Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Gelion full-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. That the company can review your questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and I'm sure, as usual, the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to CEO John Wood. Good morning.
Good morning. Thank you, everybody, for being online to listen to us today. It's not the day we normally would have chosen, but we had a very big year. We had a lot coming into the end of this year, and there was a lot of dates that needed to be lined up, and we got to today. I'm going to take you through today a story about Gelion's year and results, and we'll be doing the results. But before we start, there's a few pictures on the screen in front of you here of some of our team in action.
I know some of our team listen in, so I just wanted to call out a big thank you to the Gelion team, magic team, and also to say thank you from our leadership team this year. Amit, you're going to hear from today, Adrien, who joined us this year from OXLiD, now as the President of Gelion U.K. and Europe, Stuart, our ever-energetic and busy Commercial Director, Louis, who joined us from Panasonic this year, Nick Batt, our integration manager, my second gig with Nick, a real champion, Amit, people and culture, and newborn on the block, Jake, who's leading up our recycling. Also a call out to Michael, Gareth, Tom, and Alfonso doing absolute magic things in our tech group, as well as the rest of the tech team. Also, I'd like to acknowledge my board, Steve, a brilliant Chairman.
I really do appreciate working with Steve, always available, always with some wise words and great judgment. Thomas, our creative hero, creativity, input, spirit of the company. Joycelyn, the chair of our audit committee for her financial acumen and diligence in everything that she does. Michael Davies, our remuneration chair, for his, I guess, patience, his support of me, and then also the incoming director, Graham Cooley. Very excited to have the opportunity to work with Graham when he comes on board. A great mix of both technical understanding, commercial understanding, and investment market understanding as well. So very excited that Graham will be joining us. Okay. Well, I'm John. I'm the CEO of Gelion. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I like to think of myself as the marketing manager.
I work with talented people, and my job is to try to give them an environment that they can succeed in, and very honored and pleased to have the opportunity in Gelion. Amit.
Hi everyone. Good morning in the U.K. and good evening to investors in Australia. My name is Amit Gupta. I'm the CFO of the business. I've been with Gelion for over three years, and it's been a very interesting ride. We have achieved a lot, especially in the last 12 months, and we are very, very pleased to present this year's results, as well as all the developments that we have been working on.
All right, Gelion. This is sort of a summary slide to cover off where we are, where we're going. We work in the battery chemistry market. We work with next-generation sulfur batteries. We are also building our integration solutions business. And then there's two businesses over here on the right, our zinc batteries and our recycling. Now I'm going to context this for you. This is a bit of a shift in Gelion's direction over time. We did start as a zinc bromide battery company with some lithium- sulfur capabilities. Lithium- sulfur simply is taking off as one of the most exciting new battery chemistries on the planet. And Gelion is positioned very, very strongly in that market. We'll talk a little bit as we go through the presentation about the why and the wherewithals of lithium- sulfur, but we are well placed, right time, right technology.
You'll see alongside the lithium-sulfur, we also are working in silicon-sulfur. And silicon-sulfur is a variant of the theme. Lithium-sulfur, lithium metal sulfur giving the very highest energy density. Silicon-sulfur giving us a path to higher stability, higher cycle life applications. Our integration solutions business, we're really introducing that to you this year. We have a lot of talented people inside of Gelion who are capable of putting the full solution together. There's a synergy between lithium-sulfur and silicon-sulfur and integration, which is that many of the companies that we're working towards collaborating with around moving between lithium-ion technologies and introducing lithium-sulfur technology produce the cells that are utilized in the systems that we are buying to take that into our integration solutions business.
So there's a synergy in the partners that we're setting up between our next-generation sulfur batteries and our integration solutions. On the right, you'll see that we've put the zinc and the recycling into incubation. Now, what that really means is that in the foremost of time, you're going to see the core business of Gelion focusing in on the sulfur business. These businesses on the right have a lot of value, and they're really interesting businesses. But I have to start to focus my leadership team and my development team in particular areas. So what we want to do is to try to extract value from these businesses for our shareholders and for all of the input that the team have been putting into that. So we'll be looking at spinning out and other actions connected with these businesses we've put into incubation.
