Versarien PLC (LON:VRS) Chief Executive Officer Neill Ricketts caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss their new MOU with CT Engineering
Q1: Great news today, only last week we spoke about an MOU with Absolute Engineering, now yet again a new MOU with CT Engineering, things are looking good. Can you tell me how this collaboration come about?
A1: Well we’ve known CT Group for a while, they came in contact with Versarien through our contacts at the National Composite Centre and we do a lot of work at that fantastic location down in Bristol. CT Engineering is part of the CT Group providing design and advice on materials for people like Airbus and other major manufacturers and when they heard about our new material they were very excited at the prospect of sort of leading the charge in this new field of science and wanted to get involved in a collaboration, that’s why we’ve agreed this Memorandum of Understanding to pioneer this new science really.
Q2: Can you give us a bit of background on CT Engineering and the area in which they work?
A2: So they’re a multi-national engineering group, the provide design and engineering expertise to a lot of manufacturers in specialist areas, their particular area of real excellence is carbon fibre composites. There’s a real move within both automotive and aerospace to come up with lightweight structures to reduce fuel use and CT Engineering have got a multitude of engineering experience to really help those manufacturers to deploy that in the next generation of aircraft.
Q3: So what’s going to be the focus for this project?
A3: When you’re a small company having access to all of the design and the finite element analysis and all of those computer systems that you need in order to show the aircraft industry how your materials work, it’s very difficult to come by. CT Engineering have got all of that expertise, they’ve got all of that software and it means that we can work with them on a test programme to really define how these materials will work in applications, how will this technology work in an airframe or in a seat or any of the other applications that might come up. So it really gives us that ability to really accelerate our progress.
Q4: This is a new sector for you, what does this mean for Versarien?
A4: Well it’s really unusual for a company at our stage to be talking to these big manufacturers and have someone like CT Engineering help us is really beneficial to our progress. What this means is we can start to talk to aircraft companies, it’s a long journey being involved in the aircraft industry and in some parts of it, the safety critical parts, but in other areas we can make changes very very quickly and having CT Engineering’s ability to be able to up-broker those conversations is going to be really important for our company moving forward.
Q5: Now Versarien gave a positive trading update in April and some good news last week, are things for this financial year still looking good?
A5: I think it’s challenging for everybody at the moment but what we’re doing is we’re making great progress, you’ll have seen the number of MOU’s that we’ve been able to put in place with this new technology and we’re expecting some exciting news over the next few months about all of these developments. We’re due to come into the City in the middle of July and tell everybody what we’ve been up to and get that story out there so unfortunately until the middle of July you’re going to have to wait a little bit. We’ve seen some good progress in our business.
