Q&A with Dr Tom McColm Research Director at Zeus Capital

Zeus Capital Research Director Dr Tom McColm caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the Ilika plc (LON:IKA) and Johnson Matthey PLC (LON:JMAT) collaboration

 

Q1: Now Tom, we’re talking about Ilika today, there was an RNS announcement out this morning, can you tell me the importance of that announcement?

A1: Yes, absolutely, very interesting announcement for Ilika. Just to give you a bit of background, Ilika’s original business when I first started covering the company I would say it was more of a contract R&D house almost that used its very high tech state of the art platform to do some high level materials discovery and optimisation and its customers were all large blue chip corporations, a lot of them technology companies such as Toyota, Energizer, Toshiba etc. The way the business model works is that when it does a joint development with one of these customers there’s a carve up, each case is different, of the IP, any IP that is generated and Ilika have rights to some of that IP, now what happened in one of the contracts with Toyota, looking at batteries for automotive, is that some very exciting IP came out to the extent that Ilika decided that because it had the rights to commercialise that IP in markets other than automotive it would actually sort of shift the emphasise, the focus of its business model and resources to concentrate on doing that and the company has done that over the last couple of years. A lot of its efforts have been on commercialising, scaling up, partnering on the commercialisation of these solid state batteries that came out of the Toyota IP and in a way it’s been lost that the original business of taking on these contracts from large blue chip corporates and doing work to find and optimise new materials, whether that was going on or not and this is great evidence today, today’s RNS of the three year tie-up with Johnson Matthey to look at anodes for a completely different class of battery, which I’ll get to in a moment, it’s just great evidence that the sort of core business model is still alive and kicking well. Ilika really needs that to be the case so they can constantly get new IP that they could potentially commercialise in other markets so that was the first reason.

Second reason is just the fact that Johnson Matthey used Ilika for this or have teamed up with Ilika for this, it’s great evidence that Ilika really is getting a sort of global status, if you like, in the battery arena. Johnson Matthey is a large global company, this is another interesting area of battery technology that they’re looking at, they’re looking at lithium sulphur batteries which are very high capacity, low cost batteries for sort of scale operations, one of those being the storage or renewable energy so it’s a good sign that Ilika’s name is well and truly on the map.

The third sort of relevant interesting thing is that Johnson Matthey are taking such an interest in batteries, it means that Ilika batteries are becoming more and more interesting in all sorts of sectors, you’ve probably seen the whole test of the battery cars, storage on a large and small scale, on a very small scale we’ve got the Internet of Things which is where Ilika’s other big battery focus is. So it just shows that Ilika are a name in a sector that’s really gaining some momentum.

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