15th Jan 2014 13:39
LONDON (Alliance News) - Materials discovery company Ilika PLC Wednesday said it had made significant progress in the development of its solid state battery technology, as it posted higher revenues and a narrowed pretax for the half-year ended October 31.
Its pretax loss narrowed to GBP1.5 million, from GBP1.9 million a year earlier, as its revenue rose to GBP571,498, from GBP391,801, and its gross margin rose to GBP39%, from 24%.
It cited continued growth in licensing revenue and lower non-operational costs for the improvement.
The company also said that it had continued to make progress in developing and licensing its intellectual property and is currently managing original equipment manufacture trials with its low cost fuel cell catalyst and cell growth polymer surface products.
January 9, after the period end, Ilika announced that it had found a method to produce its stacked solid-state cell battery and was actively pursuing commercial partnerships to bring the product to market as soon as possible. Illika's shares jumped up following the announcement.
A solid-state battery is a battery in which both the electrodes and electrolyte are solid-state materials.
"Its really the solid state battery technology that caught the imagination of the market last week," Chief Executive Graeme Purdy told Alliance News. "It was quite encouraging that the market was so interested in it."
"It's a major advance, which I think is beginning to be recognised not only by our commercial partners but by investors, and it's because we can now develop lithium ion batteries that are non flammable. That has been a major issue," Purdy said.
"If you can replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid electrolyte it gets around that flammability problem," Purdy said. "Also, solid state batteries are much smaller, about half the size for the same energy and they last longer."
The new battery will be initially useful for powering things like sensors, but could then be scaled up and developed for consumer applications, transport and eventually solar panels.
The first market Ilika will be addressing is the 'internet of things', which was a big talking point at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "A lot of the new applications are using sensors that require distributed power from batteries," Purdy said. This could be applied to systems like smart homes, which monitor homes through a series of sensors to automatically control home heating.
"We're currently in phase II, which is where we're making demonstration batteries," Purdy said. "Then we're actually going to increase the scale mid-year by using a scale up facility, for which we've secured a GBP3.3 million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council."
This will give Ilika the equipment to make iPhone-sized batteries, the CEO said. "It'll come on line in June, and we've got an exclusive relationship with the university in order to make our technology on this platform, and then on the back of that we'll be looking to have a licensing deal with allows us to transfer the technology to a manufacturing partner so that they can take it to production scale."
"Realistically that'll probably be 2015, when that happens," Purdy added.
Ilika said it was committed to deploying its cash prudently to drive towards profitability whilst supporting its solid state battery programme.
Shares in Ilika were trading down 2.1% at 34.75 pence Wednesday morning.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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