Haydale Graphene Industries PLC (LON:HAYD) Chief Executive Officer Ray Gibbs caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their collaboration with Everpower International Holdings Co. Ltd, global strategy, the Chinese market, protected IP, next generation commercial products and further opportunities
Q1: Ray, some exciting news out today, can you provide a little bit more background on the collaboration agreement with Everpower and the proposed strategic investment announced earlier today? Is it part of Haydale’s global strategy to commercialise its technology?
A1: The short answer is yes, we’ve been looking at trying to, quietly for a long time, it’s the world’s second biggest market, we didn’t want to go into China until we were ready and we were happy with an industrial partner that could sell and market and make the products that we’ve got. In my announcement, I did say that we view them as an excellent platform to launch our products into China and yes, it is part of the globalisation strategy, correct.
Q2: What products will Haydale’s technology be used for in the Chinese market and more importantly, is the group’s IP protected?
A2: We have a patented process on our reactor so that’s good. What we’re doing is initially setting ourselves up with a Hong Kong subsidiary which we own, we will sell our existing products into China and Everpower are setting up a Chinese company to buy the products and sell them directly into China. That runs from our inks, some sensors, the silicon carbide out of America and a range of products that we’ve currently got on tap so they’re going to buy them, they’re going to sell them into marketplace and then after that we’re going to enter into a contract with regards to the make/buy where they will make the material and products under licence, in China, and sell direct.
Q3: Now, Haydale has also secured some contracts to develop a number of next generation commercial products, can you elaborate on these contracts and do they provide further opportunities for going forward?
A3: I guess they do and there are a number of them and they’re quite discreet products that are aiming at trying to get a commercial product out the door as quickly as we can. We have announced the hydrogen storage vessel, and that’s one of our key products that of course the Chinese are interested in too, where we’re working with Arcola Energy, we’re putting in a system which is aimed at creating an omissions-free 3,500 kilo van using hydrogen storage so that’s one.
We have developed an agreement with the Malaysian government through our Thailand office to put our graphene materials into natural rubbers and that’s a first step project that’s going to then move into products that they want to exploit in Malaysia themselves.
I’ll just step on one other as well because the oil and gas industry is a really big thing for us, it’s a lot of in-built technology in Haydale Composite Solutions which we bought in November 2014. We have a contract to certify some composite pipes for the oil and gas industry using the testing facilities which we put in and announced to the marketplace about 6-9 months ago.
So, lots of exciting things, we could talk about the Space Agency and Wave Energy and those sort of things but they’re all based on our existing current graphene dispersions, inks, pastes, coatings technologies so this is actually trying to put next generation products into place to underpin our growth going forward.
