Good morning and welcome to the Gelion plc Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to Non-Executive Chairman, Dr. Steve Mahon. Good morning to you.
Good morning. Welcome. Gelion made two important announcements on Tuesday this week. The purpose of this update to investors is to explain those and the thinking behind it. The first of those announcements was we announced a partnership with one of the U.S. government's national labs. This is part of our entry strategy into the U.S. In advanced batteries, lithium sulfur, we believe, can be a competitive and strategically important chemistry for batteries. Western countries are all looking for control over their supply chains. In all the Western governments, the U.S. is by far the most aggressive and the leading in terms of their spend on procurement of advanced technologies in this space and in the defense space. The U.S. defense budget is 10 x that of the U.K.
Our goal is to be the category leader, be the number one in the world on lithium sulfur batteries and other sulfur chemistry for batteries. You can't be the global leader if you don't have a strategy. This marks the start of our U.S. market entry. The second announcement, that we're transitioning to a new CEO today. We have both John and Matt on the call today. John is retiring. We've invited him to come to the call and share his thoughts and reasons with you all. Then it'll be my pleasure to introduce Matt to you today. John came to me about nine months ago to talk about how he could start the process of stepping back to the business. How do we manage this in the most professional and efficient way that we can.
We plotted a path to what does the stage of the company need to be at where we can go to the next phase where a new CEO can come in and look at how we scale up to more advanced commercial partnerships. John, in the last months since the turn of the year, as you have seen, a steady series of announcements that put that platform in place. We engaged one of the leading global executive search firms. They screened hundreds of candidates. We were delighted that our lead candidate, Matt, was able to come and join us. We were looking for someone who had experience globally and lived and operated in Europe and Asia, had experience of making battery materials and carbon-based battery materials, which is the core competence we need in our team.
It'll be really, I hope, an exciting few years with Matt at the helm. Firstly, I'd like to hand to John and ask him to give his reflections on the business and his rationale for why he feels now is the right time to transition. John, maybe I'll hand the floor to you now.
Thanks very much, Steve. First of all, a huge thank you to all the shareholders who have backed Gelion in our mission during my tenure. It's been a real honor being the CEO of Gelion. I'm an innovation CEO. I came to the company with a very clear focus. What the board asked me to do was to accelerate the path from innovation to commercialization, and to position the business for meaningful global impact and long-term success. Well, I was blessed by the team that I found when I came into Gelion. They're a wonderful team. They've done a magnificent job. Gelion is strongly set on those goals today. The art of innovation, it's something I've done all my life. This is a 35-year career, as an innovation CEO.
At the end of the day, to me, it's establishing product market fit for the technology that you represent and to integrate it into the global supply chain so that it's adopted everywhere. World is very competitive today. You want to be number one in your market sector, NES, our Nano-Encapsulated Sulfur, has a huge scope of product market fit. Gelion today has a very clear focus towards high growth around development, scaling, and commercialization of NES. It has an awesome and highly effective team. Devastated to be leaving them personally. They've been so supportive in my tenure. I've made this decision for personal reasons, in the stage of my life, that when I'm doing this, I'm in boots and all, working 12- 16 hours a day.
I've got a few things that I'm going to be doing before I get too old to do them. I am completely convinced that we've found the right person to take the business forward here now in Matt. There's a lot of innovation ahead, also, the company now will be drilling its focus around execution and scaling, and we needed a CEO that had the experience to deliver this next stage. I've had the pleasure of interacting with Matt for a bit over a month now in preparing for this transition. He's a very strong, honest leader. I'm 100% sure he'll do a great job, and Steve and our board did an excellent job in their transition planning. Very pleased to hand over to you, Matt, if you would take the address to our shareholders from here.