All right, this year was a huge year. We delivered on the milestones that we took to our shareholders. We did do a raise last year, and we told shareholders that we were going to acquire OXLiD. That transaction is complete, and I'm very, very pleased with the contribution that group has been making to Gelion. Adrien, your superstar, Gareth Madge , and the rest of the team out there have really been working really well through the transition. We worked with Ionblox. We put in place a JDA to start working with the Ionblox silicon anode technology and our own sulfur cathode technology. We started to swap our cathode materials, started to shift electrodes around, taking anodes and trying it with our cathodes, sending cathodes for people to work with. With Louis on board, he brought with him experience around manufacturing simplicity.
And so the team focused in on ways of making our cathode, and we think it puts us in a pretty interesting competitive position where our cathode is a very low energy to produce and low-cost path for manufacturing. So we're very pleased with that because we see sulfur as being an abundant chemistry. We put in place a JDA with Glencore. Now, this is an interesting JDA. Under that JDA, we've been working with Glencore to identify opportunities, and then the format of the JDA allows us to then introduce engagement opportunities where we see a commercial opportunity to work with Glencore. So we're in the phase at the moment of still exploring, understanding, and working towards some of these engagement opportunities. We delivered cost efficiencies. So in the middle of all of this activity, we cut GBP 1.5 million out of our operating expense base.
We added about GBP 410,000 back in when we acquired OXLiD. So we achieved more with less. We also have just been awarded the co-funding for our ACPC. This is really important about us. There's a slide I'll talk to you about what the ACPC project is a little bit later. But it allows us to start to manufacture the commercial prototypes that we supply to the supply chain as we put our collaboration partners in place, as we establish our supply chain. This grant was awarded to us by ARENA. It's a GBP 2.5 million grant. And the grant will commence when we bring on board appropriate co-funding to match the grant from the government. And over and above, last year, our team hit a remarkable milestone with their Gen 3 technology. And I'll introduce Gen 3 a little bit as we go along.
But with our Gen 3 technology, we hit more than 400 Wh per kilogram, which was the primary benchmark on energy we were looking for. Our recycling group managed to be awarded a GBP 170,000 grant by the U.K. government to do the techno-commercial development of the business model and business plan for that technology. And I'll talk about that a little later in the presentation. And our integration group managed to secure their first order, and we're shipping that or preparing that to ship that at the moment. And that was a GBP 1 million order for that group, which is developing a nice-looking order book. Amit, would you go through the results?
Yep. Thank you, John. What we have done on this slide, and John spoke about the cost efficiencies and all the milestones that we've delivered in the last 12, 14 months. What you see on this slide is our FY 2024 audited results. When you compare it to FY 2023, you can see our adjusted EBITDA loss decreasing by GBP 1.1 million. Hold that thought because I'll explain when John spoke about GBP 1.5 million, how does that reconcile? On the face of the P&L, you'll see there's a GBP 1.1 million decline in adjusted EBITDA loss, which is 18.8% lower than prior year and 13% lower than what the analysts were forecasting. Fantastic year for the milestones, commercial, technological progress, while decreasing cost. We're running a much, much leaner team. We're running much focused R&D programs to deliver more from the capital that we already have.
Our cash position at the end of June was GBP 3.8 million in bank. That is GBP 1.6 million-GBP 1.7 million higher than what was the forecast. So again, all the cost efficiencies are resulting in additional cash, and we had GBP 1.6 million of R&D tax incentive. That was claimable in June, but that claim has been processed in November. So we have got that cash from the Australian government. On this slide, what we have done is we have explained where the cost efficiencies are coming from, the larger cost buckets of the business, and how we have been able to decrease our costs across all the buckets of the business. So the first chart is about the R&D expenses, and why I presented 2022, 2023, and 2024 is FY 2022 was the first year when we listed.
So not really a normal year because a lot of costs were going, and we went growing more costs as we became a listed entity. FY 2023, therefore, is kind of the benchmark of a fully listed business and operating costs as well. So when you look at R&D expenses, when you look at employee expenses, and when you look at business expenses as well, we have been able to bring costs down across all categories. What I've also shown on this chart is there's a stacked bar for FY 2024, which reflects the contribution for OXLiD. So we acquired OXLiD in November 2023, and for the seven months into the financial year, we were incurring additional costs as we acquired that business.
