Good afternoon, and welcome to the Ilika plc half-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just please simply at any time type your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll, and if you would give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company will be most grateful. I'd now like to hand over, if I may, to Steve Boydell, CFO, and Graeme Purdy, CEO. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
Thank you. Thank you for that introduction, Mark. A very warm welcome to all of the people that have chosen to attend this presentation. Delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you again to review our half-year results. Mark, I think actually, if we switch off the cameras for Steve and myself, it will maximize the amount of screen that the slides can be seen on, and that will make it easier to follow the presentation. This is our half-year results. Actually, they cover the period from 1st of May through to 31st of October of last year. As Mark said, I'm joined on today's call by Steve Boydell, our CFO. There are bios for those of you who'd like a quick reminder of who we are.
In fact, these bios are also on the website, on the Ilika website, so I'm not going to labor that story. You can, go and look them up at your leisure for some additional information. Thank you. Ilika is one of the few independent global experts in the design and manufacture of solid-state batteries. There are two product lines that we've got. First of all, are miniature Stereax batteries that you see being held up by one of our engineers there, a wafer of such cells. Secondly, the Goliath product line, which are larger formats, solid-state pouch cells that are designed for, consumer appliances and also for EVs. These are the addressable markets. First of all, MedTech and industrial IoT for the Stereax product line.
In their own right, quite substantial markets, but smaller than the huge markets that are addressable by Goliath. Consumer electronics being currently the biggest addressable market for lithium-ion, but expected soon, certainly by 2025, to be overtaken by the market for EV batteries. Why are people interested in solid-state? Well, first of all, they are ultra compact, so they occupy about half the volume of lithium-ion, and that enables smaller battery pack design. You can imagine for people who are receiving miniature medical implants, you know this is a serious advantage. But also actually for motorists who have EVs, you can get a much more attractive design of vehicle, and of course, less weight to transport if you have a solid-state battery pack.
The other advantage is that they are tolerant of high temperatures, so they operate at up to 150 degrees Celcius compared to the 60 degrees Celcius maximum for a standard lithium-ion cell. This has got advantages not only in industrial IoT, where such cells might be exposed to high operating temperatures, but also it allows you to shrink the design of a battery pack in a vehicle which otherwise would require quite substantial cooling. Fast charging, also an advantage for medical device implants. If you're a patient that needs one of these implants recharged, you don't want to spend very much time plugged into a machine for that to happen. You'd much rather that it was done rapidly.
Also, of course, if you're a motorist, you want the advantage of a rapid recharge of your vehicle, rather than having to stop for an extended break, on a motorway while that happens. One of the things that we're increasingly asked about is, how easy it is to recycle solid-state batteries, because actually it's a significant challenge for standard lithium-ion. Currently, only about 5% of standard lithium-ion cells are recycled. One of the reasons is actually it's quite a challenge to do. They are environmentally harmful due to the toxicity of the material that the liquid electrolyte is made of, and because that electrolyte is flammable, there's of course a risk of fire, so they can't be put into a landfill or incinerated. For the oxide solid-state batteries that we make, there's no risk of explosion. They're non-flammable.
Once you've stripped off the outer packaging, you can actually use processes that are commonly available, typically from the mining industry, to extract the metals from those materials and return them to the supply chain. How do we make money out of this? The model that we've got for Stereax is a very straightforward business model. We are a manufacturer, so we have a new facility that we have installed in Southampton here in the U.K., which I'll talk about a bit more in a few moments, where we make sales on wafers, and then we outsource the dicing and thinning and stacking of those cells. We bring them back in for forming the batteries and then testing them before dispatching them to customers for their use.
There are some companies in our portfolio of commercial interactions that have addressable markets that exceed the capacity of our fab, and that actually presents a licensing opportunity. When we have discussions with them, there's an understanding that we will support their product development and their commercial launch, and when volumes ramp up to meet the total addressable market, that actually, at that point, they have the option of taking a license, which they would then use to either manufacture the cells themselves. Some of the larger IoT and MedTech companies have their own integrated cell manufacturing companies right now, part of their own internal supply chain, or they can have them manufactured by an outsourced partner.
In terms of our fab implementation, you'll recall that in 2020 we raised a GBP 15 million round in order to establish a facility. We secured a lease on the location and actually completed the design, installation, and commissioning of a clean room, so that's a clean room within that facility that allows us to control humidity, temperature, and particle count within the facility to give us quality control over the wafers. Actually back in 2020, after we'd secured the funding, we placed orders for the long lead items, the pieces of equipment that are used in order to manufacture our cells.