Thanks, John. I appreciate it. Thank you, everybody, for giving me this platform to talk to you today. I am going to go through just a few simple things. I will give a little bit of background about myself, then really talk importantly about why I am excited to be joining Gelion. The fantastic news about this CRADA and the collaboration with the National Lab of the Rockies, and why that is really, really important for Gelion, particularly as we go into this next phase. I am Matt. I have spent the last more than 20 years in the energy and performance materials space. The last 15 years of which have been at Cabot Corporation, a global specialty chemicals and performance materials company, and really a leader in that.
Through my various roles there, they have really been about developing, scaling, and growing performance materials businesses, including Cabot's battery materials business. I have had experience scaling a materials business into the battery space. I have run P&Ls of different sizes from $10 million of revenue to more than $2 billion of revenue, and businesses with teams of anywhere from 20 people to more than 2,000 people. I am extremely honored and excited to be joining Gelion. The reasons that I am excited are manifold, really it boils down to three principal things, I think. Firstly, it is the technology. It is a proven technology, not just by Gelion, not just internally validated, actually validated by our partners, the people who want to use this material.
That is not only important, it also differentiates Gelion from some other battery materials companies who have validated their technology have not had it validated by customers. Proven technology, proven by our partners. The second reason is that this is eminently scalable. I have had experience of scaling manufacturing for performance materials businesses. One of my first questions to Steve and the board was around, "Great, that is a great material, how do you make it?" Whilst our Nano-Encapsulated Sulfur material is really special, actually, the processes that you need to make this at scale do not require invention. They are processes that exist in the world today at scale, we will need engineering partners to build that into a functioning system, there is no invention required.
That was a really, really important thing because in my experience, that is a large part of the battle. Lastly, the partnerships that John and the team have built. I think what is really neat is that we have got partners in different regions with TDK in Asia, with Nissan in Europe, with QinetiQ in Europe, with the National Lab of the Rockies in the U.S., also in different applications, across different cell chemistries for lithium metal anode, which is a great fit for defense applications, with graphite silicon anodes, which is a great fit across quite a wide range of applications. Now even in solid-state chemistries. This is hugely exciting. It is really unique in my experience to have such a great spread of top-tier partners. Proven technology, eminently scalable process, great partners.
I am really, really grateful to John. What he's handing over to me and what I look forward to stewarding for our shareholders. It's a business that has clarity. We are a sulfur battery materials company. It has a very, very strong IP foundation. It has fantastic partnerships. Now, we have added to that the CRADA with the National Lab of the Rockies. What that gives us is an entry point into the U.S., that gives us a partnership in another part of the geographic spread, but also a scale-up path. I'll talk a little bit about that. First, maybe a little bit of background on the CRADA and the National Lab of the Rockies.
National Lab of the Rockies, NLR, formerly NREL, some folks know it by its former name, is a federally funded lab in the United States, underneath the Department of Energy, it's in Colorado. It's one of a network of federal labs, people may have heard of Los Alamos, Argonne National Lab, Idaho National Lab. There are others out there, but the important thing about NLR, it is the National Lab that's dedicated to energy technologies. It's a 300-acre campus. It's got more than 3,500 staff. Its mission is to facilitate the application of research into practical settings. This just matches perfectly with what Gelion is bringing to the United States and more broadly to the battery industry. A CRADA stands for a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between national labs and public or private enterprises.
I think what's important here is it's research and development, not necessarily just R&D. What we're doing is very much in the development bucket with the program with NLR. Hopefully that's a little bit to put some color to this. You can see on the slide we've got what we'll go through in this program, providing our materials, designing and building with NLR's help on the technology, some fantastic cells to prototype, validating them, validating the materials, validating the cells, and validating the manufacturing processes. Then it ends in a domestic pilot plant in the United States, the first production plant at scale of this material, the first in the U.S. That then paves the way for commercial qualification across a wide range of applications. Why is this important to Gelion? Well, I've been involved in CRADAs before.