If you take OXLiD out and you do a comparison of a like-for-like business, what we had when we announced the cost savings program in June-July, OXLiD was nowhere in the picture. We estimated the annual cost savings to be GBP 1 million. When you do a like-for-like comparison, we saved over GBP 1.5 million in FY 2024. However, as John mentioned and as everyone is aware, we acquired OXLiD, and we spent around GBP 400,000. So the net cost is GBP 1.1 million, but actually, we delivered GBP 1.5 million on a like-for-like basis. All these cost savings, running a lean business, running a really focused program, saving as much cash as possible, what does it help us with? We are able to make strategic decisions. We can acquire businesses. We acquired an IP portfolio last year in March from Johnson Matthey. IP is key for us. It's absolutely fundamental to maintain that portfolio.
It is not cheap. It's expensive. So we are able to save these cost savings and then invest back into the IP, which is absolutely fundamental for us to reach development and commercialization. John, back to you.
All right, lithium- sulfur. Why lithium- sulfur? Lithium-s ulfur has two great features about it. It's got a whole lot of benefits, but the two great features about being a lithium- sulfur business is that, first of all, it's a strategic technology. So it's the lightest technology. You can go lighter by making a lithium-ion battery. But essentially, when we talk about high gravimetric energy density, things like 400 Wh per kilogram, what we're talking about is it being the lightest battery. And there's a whole lot of applications where it is really important to be the lightest battery. Things that fly, fly further. It will be starting to enable aviation. There's a whole lot of important high-value applications that come off the fact that this technology is the lightest. But that's just sort of the first feature of sulfur because sulfur is an abundant technology.
It has a path to a lower manufacturing CapEx than OpEx. It's a very safe technology. If it's designed and manufactured the right way, then you end up with a tremendously safe cell. And as I said, it's abundant, and it doesn't use rare metals. It doesn't use expensive metals. It's a metal-free cathode. And the production of that cathode material has a very significant lowering of the carbon footprint. So we see why. Certainly old batteries never go anywhere. There's just new batteries come along and create new markets. And this will be the same as well. Lithium-sulfur won't displace lithium-ion, but lithium-sulfur will build on top of what lithium-ion is achieving today. And we're blessed to be working in this technology at this point in time when it's moving so quickly. We have a very large IP portfolio.
Now, we picked up this IP portfolio courtesy of the acquisition from Johnson Matthey. But its origin was that it was the IP portfolio created by a group of developers inside Oxis. And Oxis was really a leader in lithium-sulfur technology, pioneer creating the technology. And they moved through all the TRL stages to make lithium-ion cells. And as such, their IP portfolio covers various aspects of the anode, the cathode, the electrolyte, BMS, the battery management systems, and packaging and such. We're very fortunate to pick up that portfolio from Johnson Matthey when Johnson Matthey decided to get out of battery technologies altogether. It puts us in a nice position. There are other large IP portfolios out there. LG is a strong advocate of lithium-sulfur and is moving into the commercialization of lithium-sulfur.
We're pretty happy about that because we see LG as a very important market maker in introducing this technology. Of course, there is a very large company in the sector in the U.S. called Lyten, a very professional company doing a great job. That company has a significant IP portfolio as well. I'm sure there are other portfolios around. But Gelion has a credible portfolio in that footprint. Lyten is taking a different path and is going to be investing $1 billion to create a lithium-sulfur gigafactory. Once again, I think you see with companies like LG starting to introduce lithium-sulfur now towards commercialization of lithium-sulfur and companies like Lyten making those large investment decisions that this is an important time to have a strong position in lithium-sulfur. That's what Gelion is working to do.
What we're working to do differently, though, is that we're working to do this on a capital light path. So the theory goes something like this. If LG does the heavy lifting to create the market as LG is just a brilliant battery company. It does lithium-ion of all kinds, a real tech leader. If they're out there creating the market and Lyten is also working to create the market through this $1 billion in a gigafactory, then we believe there's an opportunity by focusing on our IP and investing in our IP, investing in the performance of our technology, that we can establish ourselves as a leader by using materials and licensing model. We will be making cells, but those cells will be in small quantity of high-value cells that will get out to supply chains or cell manufacturers.