They arrived at our facility once we had completed the clean room last year, and those bits of equipment were installed on time and on budget, despite global disruptions to the supply chain that have affected so many industries globally over the last 12 months or so. We've now commenced the qualification of our manufacturing process, and in fact, we've opened the facility with some local dignitaries in December and many of you actually took advantage and attended our corporate open day, our capital markets day when we had both institutional investors and private investors who came and had tours of the facility and saw it operating. During this period, we've continued with engagement of a portfolio of Stereax customers in the markets that we address.
We've continued to operate our pilot line, and that's allowed us to provide samples to customers who have used that to progress their engineering programs within their companies. As the volumes of cells that they require ramp up in the course of 2022, we'll be able to satisfy that demand, as the volume of supply from our new facility, which has got about a 70-fold capacity increase relative to the existing pilot line, and then ramp up for the main markets in subsequent years. Perhaps a few moments and words on the applications that we're addressing. You know, in medical devices, these are fascinating markets with very high growth rates, smart orthopedics being one of the more interesting ones.
Actually at the moment, you know, the market is met by the supply of pretty passive mechanical implants, and there is a need really to try and improve the functionality and also surgical outcomes from these devices. In the U.S., there's currently about 1 million knee and hip replacements every year, and this is expected, unfortunately, to rise quite substantially by 2040, largely driven by an aging population demographic and also increasing levels of obesity, which leads to joint failure. The cost of an explant, so when an implant fails and surgical intervention is required in order to replace the joint again, is about three times that of an implant. The insurance companies in particular really wants to avoid this type of incident.
In order to provide a solution, you get a sensor that's implanted into the joint, that then sends information about the movement of the joint, and the patient can be coached by the physiotherapist to ensure that the right postoperative activity is undertaken by the patient to ensure the best outcome from the surgical intervention. Of course, this requires batteries and a totally safe miniature solid-state battery is the best solution for this application. Another very large market is nerve stimulation. This is really actually partly a solution to the opioid crisis in the U.S., which is triggered by the need to solve, in particular, back pain problems. The vagus nerve is a potential area of the peripheral nervous system, where solutions to pain relief can be implemented very effectively.
There are a number of key nerves that connect the brain to the body, and the vagus nerve is perhaps the most important one. It's connected to all sorts of organs within the body. Therapies have been developed really over the past 30 years to treat a number of different conditions, ranging from involuntary muscle spasms like epilepsy and Parkinson's, all the way through to arthritis. A Stereax device is small enough to fit close to the nerve. It's got, you know, a lower risk implantation processes associated with it, and is, of course, much lower cost than trying to fit large primary batteries into a different location in the body. There are relatively few locations in the body where such large primary batteries can be safely fitted.
At our Capital Markets Day, we actually had videos from four of our partners who presented. I'm not actually gonna play these videos right now because they take about seven minutes to run. I think it's probably a better use of our time if you're interested, you can take the opportunity to look at these videos on our YouTube channel. The companies are very diverse. We've got Vitruvens, which is a French technology platform company for medical devices, where they are creating the electronics together with Ilika's Stereax cells to be able to provide an energy solution to some of these different applications. We were lucky enough to have Krishnan from NXTSTIM present and talk about the usefulness of Stereax cells for his nerve stim applications.
We've just come back from the NANS Neurostimulation event in the U.S., in Florida, where Krishnan was a keynote speaker, and he's a very influential player in this field. We also had a presentation from Blink, which is an Israeli company, actually focused on the harvesting of energy from the blink reflex for use in smart contact lenses. This is an area that's not only relevant to medical devices, but also to AR/VR deployments. You know, if you go to Silicon Valley and speak to some of the tech development companies there, it's a glimpse into the future, really.
These companies are developing solutions to replace computer screens, like the one I'm looking at now, with actually smart lenses, which can project an image, and prevent the need for you to carry around a large screen. I know it sounds like science fiction, but actually, it's a glimpse of the future. The fourth video was from a company called WindTAK, which is a wind turbine solution provider, Polish company. This is one of the condition monitoring applications that we've talked about previously, where Stereax can survive the hostile conditions that you often get in infrastructure and energy generation environments. It can survive the temperatures that you get in direct sunlight.