John's been involved in CRADAs before at other companies. There are lots of good things you can say about it, but there are five parts of the why is this important, that really stand out to me. The first and foremost is the major external validation of this technology in the United States. We've had validation in other regions with other partners. This will give us this validation in the United States and specifically by a federal agency, which comes with a huge amount of credibility. Secondly, we can leverage that credibility to secure two parts of funding that were previously harder for us to go and get. One is non-dilutive grant funding, which there are big pools in the United States, particularly for this type of technology at the moment. The second is access to a group of strategic investors.
There are investors out there, we've met with some of them, that look for companies that have signed CRADAs because it comes with that credibility. Both of these are big pools. The timing of this is important because of the U.S. focus on energy independence and on national security and defense. We're bringing this material to a market that really values the value proposition that we have. The third part is acceleration. This accelerates our path to commercialization. Not only does it get us our pilot plant, but it's a structured program of materials, cells, and manufacturing qualification. That will give us credibility with defense, energy storage, electric vehicle customers in the United States, but that includes U.S. government procurement. This is access into those markets.
When we put those things together, the fourth thing to say about this is it de-risks our scale up. We've got the major technical validation, which reduce our technical risk. We've got then commercial qualification. It accelerates our path to commercialization. It brings down our market risk. Really this is a very important thing for de-risking Gelion's path forward. Lastly, and by no means least, it unlocks U.S. market access for Gelion. I've worked with U.S. companies, for U.S. companies, and living and working in the U.S., all of those for some time. My experience has been U.S. companies like doing business with companies that have a footprint in the United States. They want to de-link from Chinese supply chains under the current environment. That's one of the key features of Gelion's technology. It's based on sulfur chemistry.
Sulfur is abundant in the world, but the U.S. has somewhere in the range of 15% of the world's sulfur production. It's a by-product of the oil and gas refining and chemicals industries. They want things to be fast, and they want things to be real. The CRADA now will deliver all of those things for us. It'll give us a local footprint with credibility. It enables then the U.S. to de-link part of its supply chain with an alternative cathode material for its cells. It will accelerate it. It'll make it fast, and it will very much make it real. For me, the CRADA will deliver all of those things. Just to reiterate, the CRADA is important to us because it's a major external validation with the highest level of credibility in that market.
It will then enable us to take that and leverage it to access pools of funding that were maybe not available to us before. Those are not a given, but we now have a very credible way of pursuing those and engaging on those. Thirdly, it will accelerate our path to commercialization. Fourthly, it will help us de-risk our commercialization and scale up. It will be this sort of absolutely important key in the door to unlock access into the U.S. market, particularly the U.S. defense market, in a very credible way. When we put all of that together with the fantastic work that John and the team have delivered, and you've seen recent announcements on Max Planck, on the solid-state battery program with Nissan, then actually Gelion really becomes a global cathode company.
You can see our partnerships here across the world, in different regions and with the different partners with whom we are extremely proud to be working. Yeah, hopefully that's brought a bit of color to where we are. It's the same mission that John has been stewarding the company through. It's just the next phase of that mission. I'm extremely proud to be the person who's been entrusted to lead that. I think the platform that you see on the screen is a fantastic one that we now need to go and both execute on and supplement. Alex, I think now probably best if I hand back to you for some questions.
That's great. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation, Matt. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed on our investor dashboard. Simon, at this point if I may hand over to you, sir, to take us through the Q&A session, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.
Thanks, Alex. Let's start with some pre-submitted ones. Question for you, Matt. What lessons and experience from your time at Cabot are you bringing to Gelion, and where do you see the greatest opportunity to apply those lessons?
Well, thank you. Great question. I'm sure as the new person on the screen, people are interested to know. I was lucky enough at Cabot to have a really wide range of experiences. I would say the most relevant ones to this fantastic opportunity at Gelion would be the following. Firstly, an understanding of the battery industry, including the needs of different applications, customer qualification processes, companies like Panasonic, Samsung SDI, Tesla, PowerCo, which is Volkswagen, and the industry structure. It's an industry that's built on partnerships and understanding that I think is something I bring with me. Secondly is experience of scaling production and particularly the strategic options that are out there for any company in terms of deploying capacity through different models. Lastly, experience of building and maintaining partnerships across different regions of the world.
