Versarien PLC (LON:VRS) Chief Executive Officer Neill Ricketts caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss their new agreement with Fern Plastic Products Ltd, how this ties in with their recent agreement with Scafell, what PEAK materials are, the acquisition of AAC Cyroma & further agreements in the future
Q1: Now Neill, some good news out this morning again, could you explain the background of the deal with Fern Plastic Products?
A1: Sure, well you’ll have seen in the news recently, & what we needed was an exploitation partner with that, we know Fern very well & they’ve got a very very good name in the market. They have some unique capability that we don’t have within our group, they’re really really good guys to work with & we thought that we form a great partnership to be able to exploit this new material with them.
Q2: Earlier this month you announced an agreement with Scafell, how does this latest deal tie in?
A2: Sometimes these plans can take up to 6 months & we’re obviously busy making the raw material, the raw material then is provided to Scafell who make the polymer in collaboration with our guys, so our technical guys are hand in hand with their technical guys, that creates the polymer, the PEAK material, that Fern Plastics can then injection mould into products for their customers & our customers. So we needed all of those parts in the chain to be complete before we can make any of these announcements & we’re delighted that having completed all of this work now we’re in a position that we can actually get these products to market now through all the various channels.
Q3: So Fern will be using the PEAK materials but what is a graphene-enhanced polyaryletherketone material?
A3: We’ll call them PEAK from now on! PEAK materials are, what’s called, an engineered polymer so these are very very high strength plastics which are designed to take the place of metallic where we’re trying to drive down weight in aerospace or automotive coming up with very very high strength materials. The great thing is that if you add a very very small percentage of our graphene nanoplatelets we can actually improve the strength of those even further. There are other people in the market that are producing these materials & the original technology came from ICI but in a lot of cases you need to tailor the material to the application & that’s what we’re able to do with our partnership with Scafell.
Q4: How does the recent acquisition of AAC Cyroma increase your capabilities in this area?
A4: So AAC are a similar type business to Fern but they don’t have all the capability that Fern have, Fern is a much much bigger business & it also has some very very specific specialisms around tooling. As we bring the two businesses closer together we’ll benefit from that working relationship & so we don’t see it as any kind of issue for AAC, we actually see it as a very positive thing & it will enable us to form a really really good working relationship as I said. In terms of what it means for AAC, not only can we learn about these materials but we can also then take some of that learning into some of their products as well which are completely different to what Fern do.
Q5: Would you expect to see or secure further agreements of this kind in the future?
A5: I think one of the problems of being a CEO of a fast expanding business is that the information that we have at our disposal is far greater than that that is in the public domain so a lot of these deals can take 6 or 12 months to come to fruition. So some of the things we’re working on now we won’t be able to put into the market for a period of time & that can be frustrating for everybody but rules are rules & everyone’s got to abide by those. So I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to say that we’ve got a lot of collaborations that we’re working on at the moment that we’ll announce to the market just as soon as we can.
