Haydale Graphene Industries Plc (LON:HAYD) Chief Executive Officer Ray Gibbs caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the year-end results to June 2015, their significant revenue increases as well as their losses and how they’ll be spending the £6 million fundraising.
Q1: How are you today Ray?
A1: I’m very well Giles, thank you very much. We’ve just announced our year-end results to June 2015 and we’ve announced the fundraising for £6 million, very good.
Q2: Indeed, now looking at those results, you have significant revenues but you’ve also got losses growing, can you explain that for us?
A2: Yes. We’ve continued to invest in the business, you’re absolutely correct, we’re turning over about £1.5 million in the 12 months to the end of June 2015, about £1.2 million came from our acquisition of Haydale Composite Solutions and they’ve beaten their forecast internally quite significantly so that’s good news. We have still continued to invest in people, infrastructure and staff because we’re on the edge of commercialising graphene and other nano materials.
Q3: You’ve highlighted significant expansion for the year ahead and so is this going to add to the losses in the current year?
A3: We may have some additional overheads costs but one of the key things here is we’ve announced a resin collaboration with Huntsman Advanced Materials and Scott Bader in the composite worlds and we want to pay for those ourselves because we want to own the IP so there will be an additional level of overhead spend there but having said that, that’s all for the future, we’re trying to get commercialisation to happen as quickly as we can.
Q4: Just going back to the fundraising, congratulations on that, and it’s also interesting to see an open offer, why have you done that?
A4: Well Giles, we’ve been over-subscribed by the institutions to some extent now which is great endorsement of the proposals they’ve put towards the commercialisation strategy. Outside of the institutional investors, we wanted very much for our existing supporting shareholders to have an opportunity to invest again in an open offer, we told them that we’d do that if we were going back to the marketplace at the open day in June so that, from our perspective, is their chance to support again and that’s underwritten anyway by Cantor or the financial institutions so that is good news indeed.
Q5: It certainly is. Now, how will Haydale Graphene Industries Plc be spending this £6 million?
A5: Ok, the £6 million that we’ve had offered for us is to accelerate our commercialisation of our functionalised graphenes and other nano materials, we need more reactors, we’ve already identified some, we need another 3 or 4 because we’re going to place those into our centres of excellence, one in the Far East, in Buffalo in New York state and in the German Democratic Republic. There’s one where we need to expand at our site in Wales, we’ve already outgrown with the premises we’ve got now, we need more space because we’ve got more processing capacity to fit in with some of these reactors we’re getting from Chemtech. As I’ve mentioned before the resin work we’re doing with Huntsman and Scott Bader, that’s going to cost us around about 3 quarters of a million pounds and we want to spend that money ourselves so we control the IP and then control of the licencing and the routes to market through these other great companies that are working with us. In addition to that, we’ve also got the situation where we do need some more resources, a commercial director to help out at pushing forward and a lot of new technical staff and account managers which is also going to cost money and will be part of the expenditure for this next 6-9 months.