That's been across different industries, including in the battery industry and the battery materials industry, and it's something that John has obviously done a fantastic job of, and I'm glad that I can bring some experience to that as well.
Thanks, Matt. Fairly obvious question, this one. You're operating across the U.K., Australia, Japan, and now the U.S. as well. How are you going to lead an organization as geographically dispersed as that?
Yeah, it's fantastic. I'm really looking forward to it. I think, honestly, I'm used to it. Most of my experiences involve leading global teams and cross-regional collaborations within organizations and between organizations. I'm used to it. My preference is often to be in person, but the key things in managing it are, firstly ensuring everyone in our team understands our mission and our priorities so that they can make good choices. Secondly, I think being thoughtful about what to delegate, so when you don't need to travel, when the team can go and just do it themselves, versus when to be in person or when being in person will make the difference. I would also say knowing what the important things are for being at home, because that has to be balanced in all of this.
Yeah, I'm not only used to it, but I relish it, quite frankly. It was one of the attractive things about coming to Gelion is, it is genuinely a global company and it's an environment that I thrive in.
Thank you. Have you identified any gaps, both in terms of capability and skills in the management team, do you need to go and hire?
Well, look, I'm day three on the job. As John said, thankfully, I've been lucky enough to have a month in the background, seeing how John and the team work and what they're working on and trying to get up to speed to have a flying start, it's still kind of very early. What I would say is my first observation is, John alluded to it, that I have inherited a really capable team. The short answer is no. My experience is that as we scale up, we will need to complement the skills of the team. To give some examples, working with EPC firms, manufacturing operations, global key account management. These are things that have to come as we climb the maturity curve. We're not there yet. There's not the need to do that yet.
We have a very capable team for where we are.
Follow on from that, I guess. You're going to be based in the U.K. Does that mean changes to the management team in Australia?
No. I am based in the U.K. We already have a very capable team in place, as I've said, across the U.K., Australia, and in the U.S., actually, where we have Tracy Sizemore, our Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships. A deeply experienced gentleman, and a great part of our team. No need for immediate changes. Three of the leadership roles are in Australia. Our CFO, our CTO, and our HR lead. The short answer is, my role being in the U.K. doesn't change anything. We're a global company. I've just described how we're going to continue to work globally, no need for immediate changes in Australia.
You mentioned in a proactive interview that you were expecting additional partnerships for July and later this year. Can you say anything about these? Will they be commercial or government, or is it going to be in the EV space?
Yeah. Look, this is a great question. I'm sure it's the hot one on everybody's lips. I'm sure you'll understand that I can't give specifics. We are pursuing partnerships across a number of applications, including drones, including EVs, and across short, medium, and longer term horizons. That's very important. Across the value chain, whether that's with end applications, with cell makers or people that make complementary materials in our space with which our materials interact inside a cell. We're pursuing partnerships across all three of those different things, different end markets, different time horizons, and different parts of the value chain. Unfortunately, at this stage, I can't give any specifics.
Thank you. Couple of questions around QinetiQ. One, drones have been in the news recently here in the U.K. What can you tell us about drones in the U.K.? Secondly, where are you with the QinetiQ collaboration? Can you give us an update?
Steve, maybe I can pass this one to you, and you might be best placed to answer this one.
Thanks, Matt. We're on track with QinetiQ. We said we would publish by the end of the year, and we're on track to do that, and we have made perhaps sales. I can't speak to QinetiQ's plans with the new DIP recently announced, but drones are, and autonomous vehicles are a core area for advanced batteries, and it should be no surprise that the U.K., alongside U.S. and most of the NATO countries, are actively pursuing solutions in this space.