Here, of course, the idea is that you harvest energy from the vibration of the turbine blades, store it in the cell, and then use that to send data about the condition of the blade and basically predict if it's starting to crack. Let's change gear and talk a little about Goliath. I don't think anybody could have failed to have noticed that the EV revolution is underway. Strong customer demand, and if anything, you know, a shortage of supply of technology to meet that demand.
We've got a forecast here from Bloomberg on the bottom left, showing that solid-state technology is expected to dominate the battery supply in Europe and the U.S. in the next decade. The light blue parts of the columns are solid-state, and the purple is existing battery technology. I think most analysts are now convinced that the benefits of solid-state will in time come to dominate the market. Of course, the reason that they're not deployed right now is that they're still in development. Here's a technology S-curve to explain what Goliath needs to do in order to become competitive for this application. On the top right, you've got a diagram which shows the S-curve of existing technology, so that's the dark blue line.
You can see that starting to max out as it enters that maximum theoretical energy density zone, between 300 and 350 Wh/kg, dependent on chemistry that's used. The green curve associated with Goliath, you can see their different data points and product points as we move through, get lithium-ion equivalence, by the end of 2022, beginning of 2023, and then surpass the energy density of traditional incumbent technology and move into higher areas of maximum theoretical energy density. It's not just about cell energy density, and this comes back to actually the issue that solid-state can tolerate higher temperatures in the context of a pack. What people in the industry talk about is the gravimetric cell-to-pack ratio or GCTP.
In a state-of-the-art battery pack at the minute, you might get 60%, 65% GCTP, which is basically the weight of the pack that's taken up by the cells themselves, and the rest of it is actually the structure of the module, the BMS, and the cooling system. Because solid state needs a smaller cooling system because you can run it at higher temperatures, you end up with not only less packaging, but also less cooling from, in terms of pumps, fluid, and heat exchangers, and therefore you can get to a GCTP that's closer to 75%-85%, and therefore get weight reductions at the pack level.
In terms of the technical progress that Goliath has made over the last six months or so, it's been a very rapid and pleasing journey actually to be part of. You know, we were generating more than 500 cycles without cell failure from Goliath in Q2 of last year. We then succeeded in bringing down the operating temperature of Goliath, and that's actually one of the challenges with solid-state in general. You get higher lithium-ion conductivity at elevated temperatures. But of course, you know, we need these cells to work at room temperature and even colder than that. Therefore, getting adequate lithium-ion conductivity at lower temperatures is a key objective. And then we increased cathode utilization and capacity in the last quarter.
This is key really to getting larger capacity pouch cells of the size that are relevant to the automotive industry. Also, of course, we need to demonstrate batch reproducibility and baseline cell performance, which we were able to do. The diagram on the bottom right gives you some insights into a data set where we reproducibly were able to take three different batches of cells, cycle them, and get the same result in terms of their performance. We've also started our mechanical robustness testing and at this point I've got a little video actually for a bit of light relief. Let's move to that now. Here we go. Hopefully you can see that. There's one of our scientists, he's folding one of our Goliath benchmark M0 cells, and now he's rolling it.
You know, some people have said in the past, "Well, if you do that to a solid-state cell, particularly one with an oxide electrolyte, it's gonna crack and fail." That one didn't. The light was still on. Here's the second test, one of our scientists using a pair of scissors to cut open a Goliath pouch. If you did this with a normal cell, please don't try that at home, it would catch fire, and it would spill toxic liquid. No liquid here, totally solid, and there's part of the electrode that's just been cut off, and you can see that it's still lighting that LED. A very robust technology that delivers on expectations on how useful it is and how safe it is. Let's go back to the presentation. That's fantastic. Which segments are we going to sell Goliath into?
Well, actually, the segment for us that is going to be the early adoption segment is hypercars and supercars. These are quite large pack sizes, but they are actually more tolerant of higher prices than the mass market will be. When we first start to ramp up production volume of our cells, like the ones pictured at the top of the slide, we wanna make sure that we're not selling into a price-sensitive market. Of course, if you're buying a hypercar, then you're not really worried whether the pack price is $10,000 or $20,000, because actually, you've paid maybe $1 million for the vehicle. Actually, it's an advantage being based here in Europe because a lot of the supercar manufacturers are based here too.
