Versarien Plc (LON:VRS) Chief Executive Officer Neill Ricketts caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their MOU with Haydale Graphene Industries Plc (LON:HAYD)
Q1: We saw the release of an RNS this week regarding the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Haydale Graphene Industries, how did the collaboration come about?
A1: We’ve been working with Haydale for a while now, obviously we’re in the same type of advanced materials field and really a sort of natural progression from lots of conversations we were having about how we were able to help each other. We’re both quite small companies with big aspirations so the easiest way, sometimes, to get on is to work together and that culminated in us going out to Korea together and we started talking to clients together about we might be able to offer the products that we’ve got.
Q2: What kind of things can we see you working on together?
A2: We’ve agreed through the MOU to work together on projects where we can supply the raw material and Haydale can then functionalise it depending on what the client wants. We’ll be able to share resources in terms of analytical equipment and production capacity and we should see that we’ve got some interesting marketing and opportunities for both companies to be able to demonstrate what they can do.
Q3: What does the agreement mean for Versarien?
A3: This is a big step forward for Versarien and our 2-DTech company we brought last February from the University of Manchester and this is really our first sort of commercial agreement we’ve got going. We’ve been talking to an awful lot of people about the real benefits and potential of graphene but this is the first sort of milestone in terms of working with another commercial entity.
Q4: So the market itself in terms of opportunity, can you tell us a bit more about that?
A4: Yes, to be honest I’m simply staggered by the quantity and quality of enquires we’re getting. The guys have obviously just come back from Korea and they’ve been talking to some very large OEM-type companies about some of the opportunities out there and in terms of what we’re seeing is people are now wanting to actually get their hands on the material, just out to get some usable quantities and really there’s not a day goes by where there’s not a really exciting story in the news. So in terms of what’s going to happen, I think this is really starting to accelerate and gather pace and I think what we’ve got to do and one thing Ray, who is the CEO of Haydale, and myself have agreed is it’s a too good of an opportunity to miss and that we really have to work together in order to make sure we’re at the top of our game globally.
