Gelion is an innovation company. It's a energy transition specialist company working in next-generation battery technologies. I'm gonna share with you today two things. Well, first of all, it is a half-yearly results presentation, but I know that this will be the first time that many of the shareholders, sorry, many of the investors, I hope you'll become shareholders. Many of the investors that are on this call will be meeting Gelion. So I've put together a bit of a presentation that sort of gives you the results, but shares some of our journey along the way as well. First of all, the disclaimers. I'm not gonna read through the detail of the disclaimers. You can do that yourself, but just draw attention to them.
We are in the battery industry, and there's some particular disclaimers we've put in about batteries and what we're doing. This is a very high-energy area. It's a very high-opportunity area. It's also a risk area of technology, but very, very exciting. Gelion is in a very, very special position. I'm not gonna introduce my leadership team to you physically today because a bunch of us have been traveling. But I do wanna draw attention to a few key people. Firstly, our founder, Professor Thomas Maschmeyer. Thomas is remarkable. He's regarded as one of the top 15 chemists in the world, with a specialty in particularly catalytic chemistry. So, an absolute honor for me to be able to work with Thomas.
Myself, John, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've built a number of significant technology companies around the world. Had a modicum of success with that. Those companies were all, in the end, bought at various times and gained quite a bit of experience through that period. Amit Gupta, my CFO, a very talented CFO, very hands-on, energetic, and we'll talk about some of the impact that Amit and I have been having together on the financial performance as we proceed. And then, Louis, who joined us recently. Louis was previously the chemistry supervisor for Panasonic at the Tesla Gigafactory.
Brings a enormous capability and experience to the company. All right, so Gelion, when you understand batteries, there are two great battery ecosystems out there. One is moving faster, and that is the lithium-ion industry. We are developing a technology that we see having a big effect as the next generation of that industry, and that's called lithium sulfur. So when you understand the lithium-ion industry, there's the inside a battery, you have an anode, you have a cathode, and you have electrolyte. And one thing that's characteristic of that industry is that it's reliant on an intercalation cathode on the cathode side.
Sulfur is a new technology, it's a conversion technology, and I'll tell you a little bit later about the importance of that technology. We're aiming to be a leader in lithium sulfur, this most important technology, as it takes off in the energy transition. The other industry is the lead-acid industry. Now, lead-acid industry and the lithium-ion industry were roughly the same size, if you went back a couple of years. What's happening now is the lithium-ion industry is taking off really quite quickly, whereas the lead-acid industry is starting to grow, it's growing sort of evenly, maybe at about 6%-8% per year. Into that lead-acid ecosystem, we're developing zinc-based cells with the objective as being a next-generation contributor into that ecosystem.
Now, this is a very large and a very exciting market. And so there's a total addressable market in batteries of almost $2 trillion by 2030. And the leading technologies will be very, very important. Where Gelion is addressing around 80% of the total available value chain. We are developing materials, so we're working to make materials that will be used inside the battery, cathode materials, anode materials. We're working towards the development of cells. So the cell is the single battery with the anode, the cathode, and electrolyte and the packaging. We're working towards making products, and products will be built on packs. And also the company, Gelion, has significant technology in the recycling sector as well.
For those shareholders or those of you who are already shareholders in Gelion, you may have been traveling some of this journey with us already. 2023 was a huge year for Gelion. So the company has been delivering on its milestones. I want to explain the context of this. So 2023 for us was a year where in lithium sulfur we were establishing our foundation. So going back behind that, Thomas and team had invented some remarkable breakthroughs in the lithium sulfur area that gave us the capability to match sulfur with different anode technologies. I'll tell you about the significance of that later. But looking at that, we then did a few large inorganic activities.
