VIDEO: We’re here today with Mark Thompson managing director of Talga resources. Mark thanks for your time. Can you tell us a little bit about Talga resources.
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Mark: [00:00:18] Sure. Well Talga is an ASX listed company. We’re into technology minerals which means we mine, process and make minerals into products that serve technology markets and industrial applications. We’ve got a market cap of just under 100 million and operations in Sweden, Germany the U.K. and of course Australia.
David: [00:00:36] How important is it where are your offices and your operations are located.
Mark: [00:00:41] Well it’s essentially going to be a global business. So we floated on the ASX in 2010 but we are mining in Sweden and currently we have R&D and process development in Germany and the product development in the U.K. There are very specific reasons around being in those jurisdictions taking advantage of either taxes or IP laws or energy costs. So we’re really just gearing up what will be a business for delivering around the globe at the best possible price.
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David: [00:01:08] You’re very different to your peers. You’re not a standard mining company and you’re not a standard technology company. You really do own that chain.
Mark: [00:01:14] Yeah. I guess we’re fully vertically integrated which differentiates us from our peers. We do make value added products not just raw materials although they can be provided as well. We are now processing technology and we also have a very unique way of mining and it’s the world’s highest graded resource of graphite. So collectively these natural advantages have been pulled together specifically to end up delivering this great industrialisation that’s happening across the nano-material core graphene. And that’s seemingly starting to get some traction.
David: [00:01:43] Can you talk to what graphene is used for.
Mark: [00:01:46] Sure. I think this is commonly misunderstood actually. So graphene are these two dimensional particles of crystalline carbon. It’s very hard to imagine just how thin and how small they are. And it’s been discovered that this is essentially the lightest and strongest the most conductive material on earth. However it doesn’t make a product just by itself. You add it to other products. If you already make concrete or plastic or glass or paint you can add the graphene to it by mixing it into it get some of those properties into your product so you can make something that didn’t used to conduct electricity. Now it does which means you could take an ink for example that you read a word on a page. But now that ink could also maybe light up an image or something involved in that page. So it adds functionality to your current products. It’s sort of the world’s greatest additive.
David: [00:02:33] You recently announced a very key milestone. Can you talk to that.
Mark: [00:02:38] So we recently announced a deal with a BASF subsidiary It’s a supply contract essentially to a product development. So what that means is that the BASF subsidiary buys their graphene from us and has to exclusively buy their graphene from us. If they commercialise a product using using this technology that we’re bringing together we are coordinating our efforts to work on improving their products and taking those to the market. So this is really one of the first signs of major industry going public I guess with their interest that they’ve seen in graphene and it’s a massive validation of Talga because it follows a lot of testing already. They’ve already been using the material. And so now there’s an actual decision point to take it to the next level and BASF if you know are giant industrial conglomerate and they have many many different materials that Graphene has been shown to work fantastically. And so really opens up a lot of doors.
David: [00:03:35] In terms of upcoming milestones?
Mark: [00:03:37] Initially there’s going to be a lot more product development milestones so test results across our four sort of key sectors that we work on in concrete in plastics further in encodings and also in battery technologies and battery materials. So there will be those and they’ll also be some updates on I guess more commercialisation efforts and also in the background we have an emerging Cobalt discovery that we’ve been nurturing and doing some work on. So there’ll be some updates on that because that dovetails nicely into the graphene and graphite space for the battery technologies.
David: [00:04:10] Mark, thanks for your time.