Thank you. You mentioned in the September 25 collaboration agreement announcement with TDK that the principal objective over the next 12 months is to progress to prototype lines. Are you still on track for that?
John, you've been the architect of this. If it's okay, I'll pass this one to you. Oh, you're on mute.
Strong. Our CTO, Louis Adriaenssens, and his team, they work very closely with the TDK battery team. We're progressing testing. We exchange progress systematically with them. We have two goals on the way to getting a prototype production. The first is to get to what we call our NES CAM, to what we call our MVP baseline. This is a combination of performance characteristics that we've set as to qualify for commercialization, and we do anticipate sharing this generation of material with TDK shortly. Great progress by team Gelion on that one. Second one is to scale up our fabrication capabilities to be able to make the NES in sufficient scale to support a prototype production line. We're working to that goal in parallel. Again, team Gelion doing a great job on the process technology evolution as well. There's still risk in both of those schedules.
The team is progressing systematically, working diligently towards them, and every day that I was walking into the office, they were inspiring me with their progress every day. I would say generally on track.
Thank you very much. We keep hearing, you've said a couple of times that sulfur is abundant. How do you actually collect it at scale required if the world adopts your battery technology, and who would process it?
I'll take this one. Sulfur is a byproduct of some very, very well-established industries. It's a byproduct of the desulfurization process in refineries, in natural gas processing, and in some chemicals complexes around the world, and supplies very well-established downstream industries like sulfuric acid production, fertilizers, and others. There is already a very, very strong global market for producing sulfur, particularly the type of sulfur that would be used in batteries, is used in batteries amongst other industries with some really very well-established producers. I mean, BASF, Shell, Chevron, Exxon, Saudi Aramco, Mosaic, CF Industries. I don't worry about sulfur supply. No one's got to go out and invent anything to go and start collecting it. Just to put it in perspective, there are in the range of 100 million tons a year of sulfur produced globally.
If you just pick a single market to make the point, if every electric vehicle in the United States, every electric vehicle that's produced in the United States, used cells that had Nano-Encapsulated Sulfur as its cathode, you'd need about 40,000 tons-50,000 tons of that 100 million tons. If we're in that position, we're in an absolutely fabulous position. Yeah, I'm not worried about the sulfur supply globally. One of the many great things about our material is that a little bit goes a very, very long way, and that really is the sweet spot for performance materials.
Thank you. Quite a technical question yet. Do you have any plans to release specific measured energy density numbers for the drop-in graphitic cell? Separately, do you plan to release real cycle life data for the lithium metal cells? Just curious whether those are statistics or measurements that you're going to be providing.
Steve, I'm going to duck this one and pass it over to you if that's okay.
It's coming to me? Okay. The answer is yes, the company will be giving all those numbers in time. One of the big things about our relationship with the National Laboratory of the Rockies is that it is about going through the process of the testing, the qualification, and the regulatory compliance as well. The core part of the first phase of that particular relationship is all about getting third-party validated performance numbers that will be utilized in the commercialization of the cells to the major customers that depend on that sort of quality testing. Watch this space. The performance of the material is amazing. Our team does a lot of testing. We test with lithium metal. We test with graphitic anodes. One thing that knocks me over every time is just how reliable the NES is.
Thank you, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces for trusting us with that relationship. Thank you to team Gelion for the wonderful work, taking that initial concept and then bringing it all the way through to the amazing product that it is today.
Thanks, John. Question on the CRADA. How long will the process take to get validation? Can you give us an estimate?
John, I'll touch on this and then perhaps pass it over to you to see if there's anything I've missed. The phase I of the CRADA, which is the material and cell validation, I think is in the first 12 months. I can see John nodding. Anything I've missed there, John?
Absolutely.
Thumbs up.
It ties straight to the previous question that was asked, Matt. Yeah, the first stage is 12 months.
Thank you. Where do you now see the most likely first commercial take up, Asia, Europe, or the U.S.?
