Maria Sharapova, the Wimbledon women’s tennis favourite, has become the postergirl for graphene, the wonder material that is 100 times stronger than steel.
Wielding her Head racquet, which is reinforced with the carbon allotrope, she has dropped just seven games in three matches. Last year’s Wimbledon champion Andy Murray is also unbeaten with his graphene racquet this year: “It gives me the power I need without compromising on my creativity on court”, he says.
No thicker than a single atomic layer of carbon, graphene is stronger than diamond and the world’s best conductor of electricity and heat, as well as being almost completely transparent and completely impermeable. The substance was isolated by Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov at Manchester University in 2004 and in 2010 the pair won the Nobel prize for the innovation.
Since then, around 15 companies have sprung up across the globe to produce graphene on an industrial scale.
The majority of these firms strip down mined graphite to create the material but British firm Applied Graphene Materials – which has been spun out from Durham University – is adopting a “bottom up” process, synthesising graphene using ethanol as a base.
It holds the patent on the snythesis of the material in platelet form.
Chief executive Jon Mabbitt is hoping to make Applied Graphene Materials the global leader in graphene production, creating a billion-pound company, and avoiding the fate which has befallen so many British science companies – a takeover by a foreign corporation.
“Companies like ours are always the bridesmaid never the bride,” he said. “There’s been a lot of speculation about whether we’ll end up giving away this technology but that would be really sad.”
As the former boss of Advanced Composite Group, a carbon-fibre firm which was one of the businesses in the portfolio belonging to scientific materials company, Mabbitt had ample experience of being absorbed into an American giant when the mighty Cytec bought Umeco in 2012. “The company offered a 50pc premium on the share price and so we were absorbed,” he says. “We tried to integrate but there was a big chasm between our cultures. The US company had a corporate matrix management style while ours was more entrepreneurial. They crushed it, stifling us.”
Mabbitt left the business four months after the acquisition, following 29 years at the company, before being headhunted by technology investment firm IP Group to run Applied Graphene. “My skill lies is scaling up early-stage companies,” says Mabbitt.
From day one, Mabbitt began positioning the firm for global domination. After only two months at the helm, he listed the company on Aim, raising £11m. The fundraising was oversubscribed two times over, and opened with a market capitalisation of £26.2m, which rose to £78m in just two days “without our doing anything”. The company is set to break even by 2017.
“We had raised two rounds of private funding previously but we would have run out of money by January 2014,” admits Mabbitt. “I decided that the time was right to take a leading place in the market and build a financial platform that meant I wouldn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder, thinking 'Do I need to raise more money?’ I know now that if we need to raise more capital, and we have a logical and good commercial story to tell, we will be supported.”
With £10m (after fees) in the pot, Mabbit expanded Applied Graphene from seven employees to 28, ramping up investment in equipment, capacity, and technical support. “We now have a business model that means once demand arises, we can react very quickly and demonstrate scalability very quickly, which is crucial in this market.”
Global production of graphene at present stands at around 150 tonnes, of which Applied Graphene produces a single tonne. However, talks with major industrial players have resulted in potential orders totalling tens of tonnes for a single partner. Headline-grabbing uses include ultra-thin condoms (backed by Bill Gates) superfast computer chips and flexible electronics (bendy touch screens will soon be a reality). But rather than focusing on the fickle world of fast-moving consumer goods, it is focused on stable, lucrative markets such as paints and coatings, food packaging, composites, and oil and lubricants.
“Think anti-corrosion agent on a ship’s hull,” he says. “Just a small amount of this super additive prevents barnacles and sea life building up on the ship, which leads to less maintenance, greater fuel efficiency, and higher speeds.” And by adding graphene to carbon-fibre composite, the principal material now used to build aircraft, Applied Graphene could help solve the “lightning problem” facing aerospace brands, adds Mabbitt.
“Metal aircraft conduct electricity safely but composites do not so they have to put a metal mesh over the aircraft, which adds weight and an extra processing step. By adding graphene to the composite, you solve that problem.”
Negotiations with industry players are ongoing but Mabbitt can reveal that Applied Graphene is already working with vaccuum-cleaner brand Dyson to provide graphene for its next generation products. “One of the limitations of plastic vaccuum-cleaners is that they create static electricity, which can create a build-up of dust,” he says. “By adding graphene, you can make the plastic much thinner, while delivering the same performance, and dissipate static at the same time.”
The challenge in developing new applications lies with the time it takes to test and prove that graphene adds significant benefits. “Big paint companies, for example, will have to take the new products into the deserts in Arizona and leave it exposed to sun, but that takes time,” says Mabbitt. “In [fast-moving consumer goods], adoption is much faster, but it can be very 'here today, gone tomorrow’.”
Graphene has the potential to revolutionise countless markets, he claims. “This is akin to the invention of silicon, or the first plastics, that sort of disruptive technology. But we have to build confidence that graphene will really do what we say it’ll do, while building traction in new markets and refining the process at scale. It’s like trying to walk, talk and chew gum at the same time.”
Applied Graphene has a competitive advantage against the majority of other firms vying to strike these kinds of deals. Some 80pc of the world’s graphite is found in China, but Applied Graphene’s process circumvents the need for the raw material, using cheap alcohol instead, which both keeps costs down and extricates the company from any wranglings with China, where billions are being poured into graphene research.
The space is hotting up, however: the European Union has launched a €1bn (£814m) graphene research fund; £19m from the 2014 Budget will be invested into potential applications for the material over the next five years; and the Manchester National Graphene Institute, which is tipped to be the world’s leading centre for graphene research, has had £61m investment from the Government to date. Worldwide, there have already been more than 11,300 graphene-related patents. However, almost two thirds of these have been filed by Asian companies. In Korea, China, Singapore, and the US, hundreds of millions are being spent on research.
However, Mabbitt is confident that he can keep Applied Graphene ahead of the international pack. “I got involved in the composites business when it made just £3m revenues,” he says. “When I exited, it was making £460m. I can do that much faster with the right material. Anything’s possible.”