The first one of those was we acquired a remarkable portfolio of technology in lithium-sulfur from Johnson Matthey. So when you look at lithium-sulfur, it's a, it's a technology with extraordinary potential. It's one that people have been working on for a while, and there was a lot of expertise that was actually developed in the U.K. by a group at a company called Oxis. Now, Oxis hit the wall right around COVID by making a couple of business decisions that got them in a rocky place, and the technology was picked up by Johnson Matthey. 65 patent families, extraordinary technology base. We actually acquired that from Johnson Matthey when Johnson Matthey took a decision to divest their battery technology generally.
We grew our lithium-sulfur business in our research and development, and then we acquired a company in the UK called OXLiD. Then we did a joint development agreement with a company in San Francisco called Ionblox. So you can see that we're moving really, really quickly through 2023. I joined just before that. I joined a couple of months before we started this journey. We're now in a phase where we're demonstrating our core differentiation. So we're actually pulling together all the pieces. So we've started to ship anode samples to our partners, cathode samples to our anode partners. This current period, we're doing some remarkable things. I mentioned to you that we brought in Louis with his experience in manufacturing.
One of the things we're focused on in the current period is demonstrating the manufacturing simplicity of the technologies that we're developing. As we're working to become a leader in this technology worldwide, we're working towards forming strategic partnerships globally as well. Our goal is inside this period to start the development of what we call our Advanced Commercial Prototyping Center. Now, this is a very important stage for Gelion because that allows us to start to supply into the supply chain and start to seed the supply chain. We'll then be working on our demonstration pouch format and getting our validation cells out to customers. It's a very busy time in the lithium sulfur area. We're moving very, very quickly. On the zinc side, we in 2023 produced a number of prismatic cells.
We took a bit of a pivot. We were working on a technology that was called zinc bromide. We moved away from that into a zinc hybrid technology, and we have stepped back a little bit in that we're doing research to make sure that we're ready to go before we start accelerating the investment in that side of our business. Part of that, part of the reason for that is just the excitement level that we've had on lithium sulfur, which I'd like to talk to you about now. What comes beyond lithium-ion? Well, lithium-ion is great technology. When you look at the energy transition, we are going to increase the number of batteries that we use around the world by orders of magnitude.
Now, as we do that, we need to accelerate the growth and the availability of battery materials. We also need to make batteries work better. So you may have read about things like, well, you know, electric vehicles are too heavy, but we want them to go further. Well, one way to address that is to make the batteries lighter. And one of the features of lithium sulfur is that we can double the gravimetric energy density, or another way of saying that is we can make the batteries half the weight. That's a big thing. We can also make batteries that are less prone to thermal runaway and safer batteries. We can also reduce the bill of materials.
So when you understand battery technologies, the anode is really cheap, and the cathode tends to be really expensive because of the materials that are used. By making the cathode out of sulfur, we can reduce the price of the materials. Something that is extraordinarily important to understand is not only do we do that, but we remove the dependency on captive cathode materials. Sulfur is abundant. Sulfur is available widely around the world. It's not a metal that is produced in limited territories and may have some challenges. By developing the sulfur cathode technology, we're also on a path to take batteries beyond geographic or geopolitical control, even while introducing a chemistry, sulfur, that can meet the true demands of the energy transition.
So this is a this is a very big deal. All right, so Gelion is working on that energy transition, supporting the energy transition, lifting through building a strong commercial business anchored on on lithium sulfur. So there's two things we've got to do. First, lithium sulfur, realize the potential of the technology, and secondly, win. Win the competition, be the leader in lithium sulfur. So here's a few reasons that Gelion is special in what we're doing here. The first one is the manufacturing advantage. Now, I'm not going to get into a whole lot of detail on this.
What I'll do is next time I come along to Mello, well, I'll bring along Thomas and I'll bring along Louis, and we can go into more technical description. But a lot of our competitors talk about super materials and really exotic materials. We're not using any of that. We're actually implementing our technology and aiming at implementing it in a way where we can introduce the technology on top of the existing capabilities of the industry. That's really important. We're also working on a way, on an approach without toxic solvents, without rare or complex materials, and it's low cost.