But we see sulfur as being a fairly ubiquitous new chemistry. We want to be the company that unlocks it by providing our IP portfolio and our capabilities into the broader market. One really important step towards doing that, we've just announced, which was our Advanced Commercial Prototyping Center. We are so happy to have this facility. A lot of my team worked on it. I'll call out Stu and Louis and Amit who engaged. I'll even say hi to Deloitte who did some work in the background on this one as well as our advisor and did an absolutely fantastic job. A big thank you to ARENA, who worked just through with us. It took us nine months, I think, to move through the process to get this project approved.
That was subject to the diligence that we had to work on with ARENA to be awarded this grant opportunity. That process made it a better project. We are very beholden to the government there, not just for the award of the funding, but also for the hurdles that they put in front of us that just simply made us better each step. We had to do independent third-party evaluations. We got letters of support from leaders in the U.S. We got letters of support from leaders in the U.K. We got letters of support from all sorts of companies that worked in the applications that we were targeting. Aerospace and advanced heavy vehicle and stationary storage and EV. This is a really, really important project for Gelion. We'll actually be doing. It's a GBP 5 million project, GBP 2.5 million of funding from the Australian government.
Our next goal and objective is to secure a strategic partner who's going to come along with us on that journey. The grant does include some of our current operating costs, meaning that some of our team will be shifting into this project, which makes it, as Amit is always on my shoulder, working on the financial and fiduciary responsibilities and getting our costs down, makes it a very cost-effective project for Gelion as well. All right. So as I mentioned, we are envisioning a scale-up pathway, which is the capital light. So what does that mean? You'll see a progression in products that we release in our lithium- sulfur work. At first, we're aiming at those applications that are very high value, where we get a lot of money for the cells, good margins, but low volume.
And they have particular characteristics that are needed out of the cell. Basically, they need the cell to be really light and to handle a modest number of cycles. They don't need a lot of power. The excitement starts to happen when we introduce power alongside cycle life and that great energy density because then you start to have a very competitive battery for UAVs, all these things that fly around now, the lightest batteries, high performance. And then we see around 2028 that this becomes a mass market product. Now, I know you're looking at that and saying, "Wow, 2028, that's a long time already before the big J curve hits." But when you work in batteries, one important thing to note is it's generally around, well, the automobile guys are working on a 10-year time frame, and most everybody else is working on a five-year time frame.
The important time to be an innovative technology company is where your products are coming to market in that five- to 10-year time frame. Gelion is, as I said, we've sort of joined in the fast lane by doing our acquisition of the OXLiD technology. That's why I'm calling it out as right time, right technology in the marketplace today. The next step now, we've just put in place the ACPC grant. What that ACPC allows us to do in that factory, in that small facility, we will be producing 2,000 cells a year, just 2,000. Those 2,000 cells will be very much like the cells that would come out of gigafactories. Those cells will be going to the end users. Those cells will be going to the battery manufacturers.
Those cells will be going to the material suppliers that we will be partnering with, and they'll be going to the application people at the end of the whole stream, so we'll be seeding the supply chain with our ACPC, and our next job now is to bring on board partners who will be helping us on that journey. All right. To go and achieve that, we have been traveling quite intensively. Gelion is an international battery group. One thing to factor in about batteries, you've got to be the best in the world to be relevant in the industry because it is a global business. There is no value in sort of being geographically unique in a battery chemistry. You must have your battery chemistry important to the industry, and you must work with the partners who are important to the industry.
And Gelion is blessed in that we've got off to a great start in our work to embed ourselves in the global networks. First, I'll call out Adrien. Gee, Adrien, you're getting a few callouts today. He's done a really great job up in Europe of embedding us into the industry up in Europe. Very grateful for the way that he's been engaging there. Meanwhile, we've also been working strongly in Asia, in India, which many people call them the next China, and in the Middle East and in the U.S. Now, China is interesting because China makes about 85% of the batteries in the world today. And so there's an interesting ecosystem out there where people in the U.S. are trying to start to incent an alternative supply base.
