Don't Miss The Breaking NEWS Further Down The POST !!!
You're right Herc!
Mr Grigor always rights reports about companies he is unsure of !!! LOL
I love the word
'if' - "Well,
if he really does want a piece of the pie,"
I suspect the
IF is a
high degree of likelihood. Logic would suggest he is all in; for example; Imagine IM !!!
Lets say the IF is 90% Logical that he is going to gobble up more and more of the PIE !!!
Joking aside there is allot of truth in your post Herc...
Time will tell how the pieces will fit together and in what order.
Production; Graphene; Purchasing SL Vein !!!
The Drastically Low Capex and Opex make MRL Corporation such a gem right now in my opinion.
The reason why Insurance companies do so well is they can make logical predictions with a high degree of confidence and certainty...
I contend that Mr Grigor is not just all in -
He has been researching Graphene for years now and is brilliant. Money follows management for a reason.
This is why in my opinion MRL is such a great pick:
The market is wrong and the Management is strong!
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Breaking NEWS !!!!
Material differences
http://www.manmonthly.com.au/features/material-differences
28 September, 2015
High-tech start-ups seem to be the flavour of the month. Brent Balinski spoke to serial entrepreneur Chris Gilbey from graphene technology start-up Imagine Intelligent Materials about the importance of new businesses, and about what’s on the horizon for Imagine IM.
Venturing out
In the last fortnight, both sides of politics have been trying to outdo each other in proving how deeply concerned they are about technology and start-up businesses.
Malcolm Turnbull made innovation and economic dynamism central to his successful pitch for the prime ministership, and last week the opposition floated the idea of a
HECS-style program to encourage students or recent graduates to turn their ideas into commercial reality.
According to CEO of graphene technology start-up
Imagine Intelligent Materials Chris Gilbey, whom
Manufacturers’ Monthly spoke to before the leadership change, the Australian environment has long been massively unfriendly to entrepreneurs. This includes in incentives for early stage businesses, the tax regime, and access to venture capital.
“What’s good for the economy is venture-backed businesses,” said Gilbey.
“We have a particularly unhealthy venture capital marketplace in Australia, and that has been the case for some time.”
Gilbey was the former
Entrepreneur In Residence at the ARC Centre for Excellence in Electromaterials Science HQ at University of Wollongong, helping spin out high-tech water-splitting device manufacturer AquaHydrex, which
announced earlier this year it was setting up a pilot plant in North Wollongong.
Boasting a long career in tech businesses, he was also CEO of Lake Technology,
acquired by Dolby in 2004, from 2000-2005, and is a member of the federal government’s Entrepreneurs’ Infrastructure Programme’s Experts Network.
Changing tack
His current focus, IIM, was
founded last year as NanoCarbon. It changed its name to reflect a changed understanding of what the market wants -
“pivots are typical of start-ups, of course” he said.
NanoCarbon set out as a producer of graphene, touted by some as a
game-changing nano-material. Though its properties – 200 times stronger than steel, the
most electrically conductive material (at room temperature) known, and
impermeable to gases and liquids - are promising and much has been invested in research, its use in products is not yet widespread. However, many are trying.
Gilbey’s company has changed tack from being a straight producer of graphene to a company that - while it also produces proprietary graphene composites for specific applications - has broadened to also include certification and supply chain de-risking for clients (including ASX listed graphite miner MRL Corporation) providing processes to functionalise graphene to perform in certain ways for clients.
“I still think that making graphene is important, but I’ve come to the conclusion that there’ll be a lot of people making graphene and there’ll be so many different kinds of graphene that it’s almost like talking about ‘plastic’,” explained Gilbey.
“There are a plethora of different kinds of materials commonly called plastic… with each one having quite distinct properties and uses”.
Only discovered in 2004, there has been limited opportunity to explore different possible applications of graphene. There’s huge interest in doing so, for example with the EU Graphene
Flagship project budgeting a billion euro to the task.
Gilbey figures that as time goes by, like plastic, the number of different permutations and properties of graphene will multiply.
“Pretty much every polymer has a different characteristic that is developed very specifically for a certain purpose. Each tends to be a quite complex piece of engineered material.
“When you think in terms of the film that you put on your food and then put in your fridge it’s hard to comprehend the fact that even such a seemingly simple product has layers of material in it with different attributes one on top of the other, each of which delivers a functionality that is necessary for you to preserve food. There is a lot of complexity there that we as consumers don’t appreciate.”
Australia Inc. must do better
For the time being, Imagine IM is based in Sydney, but Gilbey describes the company as
“footloose” and, like many promising start-ups, it could easily move to a location with more incentives available, citing tax breaks for start-ups located in Singapore.
“Now Australia as a country, if you regard Canberra as Australia Inc., Australia as a country needs to be competitive with other countries - With Singapore Inc., with US Inc., with Canada Inc.,” he said.
Both sides of politics are currently spruiking their commitment to encouraging new, high-growth businesses.
One set of data that came out last week highlighting the need to encourage start-up activity, in light of rising unemployment, was a Department of Industry paper. It showed that between 2006 and 2001,
1.44 million full-time jobs were created by start-ups compared to negative 400,000 full-time jobs created by older companies.
Similar findings
have been made in US studies, and are often cited by small business lobbyists.
Gilbey is evangelical about the need to encourage growth in new, venture-backed businesses for reasons including job creation.
“Existing large-scale businesses want to introduce productivity gains rather than increasing the headcount - so they want to get more from whatever they’ve got, rather than continuing to deploy capital to employ more heads,” he said.
“New businesses have to employ people to grow, because they typically want to grow faster than existing, established businesses - legacy businesses.”
Within Imagine IM, identified opportunities for growth include the development of
“self-reporting materials”, with the internet of things trend well-known and the conductivity of graphene polymers suited to this.
Gilbey’s company has
identified water, defence and aerospace and construction as major sectors of interest.
A recent area of promise is in civil engineering, in the massive geotextiles market, with the company set to announce its first market ready product in the near future.
“The real opportunity in terms of advanced materials, 2D materials particularly, is going to be in extraordinarily high-volume, essentially mass-manufacturing applications,” said the CEO.
“Our focus has become absolutely on the sort of application that will require huge volumes of polymers that pull through behind them huge volumes of graphene and deliver highly disruptive, cost-effective solutions to known problems.”
Gilbey believes that new
“intelligent” materials with will play an essential role for manufacturing generally. He added that the sector’s importance needs to be better communicated, and - like the start-up community – needs to have its importance recognized by policymakers.
And it needs to be driven by those wanting to shake things up.
“We need advocacy directed toward the ministers in the government based on what is almost certainly going to happen rather than advocacy based on the agenda of established companies that want to maintain the status quo,” he said.
“The maintenance of the status quo is what Australia has sought to do for the last 30-odd years and it’s just useless and pointless to the future wealth and health of the economy.”
http://www.manmonthly.com.au/features/material-differences
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What do you think?
Kind Regards
Easy to be Wrong!
Have a great day!
DYOR !!!