Obviously in Italy, with some of the classic brands there, but also in the U.K. and Germany. Although this isn't, you know, the mass market, when you think about the types of passenger vehicles that are sold in the largest volumes, it's still a significant volume in the context of the commercialization of Ilika's solid-state batteries. Of course, in time as the manufacturing price and volume, well, as the price comes down and the volume increases, we'll be able to move out from this segment and address the larger mass transport markets. Also, actually a slightly smaller format version of Goliath, outside of automotive, which should give us our first opportunities to get to market early with the technology. A replacement for the 18650 format.
Instead of two cylindrical cells, you have a rectangular format that's half the thickness. This is also really for luxury products, luxury beauty products, as well as auxiliary power. In these sectors, you can expect to get actually much higher prices than automotive, even less price-sensitive, and therefore, it's an attractive early rollout for our technology. In terms of the timelines that we're looking at, you see the timelines across the top there. Got another couple of years of process development and tech development in parallel. That will get us to module and pack design, and then for automotive, allow us to put our products into what the industry calls mules, which are pre-production vehicles where the performance of components is tested.
We get through to pack validation prior to Gigafactory scale-up and mass commercialization. On that route, you can see a number of cells that are different generations with steadily increasing energy density and power performance, or C-rate, as the industry calls it. In terms of our physical facilities, we are currently operating in a development facility that we call our pre-pilot plant. We have just this year completed the initial engagements with Honda, McLaren, and Jaguar Land Rover, where we've worked together with them to define specifications and develop our first prototypes.
Last year, we did a successful placing for GBP 25 million, which is in preparation for our scale up to the Ilika pilot level that you see there, which will be on the same footprint that we currently occupy here in the U.K. We're working together with Comau, which is the factory automation arm of Fiat, part of the Stellantis group. That will also fund our development through to manufacturing readiness that you see in mid-2024 when we'll move to a mega facility, similar in scale to the UK Battery Industrialization Center or UK BIC, with which we have a framework agreement. That Comau collaboration will allow us to prepare for that transition. Beyond that, we're likely to license or form a JV for gigafactory production.
Steve, at this point, I think I'll let you just summarize our financial results, please.
Thank you, Graeme. We released this morning our half-year results for the period to 31st of October 2021. They're exactly in line with the trading update that we put out back in November, particularly on these three key lines. Turnover was down relative to the same period last year. That's because last year's included a full period of grant revenues associated with the three initial R&D programs that we had. Those have now completed. There's a bit of a gap in funding. We're anticipating additional funding to be forthcoming from the Faraday Battery Challenge later this calendar year. That's the rationale for that reduction relative to last year.
That turnover or grant reduction has resulted in a net widened EBITDA loss, but we have also incurred some increased operational costs as we've been commissioning the Stereax facility. We've also been intensifying our Goliath development effort on the back of the fundraise that we completed in July that gave us the certainty to press ahead with that. The fundraise obviously bolstered the cash balance at the period end. It was just under GBP 28 million relative to GBP 12.4 million for the prior period. On the next slide, I've just outlined summary of that raise. There was an institutional placing of about GBP 18 million.
There was an open offer, which I know a number of you may well have participated in, as well as the retail offer which supplemented that such that after fees we raised just under GBP 24 million. Now the specified uses for those funds were GBP 10 million to accelerate the Goliath development. That's primarily by bringing on more staff to accelerate that development. It's also a GBP 5 million that's been earmarked for the increase in the Goliath pre-pilot facility to make that tenfold increase in productivity. The other development in the period is that we've upgraded from the pink sheets, which is basically sort of relatively unregulated market in the U.S., which was not within our control to an OTCQX Best Market, where we actually control the listing.
We're able to issue RNS's in the U.S. at the same time as they're released to the market in the U.K. We've done that because we had an increasing interest from the U.S., and actually, U.S. retail shareholders now make up just over 15% of our register. There was a clamor from them. We were getting a lot of direct requests for, you know, how to trade in our shares. This OTCQX Best Market allows them to trade on most of the online dealing platforms in the U.S., and they can trade in U.S. dollars and in U.S. working hours. That's helped improved the liquidity of our stock over the last few months. I'll pass you back to Graeme to summarize.
Thank you, Steve. I think from what you've heard, in summary, we're strongly positioned to progress the scale-up of Stereax technology through this fab implementation, complete the process and product qualification and commence commercial sales later on this calendar year, which will be in our next financial year, given that it starts on the first of May. The Goliath story is more about technology advancement, and also actually the partnerships that we've started to create and will mature through these defined technical milestones. Of course, both of these technology platforms position us for significant revenue growth opportunities going forward. Thank you.