In the meantime, people in Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea are managing to get the best of all worlds by protecting their IP and utilizing the manufacturing capabilities in China. And now there's also a big move as well to unlock the latent potential of India. And if you go to India at the moment, you'll find a lot of excitement around the fact that there's a whole lot of gigafactories that are starting to be developed. So for the investors online, your company, Gelion, is well represented in that process. We're working very hard to embed ourselves into the global landscape. Wanted to talk about the technologies that we're incubating a little. Now, first, I'll go to the recycling technology. And we have a very exciting set of recycling patents and IP.
More exciting, though, is the energy that young Jake has been bringing to this exercise and the work that's been going on in the U.K. with the government there to understand exactly where this business fits. I think there's been a great job done here. We know where we fit in the recycling world. To keep it simple, we extract lithium from black mass really effectively, and we've got some strong IP in that area that we picked up from Johnson Matthey, so our intent is to send that out to valuable consideration for our shareholders, and that could take many forms, but the intent is that this will take a path where it will have certain independence while we'll be retaining value for our shareholders, and that will allow me to be focusing the core leadership team in Gelion squarely on our growth in sulfur technologies.
Now, when we go to zinc, our zinc team has been doing an absolutely awesome job advancing our zinc technology. Originally, we were a zinc-bromide technology. We've shifted. We've used a zinc hybrid technology on the cathode side, benign and starting to become very stable. So very impressed with what our team has been doing here. The challenge on zinc is that we are developing this technology in parallel with the development of the sulfur technology. And in the company, I need to allocate each dollar of resource that we have available where it's going to get the greatest gain for our shareholders. So while this is a very exciting technology and the team is doing great goals, the lithium-sulfur is an extraordinary technology. And so we've been focusing our attention more towards the lithium-sulfur technology and incubating this technology along.
Looking to our summary and our outlook, whatever way you look at it, we're sitting here at December 27th, and it wasn't because we were trying to hide something. It's because we've been really busy. It's been a huge year. On the board there, on the left, you've got a little summary. We went out there ambitiously at the start of this year and said, "You know what? We're going to achieve all these goals." Well, we did. We got those goals, and then we got a bunch more. It wasn't me. It was our team. I got to call out all the players in Gelion, put their heads down. There's a lot of negotiations in there. There's a lot of technical work in there. There's a lot of leadership in there. And there's a lot of governance in there. And every aspect of the team has been extraordinary.
I can tell you that Amit, who's on the screen with me, his typical day was probably about 12-14 hours the last three months while we crushed through a lot of this stuff. It's been a big effort to deliver on all of those goals. Looking forward, we're not slowing down. We're going to keep pushing the pace. So in the short and medium term, we're going to progress our lithium- sulfur towards what we call our MVP, minimum viable performance. So when you've got your minimum viable performance, then you can start doing your minimum viable product. And so they'll be fueling our work on our collaboration. We will execute on our plan towards strategic collaboration partnerships and funding. We will double the sales of our integration business. I don't know. Hollow log is, I think, an Australian term or a U.S. term.
So where you put the ACPC in your hollow log. But I think we've got a little bit of room there that our team, I've got confidence in there, might have room for outperformance. Also, we'll continue to incubate the zinc and the recycling. And we'll continue to maintain our prudent cost management. So another big year coming up for Gelion. We just closed it out, of course, with the announcement of the ACPC, the raise of the round that we just closed, and that we're onboarding Graham Cooley. So all of our 2025 goals are aimed at delivering shareholder value and growth. And thank you all for allowing me or supporting me in the role as your CEO.
John, Amit, thank you very much indeed for updating investors. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions.
Just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen, but it's why John and Amit take a few moments to review your questions and answer already. I'd just like to remind you the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, will be accessible via your investment company dashboard. John, you've received a number of questions throughout your presentation. So thank you to everybody for your engagement. If I may, just hand back to you, John, just to moderate through that Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Absolutely. All right. Here we go, guys. I'll try to get through all of the questions for you and answer them as clearly as I can. The first one is, how close are you to selecting a strategic partner in any of our IP?
