Versarien PLC (LON:VRS) Chief Executive Officer Neill Ricketts caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the recent collaboration with Warwick Manufacturing Group, mass market applications and their position in the graphene value chain
Q1: Now you’ve just announced a collaboration with Warwick Manufacturing Group to focus on the development of graphene enhanced batteries, can you tell us a little bit more about WMG and what you’re looking to achieve?
A1: Certainly. It’s a fantastic facility based at Warwick University and what they look to do there is to take novel ideas and take them through to production, they’ve got a multi-million pound battery prototyping cell there and what we can do is take our material and actually produce products using the wonder material that is graphene.
Q2: This is one of a number of potential uses of graphene and you recently announced trials with a 3D printing specialist, are we moving closer to seeing graphene being used is mass market applications?
A2: We certainly are Giles, this is a phenomenally exciting place to be at the moment, it very much feels like a sort of second industrial revolution. We seeing multiple applications for high volume use of graphene and we’re scaling our production to meet that and in fact only today our guys are installing a high volume manufacturing facility in our Cheltenham factory, taking out the laboratory and putting it into a proper production facility.
Q3: Brilliant. Finally then, the potential for graphene seems huge, where do you see Versarien PLC sitting in the graphene value chain going forward?
A3: We’ve got a patented process to produce the raw material so actually producing very high quality graphene in reasonable volumes and we see our sales moving up the supply chain providing materials that incorporate that really really great material in other things like engineer polymer, carbon fibre competent structures, batteries and taking that on board right that way through the value chain.
