 10% of all wind power around the globe. Customers needed to buy AMSC's hardware to have access to something even better – its software. You see, AMSC's software helped turbines run better and kept them connected to the grid through periods of disruption and low wind. So they were more efficient at providing energy to the grid, even during a sudden drop in voltage. In 2010, Chinese turbine manufacturer Sinovel Wind was AMSC's largest customer. With a roughly 11% market share, it was the second-biggest turbine maker on Earth. And each new turbine it built was another potential sale for AMSC. It looked like the perfect partnership. According to Wall Street, it was the best opportunity in the U.S. wind-based energy market. And then everything went south. By 2011, Sinovel accounted for more than two-thirds of AMSC's revenue...It had agreed to purchase more than $800 million in products and software from its American partner. But the day the order arrived, Sinovel refused to accept the shipment. It stopped paying for equipment AMSC had already delivered. The blow forced AMSC to slash its annual revenue forecast by nearly $100 million. Shares plunged 42% in the fallout. Months later, AMSC reported quarterly revenue of just $9.1 million... down 91% from the year prior. Wall Street chalked this up to a simple issue – too much reliance on a single customer. Sinovel was within its rights to change plans and source converters from other companies. But Sinovel wasn't getting parts from someone else...It was stealing from AMSC. The Chinese company had approached Dejan Karabasevic, the head of automation engineering at AMSC's Austrian subsidiary. It offered him a contract worth $1.7 million in exchange for trade secrets.
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 'I Nearly Died – Twice' A serious car crash... a tree falling through my living room – you can't make this up. Cheating death twice has made me reevaluate everything. It's why I'm speaking out today, one FINAL time... giving away what I consider a priceless investing secret... and running up my nearly $20 million "bill" (money I've saved for readers!) with Altimetry’s sister company, Stansberry Research, so far. But after this, I'm going away for good. Please see this message now. |
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About a month before Sinovel refused to take AMSC's shipment, Karabasevic secretly downloaded its proprietary source code from a company computer in Wisconsin to his computer in Austria. With the stolen code, Sinovel could retrofit its existing turbines and build new ones using AMSC's technology. It could skip the hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and services it had promised to buy. By then, AMSC was fighting for its life...The collapse cost the company more than $1 billion in shareholder value and nearly 700 jobs. AMSC said it reduced more than half of its workforce. Eventually, AMSC's data logs revealed the betrayal. A federal jury convicted Sinovel of conspiracy, trade-secret theft, and wire fraud in 2018. The court calculated AMSC's losses at more than $550 million. Sinovel took extraordinary illegal measures to beat its U.S. competition. But it's far from the only Chinese company putting pressure on America... State-backed loans and massive industrial subsidies allow Chinese companies to expand capacity... and lower prices far beyond what a fair market would support. Modern mercantilism is putting American companies at a disadvantage. That brings me to the way to fight back – through a hidden playbook I'm calling the 'Second Declaration'...Pretty much every American is familiar with the Declaration of Independence. But the vast majority of folks ignore the lost "second page"... a 1776 economic work called The Wealth of Nations. Written by an economist and philosopher named Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations lays out our economic rights to fair trade and competition. For two-plus centuries, we took those rights for granted. But China has spent the past 20 years embracing 18th-century mercantilism while the rest of the world slept. It's time to wake up. The only way to fight back is to put the U.S. balance sheet to work...The government realizes this – it's pouring cash into key industries like chips... AI... and energy. While the former two grab headlines, far fewer folks are talking about energy these days. But America needs reliable natural gas. It needs the machinery to turn that gas into exportable fuel. It needs equipment that strengthens the electrical grid... components that power critical machines... and automation that allows domestic factories to compete. My team and I dug into the numbers – and found a handful of top businesses spread across this domestic supply chain. Together, these companies are helping the U.S. take back control over its own manufacturing future. They sit at the center of America's effort to overcome Chinese competition and dominate the global stage once more. Learn how to get their names here. The rest of the market hasn't caught on yet... But I don't expect it to take much longer. This is our chance to bet on America. I hope you'll join me. Regards, Joel Litman
August 14, 2026
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