And if not, what are the barriers? Well, that's a really good question. There are three things that I think about when I'm trying to do a strategic partnership and a collaboration. One, respect, trust, and having something that the partner really wants. So we're well positioned with all three of those. Respect and trust require confidentiality. So I can't go into any details about what we're doing with our partners. I can only answer the question qualitatively. And I guess the question was, how close are you? And I would say close. Next question. When is commercialization of each type of Gelion-produced battery likely to occur? And when will income be seen? Well, we're actually delivering income now in our integration business. And I expect that income to continue to grow as Amit and I presented.
Although we're stewarding a growth company, we're also stewarding our costs and have been reducing our costs. Now, one of the benefits of having our integration business is we're starting to grow income as well. And so we're trying to work on both sides of the curve there to reduce any losses that we've been making. And when is commercialization of each type of Gelion-produced battery? I would refer back to the lithium- sulfur time frames that I had in the presentation. Integration business now. And the zinc, I'll take on notice because we've still got more development that we're doing on the zinc. What is the current cash runway? And when will the company need to raise further equity capital? So on current budget, cash runway is just north of the next half, the end of the next half. We will be raising more capital.
Our intention is that with the ACPC, with the approval of that grant, we will utilize that grant. The intention is to utilize that grant to bring in match funding from a strategic corporate source that we've been having progressive discussions with across the supply chain. We will be raising again. As I said, we're starting to reduce the cost of our business both by reducing costs and increasing income. Would Gelion be developing a non-flow zinc-bromide flow battery as invented by a brilliant professor of the University of Sydney? The brilliant part is right. Professor Thomas Maschmeyer, one of the leading chemists on the planet, I think number 15 by the algorithm, as Thomas tells me that was set by his mum. Thomas is certainly brilliant.
We will not be delivering a non-flow zinc-bromide battery, but Thomas is active and contributes to every part of our business and inspires me every day. While I cannot tell you about it on this call, I can tell you that Thomas in the last two months has made one of the most important contributions that I think he could have made to Gelion and opened the door to something significant for our future. So certainly, the brilliant Professor Thomas Maschmeyer is correct. What is the minimum and maximum threshold from investors outside of Australia and the U.K. who are interested in Gelion PLC portfolio? Well, no minimum, no maximum threshold. We're listed on AIM. So any investor who wants to invest is welcome to invest on AIM.
But if you're a corporate strategic investor who sees a future in being with Gelion in a large scale, well, come and talk to Amit and I anytime. So I don't know that there's any threshold of minimum or maximum. When you eventually make, this is a long question. It says, "When you eventually make batteries for the home storage market, will its battery management system have a large list of inverter types? This will increase the desirability." Yeah, I understand that. It's true. So to answer it as directly as I can, we are aiming to intersect the bulk of the market. That means we want to be supplying sulfur cathode materials and licensing the really big manufacturers. Now, those big manufacturers are going to supply cells, and those cells are going to use battery management systems.
When we acquired the Oxis IP from Johnson Matthey, we did get a bunch of battery management IP. But what we'd like to do is leverage that to maximize the number of cells that go out to market. So I guess my short answer to the long question is yes, it would be our intention that we would support the whole range of inverters. From the Financial Times, U.S. startup Lyten is committing more than $1 billion to build the world's first large-scale factory to produce lithium-sulfur batteries. An emerging technology that could break U.S. dependence on China for metals crucial to the energy transition. The factory located in Reno, Nevada, is expected to start production by 2027. In our call, the technology officer at Lyten refers to the polysulfide shuttle as a Gordian knot to be solved.
Does this represent a commercial opportunity for Gelion to grant a license or a partner with Lyten? That's a really thoughtful question. I like the Gordian knot bit. Was it Alexander, the conqueror? He just rode up and cut it with a sword. I'm sorry, I don't get that one. I might not have got that right. But I remember the Gordian knot and that somebody cut right through it. There's a nice analogy there. So what was said there that the polysulfide shuttle is a Gordian knot to be solved? Polysulfide shuttle is this sort of weird thing where sulfur is solid in the cathode, but then it turns to a liquid and a solid again. And then that liquid form is a polysulfide. It can travel in the battery.
