Versarien revolutionising multiple industries
“…We hope to launch 12 new products over the next 12 months…”
With so many recent updates about collaborations with Superdry, Flux footwear, and Umbro, is engineering materials group Versarien becoming a graphene-based lifestyle company?
While it is associated with lifestyle products, Versarien’s chief executive Neill Ricketts reminds investors that the company has many attributes and multiple applications, and the Ministry of Defence contract signed in November 2020 had also been occupying the team with delivery fulfilled on time.
Ricketts says there’s never enough hours in the day for the company that has set up a business every year since it floated. Another acquisition is not on the horizon, but in terms of sales and potential custom for its suite of products Ricketts references multiple NDA’s and projects that are ongoing. In fact the accompanying podcast was postponed in favour of a customer call. He won’t say who the customers are, but construction features heavily in his conversation with Sarah Lowther.
Tantalisingly Ricketts talks about the company getting closer towards profitability and cost management is critical at this juncture, and one of the reasons there was a change in auditor.
Graphene is, according to Ricketts, a miracle material, and Versarien is internationally recognised for its ability to make that miracle material do more and more.
There’s the Versarien Lunar pods, the 3D-concrete printed product with a graphene additive that can create offices, studio, gyms, and leisure rooms. Again there’s the lifestyle reference, but Ricketts talks about affordable housing and explains that a wall of a house utilising the company’s technology can be made in 60 minutes, and a relatively modest house made within a matter of hours.
The brickies listening to this might just be bricking it. The construction sector knows it needs to adapt and the Gloucestershire-based business is the one that large construction companies are talking about and talking to. “We’re in that position that we have a solution to their problems which makes for an easy sale.”
The lifestyle aspect to the business such as the wearables is, Ricketts says, funding the business and very much in the public eye with the Versarien logo imprinted on international brands.
Listen to Neil talk to Sarah about his team which is delivering “in spades in terms of and commercial connections and contacts” and how Versarien’s technology is revolutionising “five or six different industries.”
Watch Neill, CTO Dr Steve Hodge and CFO Chris Leigh talking about the company’s interim results released in May 2022.
Read the company’s construction presentation and learn about graphene-wear textiles
Follow the company on Twitter @versarien
The author was remunerated but does not hold shares in the company
