Did Apple use $2 billion to bail out Sharp last quarter?

Sharp was in serious trouble last summer. It had hemorrhaged 103 billion yen ($1.3 billion) in cash in the first half of 2012. It had another 200 billion yen ($2.3 billion) in convertible bonds coming due in 2013. And an emergency infusion of cash from Foxconn had just fallen through. This was a problem for Apple, because it was counting on Sharp to supply touchscreen displays for the new iPhone 5 scheduled to launch in a few weeks. August came and went and the displays from Sharp were AWOL. Then, in the second week of September, the Wall Street Journal reported that mass production of Sharp's LCD screens for Apple had finally begun. What happened? Asymco's Horace Dediu has a theory. In a post published Wednesday he points out that there was a $2.3 billion discrepancy between what Apple said it planned to spend on capital expenditures in 2012 and what it actually spent -- $2 billion of which wasn't reported as cash flow. "The question is," writes Dediu, "what was it spent on and why did it not go through the cash flow statement?"