And when we did our announcement about Gen 3 batteries, it was about implementing a technology that had been developed inside Oxis, where they used what's called a low polysulfide soluble electrolyte to stop the polysulfides shuttling and forced what is described as a solid-to-solid conversion. And hopefully, that's a sword that cuts through the Gordian knot. And so solving that problem unlocks the full potential of sulfur as a cathode material. And it is really hard to explain just how relevant and important that is to the energy transition generally and batteries generally. So the IP that we're working in is really important. So the answer to this question, the direct answer to this question is, you know, maybe.
But at this point in time, rather than us seeing as a technology a license to go that way, we would see that the best path for us with the technology that we have and the IP that we have is to unlock the potential of a lithium-ion industry to utilize lithium- sulfur in the future. What is the life cycle on your battery, on your Gen 3 battery? Increasing by the day is the short answer. So what we did was we came out, first of all, and we said, "You know what? We've done 400 Wh per kilogram with a Gen 2 battery." And then we paused. And we did 400 Wh per kilogram with a Gen 3 battery. And then with that Gen 3 battery, what we're now doing is increasing our cycle count systematically.
Let me say that I think that with the Gen 3 cells, once we get to about 400 Wh per kilogram and we've got to say 150 cycles, then at that point in time, we've hit what we call our minimum performance, minimum viable performance. You're providing a very dynamic environment with lots of positive update. However, I feel frustrated with my investment. I've not seen any positive share price growth. I am sorry. The company keeps switching tacks, so it makes it impossible for an investor to predict the future. When I can expect to get into positive price territory? If I have my way tomorrow, look, I think that the company is doing everything that it can to make that turn. I share your frustration in this comment.
When I look at what the team, what the Gelion team achieved last year, it's really hard to come to grips with the fact that the value of the company on the stock market was lower at the end of the year than it was at the start. So we are providing a dynamic. I admit that. I am frustrated as well that we haven't seen positive share price growth yet. I have changed tack. I take that on board. I think we've got the company set on the right tack. I think we're doing the right things. We've got a great team. We've got our head down. We're working in a hard environment. It's pretty tough out there in batteries right now. We're not complaining about that. We're going to try and get on there and deliver and try to get you into positive price territory.
How is R&D cost management impacting innovation? It does do that. But I can tell you that we have a modest team. We have a modest team doing research in Australia and a modest team doing research in the U.K. I will back them and their leadership. I think we've got an exciting team. So we're doing what we can with what we've got. And I'm not asking for more right now. I think we're doing a good job.
John, if I can add that response as well. So when I was taking everyone through the slides, the financial slide, and walking everyone through the reduction in cost, so R&D expenses have come down, but it's not at the cost of innovation. What we have changed is the thought process and how we approach R&D in the business.
We are becoming more and more commercial, and we are running more focused R&D programs. I'll give an example. As John was talking about 400 Wh per kilogram Gen 3, and then we stopped in Gen 3, and then we stopped. We could have gone and potentially—and I don't know how to speak to the team—but we could have gone and continued to work on increasing that energy density to 450, maybe 500. But we didn't want to do that. We started working on the cycle life because getting a product to a commercial product is more important than trying to just work on an R&D program and increase the energy density. And hence, by running these very, very focused programs, running a lean team.
John spoke about the structure of the business as well, where we are incubating a couple of businesses, and we are really focusing on a couple of businesses. That helps us bring the cost down, but not necessarily at the cost of innovation.
Thanks, Amit. When will you publish the performance characteristics for the lithium- sulfur cell? I can approach 400 Wh per kilogram. I'd like to hear specifically cycle life expectation, charge rates, RTE degradation profile. Also, it's possibly interesting to hear how your separator technology is compared to the ceramic solution by QuantumScape. So we've only, at this stage, published our Wh per kilogram, which is correct. I'm giving you some guidance in saying that we would anticipate MVP or minimum viable performance at around 150 cycles. 150 cycles. I'm not for a car, of course. It'd be 600 to 1,000 per car.
But that's in our technology as we advance. Your question about QuantumScape and the ceramic solution is really interesting. I can't give too much away. What we're working on at the moment and what we've announced results about are what we call a semi-solid state or a quasi-solid state or a pseudosolid state. So it's all utilizing our low polysulfide soluble electrolyte. We have other significant developments underway as well in the innovation. And the case can be put that Gelion's work will transfer into a full solid state solution in the future as well. But I can't go too far on that path at the moment.