That's a really good question. I'd like to say all of the above. Without being glib, it will depend on a lot of things. It depends on the chemistries that they're using, how quickly they get their chemistries fixed. Sometimes it's not just all about your material. Battery cells are the most complex downstream market I've worked in in 15, 16 years in chemistry. Making I quite often say this to people, but making a battery is hard. Making a battery that works is even harder, and making a battery that works economically is harder still. Our customers, the people who are using the material, their adoption of this depends on those things, and that's why picking the right partners is really important. I think the important thing here is that we've picked really good partners. They've solved and cracked those challenges.
They know how to make batteries. They know how to make batteries that work, and they know how to make them economically. It's really hard to put a timeline on it. It's really hard to put which one will come over the line first. I think the important thing is we're working with the right people in the right places on the right applications.
Thank you. Does the increased interest in sodium-ion, like from CATL, make it a path that you're going to be addressing?
I know how much John is passionate about sodium-ion batteries, it would be rude of me not to give him a chance to speak on this topic. It's important. It's important in the world for a number of reasons that John will discuss, I'm sure. We are doing some technical work on sodium-ion. I think the important things in there for me are, we've got a lot to do, we have to make sure there's a kind of a priority order in where we're focusing. We need to be really thoughtful about the technical success in taking on something, new programs and product market fit. I think that's something that John's championed so strongly is product market fit.
The one thing I'd add to that is We don't just want to chase sodium because there's a lot of news about it at the moment. We want to make sure we're chasing the right sodium-ion chemistry with the right partners. We have got a bit of work going on in the company assessing this at the moment. To the answer the question, I can't give a definitive answer whether this is something that we will definitively be or not be doing. John, I'll pass to you because you're really hot on sulfur, I think you've seen the work that's been going on in the world on that.
Thanks, Matt. What I said earlier is NES has such a broad product market fit. One of the absolutely amazing things about the NES technology is actually the same material, the same NES material can be coated on a cathode, then that coated cathode can be combined in a system that uses lithium ions as the charge carrier and can be used with a system that uses sodium-ion as the charge carrier as well. Now, lithium has a higher energy density. Sodium is cheaper. With NES, we have this material that has a huge product market fit. Firstly, the lithium metal, obviously giving us the highest energy density, highest gravimetric energy density you could ask for. Fantastic material for that extent.
You go to the graphitic and the graphitic with silicon cell. That's a drop-in, so that in the case of that material, we can go to pair with standard anodes and standard electrolytes. It's one of the truly remarkable things about NES. Then you come to the one that, as Matt says, really speaks to my heart, which is the room temperature sodium-sulfur. That cell is literally sodium-sulfur and carbon. It's the furthest along the line in terms of those three cell areas I talked about. The potential for that room temperature sodium-sulfur, which will be an ultra-low-cost cell that can be produced from materials that are available abundantly anywhere in the world, is huge.
That's the scope that Gelion has as the sulfur battery company to be able to commercialize early, to drop-in commercialize, and then to be able to have this third stage , which is just to me will be so influential to have that cell being able to produce all around the world. Matt, thanks for giving me the chance to talk on that one. It is an area of passion. I think if I hadn't have, I might've got a red card at the World Cup by putting my hand over my mouth at the wrong time or something like that. It is an area of passion, as you can pick up.
Thank you very much. Is your route to market to try and go through existing battery manufacturers, and how many of those are currently evaluating NES?
I think one of the beauties of this material, the Nano-Encapsulated Sulfur cathode material, is that it can drop into existing production lines. I've seen a lot of battery materials companies bringing new technologies into the market that are great, that are fantastic materials, but they require the cell makers to do something different, whatever that might be, sort of completely retool a line, change the atmospheric conditions, add extra pieces of equipment, add a process somewhere into their existing manufacturing process. That's not the case for our material. What that means is there are some companies out there that then they're a battery materials company, but they are forced to go and start to make cells to prove that their material can work. That's a very expensive endeavor. Making cells is a very expensive endeavor.
