Versarien Share Discussion Threads

[hermanngoring] 06/1/2020 09:26

Fair value here is 14p

[rainbow23] 06/1/2020 09:24

Looks like my 70p by Friday prediction was way out. It could be today.

[billwave] 06/1/2020 09:22

Rogerthegrouch - it's simpler than that, the group of investors having been led down the garden path by NR and his chief ramper for a number of years, are eventually paying attention to the fact that VRS still produces nothing that anyone in the world wants to pay for, verified or not. Meanwhile Graphene related products are hitting the shelves globally without VRS involvement. As for bargain entry points people have been calling that one all the way down from 165p. I've noted before, no-one outside of the few dozen deluded souls that frequent the main thread have been buying these shares for years. I wouldn't like to be in the position of holding a lot of these and trying to unload right now as the penny drops.

[dgduncan] 06/1/2020 09:22

Spike, the RNS stated a Drilling Tool - not a fluid additive.

[loglorry1] 06/1/2020 09:20

The problem with VRS is that the nosebleed £117m market cap is almost entirely supported by these two tiny business units 2D Tech and Cambridge Graphene both of which have minuscule revenue which is falling dramatically.

[oracle6] 06/1/2020 09:19

Was I wrong though?

[loglorry1] 06/1/2020 09:17

For completeness herea AAC (traditional business)

Barely profitability and we now know they've cut staff and are restructuring loss making or as they put it "low margin" business.

[club sandwich] 06/1/2020 09:16

"Neill has some explaining to do given what he's told people. What was the phrase he used last year "transformation year ahead". Must have meant a transfer of cash fro PIs to himself as he sold his shares maybe?"

loglorry, seconded.

share price in freefall. Ricketts has a LOT of explaining to do.

[dgduncan] 06/1/2020 09:15

RTG, I am not underestimating VRS but I have a lifetime of experience in the O&G drilling industry. It is still speculation as to what the product is as it has not been specifically stated by VRS. It was stated to be a drilling tool and the only drilling tool with a substantial use of a rubber type product is a drilling motor stator. If this is correct then I stand by my comments.

[loglorry1] 06/1/2020 09:13

But wait there's also graphene business in Cambridge Graphene



Ooops also train wreck. Revenue down from £19k to £6k.

Neill has some explaining to do given what he's told people. What was the phrase he used last year "transformation year ahead". Must have meant a transfer of cash fro PIs to himself as he sold his shares maybe?

[spike_1] 06/1/2020 09:13

dgduncan, my understanding is that the graphene will go into the fluid (to help transfer heat away from the electronics). This being the case, then the quantities become significant especially as it can be used successfully on most if not all drilling.

Best wishes - Spike

[rogerthegrouch] 06/1/2020 09:07

I think you are underestimating the O&G part then. There is massive money in it and even if its a perceived small order I would think the names involved, hidden under NDA, once announced will probably help us appreciate the magnitude. A substantial order would, of course, also further prove the business model.

[club sandwich] 06/1/2020 09:01

"We are at the beginning of a truly transformational year for the graphene revolution."

That's what we thought last year.

[rogerthegrouch] 06/1/2020 08:55

If this was an oiler I’d be scared that some inside info was loose on a duster. If this was a pharma I’d be scared news had leaked the trials had failed. If this was a company in a poor cash position id be scared of an imminent fund raise.

It’s none of these things, it’s a tech company with world leading products that can service every conceivable market with boundless potential. Cash position healthy which is derisked by probable sales and the strength of the legacy businesses.

The recent drop has nothing to do with potential bad news, this company doesn’t do bad news. The next run of news will be extremely positive and detail any number of exciting developments for example:
- Oil and Gas full commericals / further orders
- Textile launch / update on commericals
- Formal announcement and details of Biogrene and its first applications
- Any one of the mega China deals
- Update on Japan, Korea the US
- Aecom concrete development update
- Contract to incorporate Arch into mega project
- Update on Airbus contract (Airbus!)
- Further sales and maturation of Hexotene
- Update on any one of the 81 projects currently working on
- Anything else positive from the leftfield

Versarien are duty bound to inform the market if anything a cropper. There has been no RNSs to that effect and I don’t expect any.

We are at the beginning of a truly transformational year for the graphene revolution. This is likely to be the last time the price will be manipulated down before such acts will be impossible. The share price offers unbelievable value right now, anything under a quid is crazy cheap. What an amazing entry point / top up opportunity. I helped myself to a few more.

Here is to a mind blowing year, Happy New Year

[superg1] 06/1/2020 08:51

Just an update.

It's not Will BTW he's long and strong, I checked.

So the only ones left are large PI holders (many of which I know) or as I recall the ex BOD guy had 1 mill or more, so could be him.

Obviously drops cause other selling but clearly it has been one main seller 30th Dec on.

[nateroyd] 06/1/2020 08:46

Like it lol

[franksan] 06/1/2020 08:41

Nothing has changed in terms of bad news. All of the collaborations remain on track. VRS have a commercial agreement with MAS. The AECOM arch is award winning and should bring in substantial orders for VRS. We are still the only verified grapheme producer in the world. 5 key areas are progressing well. 40 others are also live. The news is all good. Tini5 is right - you'll be kicking yourselves in b the years to come and be saying if only I had bought VRS, I'd be rich. The shorters claim not to be shareholders, then why are they here? I'm only on the BB'S of companies that I hold shares and not the ones I don't hold. Clearly, they are trying to profit from shorting at our expense.