That's great. Graeme, Steve, thank you very much indeed for updating investors this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted already, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed after this meeting via your investor dashboard. Graeme, Steve, we did receive a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and I think there are a number of common themes within the questions that have been submitted during the live event.
What I propose to do is maybe just ask you a few of these pre-submitted questions and then, ask if you would be so kind as to look at the live Q&A. One of the questions that we received ahead of today's event is, if Ilika 3D prints its batteries, couldn't it scale up at a lot less cost and money? Maybe you could just give a little bit of color on that.
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, 3D printing is actually a really useful technology, and is used very broadly actually by a number of industries. In fact, actually, it was originally called rapid prototyping, and that's really what it's used for. It's useful for rapid prototyping of a wide range of items. So it's generally used for evaluating early product designs or carrying out short production runs rather than for mass production. So I think, you know, most analysts would wonder if 3D printed batteries could really be manufactured at an affordable price. Yeah. Thank you.
Thanks, Graeme. Just moving on to the next question. I understand that margins from Stereax sales will differ across customer and segments. However, what average gross profit margin do you currently expect to be generating from the newly open facility? Are you forecasting positive bottom line results from Stereax division since 2022/2023?
Steve, do you wanna take that one?
We expect an average gross margin of about 50%. I think it's probably gonna be slightly less in the industrial Internet of Things applications. There are applications in the medical device sector where it could be higher than that. The initial revenues from Stereax will offset the Stereax increased spend next financial year. Thereafter, we expect the Stereax business to make a net contribution to group overheads and help actually contribute towards the Goliath development program.
Thank you very much indeed, Steve. Perhaps a final pre-submitted question, a fairly open one, but what are the company's ambitions over the next two to five years in terms of products and profits?
Yeah. You know, regarding Stereax, we built a fab to manufacture our M300 product. That's gonna be a 300 microamp-hour product. Specifically for the market segments that we've talked about today, you know, and the process for that is currently being qualified. Commercial sales of that product will commence in the next financial year. Our roadmap for Stereax includes a high temperature battery that we call our AP battery, and that's really for Internet of Things, industrial Internet of Things in particular. Actually a larger capacity battery, which we call our C1, which has got the same format as an M300, but has got a higher energy density for medical implants.
They're both due actually to be launched next year, so 2023, and they'll be followed by an even larger capacity Stereax Medical Implants battery, our C-two, which has got a 1000 microamp hours later on actually in 2023. We'll have a product for those smart contact lens applications scheduled in 2024. So you can see there's actually a nice runway of different products as we go forward for Stereax. For Goliath, the P1 is an early product release, and that's gonna be sent to development partners. Then we'll have increasingly energy dense cells in particular for EV deployment, which will include the P2 at 320 Wh/ kg, and then the P4 at even higher energy density levels by 2024.
In terms of revenue generation and profit, the Stereax product line will allow us to fully maximize our fab capacity. You know, we've previously given guidance that that fab should generate revenues at capacity of between GBP 12 million and GBP 13 million when fully utilized within the next few years. The Goliath product opportunity is a larger commercial one. The markets are bigger, and that will be ready for transfer into mega scale manufacturing by 2024, 2025, and we'll build up revenue from that point onwards, driven largely by the scale of the factory deployment that we land on for Goliath.
At the moment, it's looking like we want to build a mega factory as opposed to a giga factory for the initial commercialization, and we'll be moving forward on that basis.
That's great. Thank you very much indeed, Graeme. Of course, there were a number of other pre-submitted questions, again, a little bit more technical in nature, which obviously we'll review post today's presentation. You have received a considerable number of questions throughout today's meeting, and perhaps if I may, Graeme and Steve, if I could just ask you to open up that Q&A tab and then just read through perhaps ones where we haven't touched on or perhaps areas of interest, and then I'll pick up from you towards the end.
Fantastic. All right. Maybe the first one that has had a couple of votes is from JB. What are the relative merits and demerits of sulfide electrolyte solid-state batteries as used by Toyota and Solid Power versus oxide electrolytes as Ilika uses? This is an interesting technical discussion, a live debate really. You know, sulfide electrolytes were one of the first types of electrolytes that were invented and demonstrated to work in a solid-state battery. And they were picked up by Toyota through an academic collaboration that they had in the University of Tokyo. The advantage is that they've got a high ionic conductivity and are electronically insulating, so they function as a solid-state electrolyte.
