Zeus Capital Research Director Dr Tom McColm caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss Ilika plc (LON:IKA)
Q1: Now Tom, Ilika plc put out pre interim trading statement today, what are your thoughts on it?
A1: First thoughts, a very positive trading statement for the six months to the end of October. I think the company probably put it out the share price has been drifting off a little bit in recent weeks for no obvious reason that I can see and that I would think they can see either so probably a little bit of a reminder that everything’s on track and there’s good news coming out of the company. An actual sort of added bit of extra good news is post period they’ve received this aggregated grant in the region of £1.4 million to do more of the solid state battery development work, their main focus and also they’ve got another $1 million new area to look at from one of their existing blue chip corporates that isn’t in the solid state battery space. So I think the RNS shows that the business is not only doing well in the solid state battery space, that it’s become its main focus, but just reminding us that their sort of core competency, this sort of materials optimisation and discovery for blue chip corporate clients is also working well. So it’s just a positive reminder that everything’s going well, full year numbers they expect to come in inline and there’s no real obvious reason for the recent share price drop.
Q2: What news flow should we be looking out for over the next 3-6 months in terms of driving the share price?
A2: I think the real key one to look out for is a commercial, particularly licensing developments, on the solid state battery side. I know management has been working very hard over the last 6 months negotiating with a number of potential commercialisation large OEM partners and I think those negotiations are kind of sharpening up and honing down and you’d hope that within the next 6 months we would see at least 1 or 2 of those moving to the next stage. If that news flow comes then that will be very very positive for the company and should be reflected in the movement of the share price. Also, just like today, we’d hope that we’d still see the odd new customer or new contract in the materials optimisation development space outside of solid state batteries, just to show that Ilika’s core competency is functioning well.