The beauty of our material is that it can be used on existing lines by existing manufacturers who've solved those problems that I talked about before, who've built factories, who can make batteries, can make chemistry work, and can do it competitively. They are the best partners for us to be working with, in my opinion. Again, you can see the names on the screen of the ones that we're working with. Of course, there are others that are evaluating our materials. I'd perhaps just hand to Steve to see if you've got anything you'd sort of add to that.
Hi, Steve, can you hear us? Let me just You are now muted. Go ahead, Steve.
Yeah. Maybe you can just repeat that question, Matt.
It's about will we be working with cell manufacturers as opposed to making batteries, and then are other cell manufacturers beyond the ones we've got on the screen are testing our materials. My response to that is the beauty of our material is that we don't have to go and make cells because it works on existing cell lines. We haven't got to make cells ourselves to make our technology work. That as well as the folks that you can see on the screen, there are others out there testing our materials, but we're not ready to say yet exactly who they are.
Yeah, I think you and John covered it in that one of the real advantages we have is the development, where all of our development work builds the platform, and it is nearly all relevant for a whole series of different applications. We really leverage our development work in multiple ways and multiple applications. The work we do on EVs is equally applicable to the work we do on drones. We get a lot of bang for our development spend. In terms of customers, look, we're a small company, so we can only have a small number of strategic partners. For us, it's been to carefully select those partners, we can go wide and deep with over coming years.
Some traction in Japan, we've already announced ships with TDK and I think that we have chose wisely in the partners we have established to date. I think going forward, you can expect that the company and the board will be looking for partners which are strategic in nature. Minor application or equipment. This is all about building long-term shareholder value.
Thank you. We've almost run out of time, but a couple of quick questions to finish with. I'll put them together, I hope you don't mind. What's the duration of the CRADA agreement with NLR? You mentioned on the way through there, Matt, working with EPC firms, is there a plan for you to work more closely with EPC firms? Will you own your manufacturing facilities?
Two good questions. The first question, the duration of the CRADA is three years, unless the two parties agree otherwise because we can get the work done quicker or we need more time, or we choose that there's additional work we want to do. That's a simple one. On the EPC question, there's the number of angles to it, but ultimately for people to use the material, it needs to be made. The great thing about that and the great thing about this material is that could come in a number of forms. It could be partners making the material on our behalf. It could be licensing technology to partners for them to make this material. It could be plants that are in joint venture. It could be building and operating plants under whatever ownership structure.
The great thing is that this material, this business, lends itself to different business models. I list those in no specific order. The important thing is any of those cases, there's engineering work to be done. We have a process to make the material, and part of scale-up is industrializing that process with existing large-scale processes out in the world, and we will be securing partners to help us with that work. How that's then deployed, there are multiple ways that that can be done. John, anything you'd like to just say on that? You're nodding along. I think you and I have
All I would say, Matt, is you've just reinforced the reasons why I think you're the right person to come in and this is the next stage of Gelion is about doing all the things that Matt just went through, and that's his field of experience. Very confident that that's where we'll be going, Matt. We got it.
You're very kind. Thanks.
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, John. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Steve. I'll hand back to Alex.
That's great. Thank you all very much indeed for addressing those questions for investors today. Steve, before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to yourself and the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Thank you. First of all, this has been about the most professional handover between CEOs that I have ever experienced. I think both John and Matt have done a fantastic job in the last month to make this as professional and seamless as possible. I think the board and myself are convinced we have found the right person at the helm in Matt. Matt, welcome to the team. My closing remark would be for John. John, through his tenure as CEO, has always put the shareholders first, and his level of commitment and diligence has been second to none. To wish you, John, and your wife Jane, a long, healthy, and very happy retirement. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Steve. You're a champion, man. Thank you.
That's great, guys. Thank you all once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors now to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.