They're also quite malleable, so it means that you can get a reasonable contact between the positive and negative electrodes when you make the cell, and of course, that reduces the transfer resistance of the lithium ions as they move backwards and forwards through the cell. The sulfides though are a little bit tricky to handle in a factory environment because they do give off toxic gases, so hydrogen sulfide and SO2 and those gases need to be managed at very low levels, otherwise they pose a risk to the workforce.
Actually, my latest intel from our suppliers are that actually the sulfide electrolytes are selling at a substantial premium to the types of materials we use in the oxide electrolytes at Ilika, so actually a tenfold increase in price relative to oxide electrolytes. The oxide electrolytes that we use, technically are more challenging to get to work. They typically have got a lower intrinsic ionic conductivity, which leads to higher resistances in the cells, so it's important to use the right type of additives, and form the interfaces as effectively as possible between the electrolyte and the electrodes. That's really part of the technical development that we're doing here at Ilika.
Shall I take the next one? Yeah.
Go on. Yeah.
The one from JB which says, "Can you confirm that you'll be selling Stereax product made in fab one from financial year 2023, which starts in May 2022?" Yeah, I think the answer to that is yes, we can. We're still going through the process and product qualification of the fab, which we anticipate to be complete in the first half of this calendar year. The second half of this calendar year we'll see Stereax product actually being sold to our customers, and we've got a number of pre-orders that we'll be looking to fulfill in that period.
Okay. Now we've got another one here. This is from Paul. He says, "After trials with Ilika, Honda have now entered into a strategic partnership and invested in SES, which is SES AI. What should investors read into that? And does Ilika have OEM EV partners?" Yeah, if you were an automotive company like Honda, you would have a number of partnerships around the globe. Of course, a lot of these automotive OEMs are backing a number of horses and are making multiple investments. Honda are no exception and, you know, we don't have an exclusive relationship by any means with Honda. We still have an open and regular dialogue with them, and they're part of the portfolio of OEMs and supply chain partners that we interact with.
I would say, in terms of what investors should read into it, is that they should probably congratulate Honda on spreading their bets and keeping an open mind for open collaboration. Let's have a look, see if there's some other stuff that's different. Yeah, there's a question from Adrian here: Do solid-state batteries perform well in very cold temperatures as well as high temperatures, or is there a cutoff temperature below which performance noticeably deteriorates? Unfortunately, as one of our favorite Star Trek characters said, "You can't beat the laws of physics." Unfortunately for all batteries, ion mobility reduces at lower temperatures, so normal lithium-ion batteries actually don't perform particularly well in very cold temperatures.
That is a challenge actually for pack design, but that can be overcome by having some pack heating to start cell cycling when you get particularly low temperatures. That's actually incorporated into traditional lithium-ion pack design right at the minute. Actually there's no hard cutoff below which you know you can't get any of these cells to work, but it does deteriorate gradually. Once the cells actually start cycling, they generate their own heat. Actually you know once you've started the vehicle and have driven it down the road, there's no need for sustained heating. Actually the intrinsic warmth of the pack keeps the cells in their sweet spot in terms of the operating zone. Let's have another question here.
From Simon, it says, "Do you have enough customer commitment to fill your in-house fab, or are they still evaluating samples?" Yeah, actually, we will need to continue to debottleneck and increase capacity in our in-house fab to meet customer demand. We've got early commitment from a portfolio of customers that will take our initial production from the fab, and over the next few years, we expect that to ramp up until the fab is fully utilized. Yeah, we have patiently waiting customers, and actually the pressure is on the operations team to deliver those samples. One from Adrian here: How much more technical progress is there still to be made with solid-state batteries?
I think, you know, with Goliath in particular, this is a classic technology S-curve where, you know, the incumbent technology is still, in practical terms, performing better than the solid-state next-generation cells that are being developed, not only by Ilika, but actually, you know, by our competitors as well. You're gonna get that parity point, which most people expect next year when, actually, the advantages of solid-state can be combined with the higher energy density, and then you will get an improved outcome. I think, you know, the theoretical justification for that is very clear. The initial data that's coming out of prototypes is also extremely encouraging.