What I can tell you is that when we acquired OXLiD, one of the requirements that we had before we did the acquisition was that we also were able to access, by license, some technology from OXLiD that was for a very thin solid state separator or manufacturing technique for that, which is turning out to be very important for us. Sorry that I've ducked that question a little bit. We will progressively be adding more in terms of our performance. Given the cost moves in financial year 2024, you see R&D costs and admin costs are similar in financial year 2025, where you see further changes in the cost base. We will be controlling costs. Yeah. Yeah.
I was going to say the same thing, John, that we continue to look at our cost base. We continue to manage our cost base.
I will be very surprised if it's significantly different, but we continue to manage our cost as efficiently as possible.
The next question was, are there any key areas or IP portfolio that are missing from what LG or Lyten have? As an industry evolves, you'll always find this, but you end up with the companies that persist or survive or grow as having IP portfolios that overlap with other companies as well. And you end up with a few companies that control meaningful IP portfolios. So yeah, I would believe there are parts of our IP portfolio that they would have, and there's probably parts that we have that they don't have, but they're relevant portfolios. So I can only give a real-world answer to that. I don't want to overclaim anything.
On your initial 400 Wh per kilogram density, what sort of range or flight time would power a UAV? The short answer to that question is that with our first test, we had low power. UAVs use maybe a third of their battery on takeoff, and they do it at high power, and then they use quite a bit on landing as well. Our very first result wouldn't have been good at UAV. The first one was a low-power device. As we progress the power capabilities of our device, then the question that you're asking, I guess the only answer I can give, answering as completely as I can, is probably twice as far or 1.5 times as far as the UAV would do without the lithium- sulfur battery. It's not something you can quantify in kilometers. Does Licella collaborate with the recycling division?
No, not at this point in time. There's no link between Licella and the recycling division at this point in time. What about the zinc technology made you decide to incubate it, and what does incubating mean in this context? The zinc technology, as I said, it's a great technology, and the team's doing great work on it. So I don't want to knock this technology at all. All I'm saying on the zinc technology is that I think it's a great technology. But if we're going to be a leader in a technology, we have to focus on that technology, and we have to focus our resources. And similarly, if our zinc effort and our recycling effort want to be the best in class, then those efforts have to focus as well.
And so when I talk about incubating, what I'm really doing is I talk about trying to get things to a state where they can justify their independent existence and that I can put them on a course for that independent existence where they're able to focus 100% just at one technology, just like the lithium-sulfur will be able to focus 100% on that technology. And I think that in Gelion's case, it is time for us to start to develop that focus in our organization because you really can't pretend that you can be best in the world if you're sort of not using all your resources in that direction. And the lithium-sulfur has become such an exciting push for us.
And as I said, it complements what we're doing with our integration solutions because we are managing to forge these relationships where we have multiple points of interaction with the same industry participants, which from my history have always found to be an effective way to grow a company successfully. I think we came to the end of our official questions.
John, if I may just jump in, you have taken every question from investors. So thank you very much indeed to everybody for your engagement once again. John, Amit, I know investor feedback is important to you. I'll shortly redirect those on the call to give you their thoughts and expectations. But perhaps before we go, John, a few closing comments from your good self.
I'll say to everyone, look, it's exciting to be leading Gelion.
This is such an important time on the planet, and that creates so much commercial opportunity. You can feel good about your investment in Gelion and its potential to make a difference in the energy transition. You're investing to make money, though, and I'm here to steward that and certainly Amit as well and our board to make money for you. We know that's our job. But you can also feel good about the fact that as we're making money for you and as we turn that corner and as we start to generate wealth and start to move the needle on the price for our shareholders, that you're also going to be part of something that's really important. And I know all of our team get up and come to the office knowing that that's the case as well. So thank you for giving me this opportunity.
I guess the only thing I can tell you is you know that we're going to be doing our best at every step of the way to deliver success for you for what you're entrusted to us. Thank you.
That's great. John, Amit, thank you once again for updating investors. If I could please ask investors not to close this session as we're now automatically redirected to the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the company can better understand your views and expectations. This only takes a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at Gelion, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and wish you all a good rest of your day.