At the markups they are making they could be hand-soldering the bits and still be ahead, scaling existing process makes more sense than investing more in research.
> scaling existing process makes more sense than investing more in research.<p>It doesn't sound like they've stopped investing in research in general. Just one specific area.<p>"We've been working on this for decades and can't figure out how to commercialize it, so we're going to try different things" is a healthy result, even if other companies got different results.