I don't think there are any, you know, big breakthroughs that are waiting to happen. It's more of a case of the classic Japanese continuous improvement. That comes from Kaizen and, you know, the relentless pursuit of excellence in order to deliver those outcomes. Got a question from Christopher here: What yields are you achieving on the Stereax line? On our pilot line, we were regularly seeing yields in the order of 85%-90%. With the Stereax manufacturing line, we're still qualifying the process, as we were discussing earlier. We are lower than that at present, and that's really the objective of carrying out that process optimization to make sure that we've got commercially competitive yields that are, you know, in the 90% and above.
Another one from Christopher: Have you continued to see improvements in the performance of Goliath cells? And are you still on track for a commercial device? Yeah, I think, you know, as we've gone through the presentation, we've demonstrated some of the improvements that we've seen in 2021. We're continuing to see that actually in this year, we've got a very steep S-curve to climb, and we are definitely still on track for that commercial device. Here's another one from Adrian, actually, some quite good ones from Adrian today. Besides lithium, what other metals and minerals are commonly used in solid-state batteries? You know, actually they often use fairly well-understood cathodes. For the automotive industry, the cathode of choice is NMC, which is lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide.
You know, there's always a lot of discussion in the industry about the price of cobalt in particular, and the ethics of cobalt mining. You know, that is, that's just as important for solid-state cells. There are other different types of cathodes that can be used like NCA, LFP. You know, the big attraction for LFP is that actually there's plenty of iron in the world, so LFP stands for lithium iron phosphate. It's a relatively inexpensive, albeit lower energy density solution, which has been heavily commercialized in China. You know, perhaps can be used increasingly in the mass market. Even Tesla actually have talked about using LFP-based chemistries.
Other, you know, metals that are important are, of course, copper for current collectors and aluminum as well. Another question here from Adrian: Is the outer casing for Goliath some sort of plastic? Actually, it is a foil. It's a metal foil that we use for that, which has some temperature-resistant polymer associated with it. Let's have a look. From Malcolm, we got: You state that Goliath is now capable of operating at room temperature, but my car was sitting at -5. Yeah, mine too. Actually, I had to scrape the frost off the windshield this morning. How will you cope with this? Yeah. The way that actually you generally do this is that you warm the battery pack for starting.
There are technologies that already exist for that. Once the battery pack starts to cycle, you can deal with those lower environmental temperatures. One from Paul here: What's stopping more rapid acceleration of Goliath? Capital, skills, or ambition? Actually last year, in the summer, we raised GBP 25 million, which Steve was outlining before, for the additional capital that we need, in order to debottleneck the facility that we've got and turn our pre-pilot line into a pilot line. Of course, there is the need to hire a skilled workforce. Actually the market for, you know, battery scientists and engineers is pretty tight because, you know, there are lots of organizations, not only solid-state, but also traditional lithium-ion batteries that are hiring quite aggressively.
You know, that capital that we raised allows us to be able to attract some of the key skills that we need in order to you know continue to scale our business. We've certainly got the ambition and you know I believe that Ilika is in that leading cohort of cell designers that's well positioned for growth and market expansion going forward.
Shall I jump in, give you a break?
Yeah.
Julian S has asked why no interest in computing devices, watch, phone, tablet, laptop? Is it temperature or price? I think fundamentally it's the fact that the batteries for those devices are produced on such a scale that it would be price that would be the initial barrier. The scale that we're at, we're looking at devices where we can demonstrate a performance benefit be that at the ability to operate in harsh environments and temperature, be longer lasting, not easily replaceable, low cost applications.
I mean, ultimately, once we're at mass market scale ourselves, you know, making on the giga scale factory size, there's no reason why we wouldn't be cost competitive, but it doesn't seem to make sense to try and go head to head with these devices currently, which are well-served by the mass market applications.
Another one from Adrian we've got, "What are you most concerned about that might disrupt your overall plans?" Actually, one thing that I think investors in this sector should take some comfort from is that most analysts don't think that the sector is tending towards a monopoly. There's plenty of evidence from the existing lithium-ion industry that actually multiple solutions have been adopted. We were talking about some of the different chemistries that are used in lithium-ion earlier. Actually I think, you know, these different solid-state solutions will find different niches. It's not really competitive disruption. You know, obviously the pandemic hasn't helped, but you know, fingers crossed, the supply chain will start to recover from that disruption.