[woodpeckers] 06/1/2020 08:36

Graphene: From incremental innovation to disruptive design

Graphene layers were only first successfully extracted from graphite in 2004, but chances are graphene is already in your mobile phone, car, tennis racquet or the wings of an aircraft you’ve flow in. But its full potential is only just being imagined.

Such is the interest in graphene that at a recent lecture in Modena, Italy, so many people attended a public lecture by physicist Professor Sir Konstantin “Kostya” Novoselov, who with Andre Geim earned a Nobel Prize for his work on graphene in 2010, they spilt out of the venue and onto the street.

Two days later, international packaging innovator Tetra Pak held an open day at its Modena R&D facility to celebrate joining the Graphene Flagship, the EU’s biggest scientific research project with a budget of €1bn, where Novoselov told Verdict that graphene began as a side project.

“Andrei Geim introduced style of work in our lab that from time to time we’d do something completely different outside of the of our normal field of interest,” he explains. “Andrei is known for frog levitation, but graphene was one of those side projects. So the question was, can we make transistors out of graphite.

“When we started that project, I knew for sure that graphene shouldn’t exist but you can at least try to make the transistor. We almost gave up. And then we found the way how to make thin layers of graphite and starting to work with those and it took us about a year before we realised that we can make graphene.”
Graphene is a near-transparent single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal grid, with a range of important properties including high strength at low weight, excellent heat and electricity conductivity, and the ability to act as a barrier or selective filter.

While commercial applications are only in their infancy, Novoselov says that like all novel materials, establishing manufacturing processes and ensuring health and environmental safety take time, so for it to have penetrated markets so far in just 15 years is a good result.

Novoselov is chairman of the Strategic Advisory Council of the Graphene Flagship, a body which he believes has been critical to graphene’s research journey to date, but he says it now needs to shift away from academia.

“I think it’s time to give the steering wheel to the companies rather than to the academics and in the second phase of the organisation we need to work with them much more closely so they can tell us which direction to go,” he says.

Novoselov says Tetra Pak is one such innovative company looking to disrupt in materials, production and technology to make the most of graphene’s potential for the packaging industry. And Tetra Pak vice president for programme management and managing director for the Modena site Sara de Simoni has been instrumental to its introduction.

“We started looking into graphene in a more serious way one year ago when we started a future talent programme with [development engineer] Gloria Guidetti,” she says. “She has a PhD in a graphene technology so we started to speak with her about graphene’s potential. She suggested Tetra Pak should join the Graphene Flagship.

“Tetra Pak has this trend of being very good in incremental innovation; I’m really excited because when it comes to disruptive innovation, graphene might enable smart digital packaging.”

3 Things That Will Change the World Today
GET THE VERDICT MORNING EMAIL
How graphene could enable digital packaging
Digital packaging incorporates flexible electronics and printable sensors that make interacting with packaging intuitive for customers. It is just one of three potential paths for disruption in the industry. The second is the packing material itself, where graphene could provide a lining barrier that would provide the same waterproof property as plastic but could, for example, selectively allow certain gases to escape but still be fully recyclable.

“Then for the last area, I go back to my dear equipment,” says de Simoni. “We struggle with quality issues on our equipment because the environment it works in is pretty aggressive and we have to do deal with issues very fast for customers. So I see new materials making them more robust and less exposed to the aggressiveness of the environment and to operator error at little additional expense.”

But Novoselov says that the timescale for the wider adoption of graphene is subject to the ‘hype cycle’.

“Ten years ago we thought that graphene will never get into applications, and then seven years ago we were starting to believe that everything was going to be made out of graphene. The reality is somewhere in between” he says.

And while headline-grabbing applications such as flexible mobiles phones that users can roll up and put in their pockets are still some years away, graphene is gradually getting into our daily lives in ways we don’t even notice.

“Our phones have graphene in, most new Ford cars have graphene parts,” says Novoselov. “For me, it is a signature of maturity that the material gets into our lives without being noticed. It just naturally takes a long time to introduce any new material. Even a new microprocessor takes two or three months to develop, depending on the complexity.”

Graphene’S Holy Grail
Novoselov’s Holy Grail for graphene is for it to be used in disruptive applications where it doesn’t simply add another property or replace another material just because it does the job a little bit better.

“I’m really looking for applications which are created by graphene which were not possible before or started to be available only because of graphene,” he says. “There are some of those on the horizon, but I don’t think we’ve seen them yet.”

Novoselov identifies graphene’s potential use as a membrane as one of these. It would enable water purification processes to filter out chemicals and drugs that enter the water supply that current processes struggle with, for example.

“Graphene is the thinnest possible material; it’s only one atom thick so it’s a perfect membrane, and you can make it impermeable or permeable to certain atomic species,” he says. “That’s the opportunity, the capability which we’ve never had before, so I think using graphene as a smart membrane for various technologies would be quite interesting.

[ad631] 06/1/2020 08:35

We all know, bulls and bears, just what the market is waiting for. You either believe commercial deals will come or don't. Whatever ones leaning, big triggers are on the way and serious money is going to be made either shorting or going long. At the moment, it is the most positive position (that I have known) that VRS has been in - we must also acknowledge in the mix the existence of the 'ifs' and 'buts'. I do wonder who will be posting on this board by the end of 2020 stating they were right all along? 2020 should witness VRS' 'tipping point' to globalisation - I believe as much as ever that this will happen, but it takes commercial deal validation to make it so.

[basstrend] 06/1/2020 08:31

Shorters sounding pathetic as usual. Looking backwards and never forwards! Must be desperate to close their low shorts, which they clearly misjudged completely!