Haydale Graphene Industries PLC (LON:HAYD) Chief Executive Officer Ray Gibbs caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the timescale for commercial products, their tie-up with Briggs Automotive Company and profitability
Q1: Now Ray, you’ve said that you have a supply chain for raw material, partners for various type of products and their customers have demand so I guess the question is how long before sales of commercial products?
A1: Well Giles, we think that’s going to happen in the fairly near future, certainly in the next 4-6 months and that’s going to come from our arrangements with SHD Composites in Lincolnshire where they’re making these pre-pregs, which is the resin pre-impregnated woven fabric, which is another value chain further along in the composite market. The focus there is on the automotive and the sporting goods and whilst I’m talking automotive, what we did was we have a tie-up with a UK supercar company, Briggs Automotive Company, who developed the graphene-enhanced body panel that delivers between 15%-20% weight saving to their single-seat road car. We announced that at the JEC Composite show in Paris and I’ve been inundated with enquiries from all over world in the automotive sector so there’s massive interest in what we’re doing here, massive.
Q2: You’ve stated that Haydale Graphene Industries has a clear strategy through to profitability, when will that be?
A2: The profitability, I can’t give the forecast out to you, you know I can’t do that, but in essence we’re working very hard to do that in the next 12-18 months because no one at the moment in the graphene space is profitable, it’s a new material. In that respect, don’t forget we think graphene is an enabling material and it works particularly well with other nano-particles and that’s where our IP comes in too. So we’ve got the materials supply chain being set up, we’ve got those in place, we’ve got our IP functionalisation process, the resin supply from Huntsman in particular, they’re a massive $13 billion American organisation, number one leader in the world on Araldite resins and the pre-preg site with SHD Composites so all of that is set to go. We’re already receiving some enquiries in the whole piece so that’s really good and Huntsman will be again our route to market, now looking forward to that very much we’re now know the hybrid process of Carbon Nanotubes and graphene in particular works very well in the resin systems. That’s our route to market and we’re very confident of making that happen, very exciting times, very exciting times in the composite world.