Lithium-sulfur is very special, and I did say in the introductory bit about the work that Thomas and team in Gelion had done towards using alternate anodes. And that's because most lithium-sulfur initiatives rely on a lithium metal anode. Now, what's a lithium metal anode? That's something that's really special. It's actually the highest density anode, so it's a great technology to use lithium metal anodes. But it can be a difficult technology on the anode side, and it can be challenging to master because of passivation and dendrites and other factors. What Thomas and team did was to make it possible for us to use alternate anodes, like a silicon-sulfur battery.
And recognizing that, and recognizing that certain aspects of the IP portfolio that existed in OXIS protected core areas of electrolyte that were important to that, we picked up the Johnson Matthey IP, and then we put in place the JDA with a remarkable company called Ionblox out of San Francisco, and we're developing a silicon sulfur battery. Now, that's a development targeted at a long cycle life, high safety, and good stability. Very important development. And finally, you have protected lithium metal anodes. Now, there's a bit of a holy grail there.
Everybody wants to get to a protected lithium metal anode, and we are working on protected lithium metal anodes as well, using some remarkable technology that we've licensed from universities in the U.K. that have been working under the auspices of the Faraday Institution in the U.K. towards long cycle life and high safety. So then that gives us, as Gelion, two technology pathways to achieve mass electrification. The first one of those at the top here is the silicon sulfur path. And that's where we've been working on the enabling technologies and the agreements towards silicon anodes and pre-lithiation in our arrangement with Ionblox. On the bottom, the lithium metal anodes.
That gets us to market ready early into specialist applications that can use unprotected lithium anodes, and then through our work on making protected lithium anodes to the future potential of the ultimate outcomes. If you look at the technologies available today in order to achieve high performance, you come down to pretty quickly an understanding that it's gonna be attained either by a sulfur cathode or by an oxygen cathode or an air cathode. Air is really hard. Sulfur is practical. It's fairly clear, at least to me, that sulfur is the technology of the future. So looking at it another way as an investor.
Here comes Gelion, looking for leadership in one of the most exciting technologies on the planet, and building value in our company for our shareholders. These are some of the steps. As I said, I joined just before 2023. I'm committed to success for Gelion and to see Gelion become a leader in this, and you can see the momentum that the company has been gathering. We are here. So in the last, I guess it's the last month, we've just released some results about the outcomes of what we did last year. So last year, we acquired the 65 patent families, we accelerated our program, we acquired OXLiD, we did the Ionblox. But, hey, what does that all mean?
We let our shareholders know recently about some of the outcomes from that work, and we did that in the form of progress announcements. The first of those announcements was about the performance of the acquired technology. We announced that we had achieved 395 Wh/kg. We almost could have said 400 Wh/kg, but we said 395 Wh/kg. Why is that significant? 400 Wh/kg is a very important milestone. When you think about the energy of ordinary lithium-ion cells, this is approximately, you know, 2 x. We then... The next one's a little bit technical, and I apologize for that, but I'll do a little bit of a technical explanation for you.
The thing that held sulfur back was that it goes from sulfur-- sulfur goes from solid to liquid to solid when you charge and discharge. But what this one in the middle indicates is that what we achieved was we demonstrated solid to solid conversion. So the problem with solid, liquid, solid is that in the liquid state, these things called polysulfides can cross between the cathode and the anode. By doing the solid to solid conversion, we prevented that happening, and we demonstrated it. Now, this is really important to understand because this came out of originally Oxis. So I mentioned this company, Oxis, that had spent in the order of GBP 100 million developing lithium sulfur, and in my view, just got it right just before they hit their problem.
And what they got right was they achieved, I'm gonna use a very technical term again, it's called a quasi-solid state approach or a semi-solid state approach with a low polysulfide soluble electrolyte. Now, what does that mean? What that means is they came up with a way to stop polysulfides, these liquid things from crossing the battery by using this low polysulfide soluble electrolyte. And we've taken that forward and shown that to be effective in that second announcement there. The third one, the third one was an announcement of our work with Ionblox and the success of the work with Ionblox. So go back to the slide I showed you a moment ago, and you can see that last year, we took some very deliberate actions to get to leadership.
