Ilika plc (LON:IKA) Chief Executive Officer Graeme Purdy caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss Stereax & the commissioning of equipment in the US, Goliath & the significant technical milestones, and how they are competing with peers.
Q1: Ilika has just posted a great set of half year results with exciting progress across the Stereax and Goliath businesses. The most recent news from Stereax was only last week when you announced the completion of the commissioning of the Stereax equipment in the US at Cirtec. How is that relationship developing now?
A1: That news was news really that a lot of the people that follow Ilika have been waiting for, so it was a great milestone for the combined teams at Cirtec and Ilika to hit.
Really what it signals is the start of the process optimisation. We’ve got all of the equipment installed, it’s all operating in the way that it needs to in order to produce Stereax batteries and now it’s the start of that process optimisation. So, real products going to come off the production line, as it were.
The relationship’s very healthy and in fact, over the next six weeks, we’ll be jointly presenting on the Cirtec stand at three important conferences and trade shows that are coming up all in the US.
So, we are ramping up our joint marketing activities through those channels.
Q2: How is customer engagement going for Stereax?
A2: Very strong, thank you. We’ve got that pipeline of 21 customers who have already got development plans for their own products and launch schedules and really making the best of the integration opportunities actually that exist between the Stereax products and Cirtec’s broader technology platform portfolio. The customers will have an opportunity to speak to us at those trade shows at those conferences and engage further and talk about their product development.
Q3: Now, in the first half of the year, the group announced a series of significant technical milestones for Goliath. Could you talk us through them?
A3: So, in the summer of last year, we announced that we had our first generation P1 prototype batteries, as we refer to them, that had commenced testing in a customer-sponsored programme, allowing that customer to validate Goliath’s performance characteristics. We then followed that up by shipping a batch of those P1 prototypes through to another customer and so that was a great achievement, really, for the team to have got to the point where we are sharing reproducible prototypes that can be validated through customers’ own test programmes.
The next milestone that we hit hard on the heels of that later in the summer was what we call our D5 development milestone. There’s that fantastic video that we’ve talked about previously, actually, on DirectorsTalk and through other interviews, where we compare the safety characteristics of our D5 development milestone with a normal lithium-ion battery.
The normal lithium-ion battery, which undergoes a penetration test, goes up like a firework and the Goliath battery is very safe and very inert. It has all sorts of then knock-on advantages for pack designers who are able to strip down some of the additional safety systems and temperature control systems that they need to have in place in a normal pack design and then make all cost savings and lightweight the vehicles that these Goliath batteries can be integrated into. So, a great demonstration of some of the unique selling points, really, of the Goliath technology.
Post-period end, towards the end of 2024, we talked about the D6 milestone that we’d hit, which was really actually the first 10-amp hour battery that we had made and that’s undergoing a rigorous testing program at the moment. That’s five times bigger than the P1 prototypes that we sent out just a few months earlier in the summer.
So real rapid progress being made by the team there.
Q4: How have Goliath customers reacted?
A4: Very positively, as you might imagine. We’ve actually expanded our portfolio of automotive partners that we’re interacting with now. More people have come forward and signed up for the test programme for what we’re calling our P1.5 prototypes, which will be these 10-amp hour batteries later in 2025. People are also showing interest, of course, in our P2 batteries, our 50-amp hour batteries later in the year.
So, lots of excitement really around customer engagement, lots of conversations ongoing at the minute. Also, people from outside of the automotive industry paying attention to this development and engaging with us to hear about the advantages of these batteries for their applications.
Q5: Ilika had just over £10 million on the balance sheet to the half year and in the context of industry, the company has a modest burn rate. Now, in comparison, QuantumScape is spending nearly half a billion dollars a year on cell development. How does the company compete?
A5: I think it’s a question we often get, you know, how can you compete with these huge injections of capital and very expensive programmes that some solid-state battery developers are running.
The reality is, though, that actually a lot of innovation is carried out by relatively small teams. Elon Musk is famous for having described how he drives his innovation processes. I don’t agree with Mr Musk on many things at the minute, but actually, in his early career, he used small teams very much to good effect in order to make some of the astonishing technological breakthroughs that have been achieved by his companies.
It’s the same with Ilika. We are a very focused team, we have got a very well-defined roadmap, and we are delivering in spades against that roadmap. We are adequately resourced in order to really make a difference in the sector.