The first thing we did this year was we were very happy to be able to go back to our shareholders and say, "You know what? Those activities we did last year, we've got validation of the efficacy of those transactions." This puts that in just one more way. So batteries take time, but then when you start to get there, you move really quickly. And this shows how the heritage of the work that Gelion has been doing goes back to 2005 in Oxis. But the key breakthrough was right there, 2018, when Oxis managed to do this solid to solid conversion with their low polysulfide soluble electrolyte. That's the work that we picked up, and this OXLiD group had taken it forward.
A remarkable man, Adrien Amigues, now works with us as our president for U.K. and Europe, with Gareth Hartley. Great team that assembled around them in the U.K. to continue the work with the support of the Faraday Institution, and that's why we acquired OXLiD as well, to put it together the work that Gelion had been doing to very quickly establish a position in leadership for Gelion. There is incredible value that has been created through that process that's not yet been recognized. I guess one of the things that's tough in a way is that many of our competitors have been private companies. We're on AIM. We are, we are a listed company. I love running listed companies. I've run listed companies before.
It's a great way to do things, but at the moment, a lot of those private companies seem to be having higher valuations than some of the listed companies necessarily. We think we've put ourselves in a great position, and that through 2023, we've really accumulated value that we're accelerating the momentum on that at the moment. It hasn't yet been reflected in an increasing price for Gelion. Okay, so looking at the competitive global landscape, LG is a competitor in lithium sulfur. We have another competitor from North America, who's much higher valued than us. But in terms of IP and patents, we have exceptional patent families that cover the full spectrum.
Looking at our zinc technologies, zinc is abundant, it's low cost as well. This is a technology that we are developing aimed at the lead-acid industry. But with the excitement that we have going on with our lithium-sulfur at the moment, you know, straight up, the majority of the investment that we're doing on behalf of our shareholders is going into establishing our lithium-sulfur leadership, while we're making sure on this side that we've got the technology right before we start to lean into it. And so we're doing a technology and commercial study. Again, enthusiastic, so I've got to move quick so that I can get through the financials with you.
We are a very diligent company financially, and I did mention my CFO, Amit Gupta, and the talent of this man. I've really got to give Amit tremendous credit for the way he has supported me as I've been working through this transition towards leadership for Gelion. So, on each of our metrics, we outperformed, you know, our projections. So bottom line, we did a lot of cost control, even while we were working to accelerate the important parts of our business. In terms of cash use, we controlled our expenses so that we could afford to invest. And we did invest. We invested in acquisitions, we invested in IP, we invested in property, plant, and equipment.
I think that's the best thing we can be doing for our shareholders, is to be making sure that we're controlling controllable costs and investing effectively where we can get the most benefit for our shareholders. And you'll see that again in these financial slides. We've reduced our employee expenses. I've started to increase our R&D expenses just marginally, significantly reduced the business expenses, and you can see that big rise in IP, where we're working towards leadership. So, as a summary and an outlook for our report, wow, 2023 was great. It was a big year. We achieved a lot. We did a raise in the course of that year to support the acquisition that we did.
2024, we've come out of the blocks really fast with the demonstrated validation of the primary elements of our technology plan, to show that the moves that we've done in 2023 were on the mark. You're gonna see the continued momentum as we move forward. You'll see more test results, more validation. You'll see us explain the importance of this manufacturing simplicity to the industry. That will be a big deal. It will attract the attention of the participants in the industry, the major strategic participants. We'll be producing materials and cells for our partner validation, and our goal is to be securing strategic partnerships, global partnerships, that let everybody know just what an important company Gelion is. So thank you very much.
That's the formal part of the presentation.