You know, I also don't think that it really relates to raw material shortages because the materials that we use in our solid-state cells are generally very available. I mean, we've seen some volatility in commodity prices recently, but I think that's more related actually to short term supply issues rather than you know deposits available in the ground. Let's have one from Ben here actually. "So as a long-term holder, the timescales to gigafactories seem very long, especially given the competitive landscape. What would it take to massively accelerate this, and how much would you need to raise, and why haven't you asked us if we would support this?" Hmm. Okay.
Actually, when you compare our timescales to gigafactories, I think when you put our plans alongside other organizations, they appear just as aggressive and you know, I think that they are, you know, they're pretty sensible and rational plans. What would it take to do it ourselves? Well, you know, my rule of thumb is that for every GWh per year of capacity, you need to invest about $500 million. That is quite a substantial sum. I know that some of our competitors have raised capital to that effect, but I don't think that actually it would give our shareholders the best return on capital to build their own gigafactories.
Actually I'd much rather manage the risk of that large scale manufacturing implementation by forming a JV with a manufacturing partner that would allow us to deploy our technology and contribute it as an in-kind contribution to the JV. I believe that would be actually the best outcome for Ilika's investors. Question from Mike: "How confident are you of achieving the forecast increases in Goliath kWh/kg ?" Yeah, actually, you know, I'm pretty confident. I think we've got a best-in-class team that has been working on this technology for a number of years now, and you know, we're making sustained progress.
I think that there is always a bit of a technology risk with new solutions like this, but we are in as good a position as anybody out there to come up with the solution that the industry needs.
There are a few questions lower down that are talking about competition. I think there's a theme a bit lower down.
Okay.
Maybe we should address some of those. I'm just thinking so. One from Douglas K: "How competitive is the solid-state battery market?" I think we'd have to look at the Stereax product and the Goliath product in different ways. There's not actually that much competition for our Stereax cells. There's a couple of U.S.-based companies that are relatively modest scale that sort of competing in that market in solid-state battery sense. One's called Cymbet, spelt C-Y-M-B-E-T. They're possibly one of the closest to us. I think the market for EV batteries is much broader. There's a significant number of battery developers, the likes of QuantumScape, who we've mentioned previously.
Solid Power, both are relatively well-funded companies that have performed SPACs and are looking to create their own gigafactories. They're looking at a different market entry. There are a number of other players with different chemistries also operating in that area. Do you wanna expand on that, Graeme? You've probably got a whole broader perspective.
No, no, I think that's a good overview, actually. You know, there's I would say, you know, in terms of competition, you've got the technology development activities of the incumbent battery manufacturers, you know, the current lithium-ion battery manufacturers that have got substantial resources that they're deploying in the field. You know, you look at Panasonic in Japan. In Korea, you would include SK, LG, and Samsung in that. Then in China, of course, the big companies like CATL and BYD. You know, those big companies don't really have a need to publicize what they're doing because, you know, they're not really trying to attract investors. You know, they've got their own free cash flow that they're deploying in R&D.
Sometimes it's a bit tricky to follow exactly what they're doing unless you look closely at the patent literature. Of course, you've got the technology developers like Steve was just listing. A lot of them are in the U.S., but also some in Asia as well. I think I would probably include ProLogium in that stable. You know, you've got to make sure you're in that leading cohort and innovating in a competitive manner to attract customers and investors. Yeah, I think that Ilika is well positioned within that competitive landscape.
There's a question from Douglas K-
Yep.
About how sensitive are our financial assumptions to the changing prices of the various elements of the products? This is something that's been raised a couple of times today or actually in another investor meetings. From the Stereax side, the bill of materials of the elements is modest compared to the actual processing cost. The increase in lithium price there has little impact on our offering. I think clearly it's gonna make more of an impact on the Goliath cells when they come to market, given the bill of materials there represents about 85% of the total cost of the battery. We will be exposed in the same way as all other battery developers will be to increasing raw material prices.
Graeme, Steve, I might just jump in, just mindful of every question that you seem to answer. There's another one on public policy afterwards. And obviously just mindful of time as well, and you've been pretty generous so far. We can make all these questions available to post the meeting, so if there's anything perhaps that flags up that's that you know you'd like to give an additional response, we can publish those to the investors on the call post. I don't know if you'd want to have a quick final scan through or maybe pick up a question to wrap up with. Then what I'd like to do is just ask you for a few closing comments, and then I'll redirect investors to give you their feedback, if I may.
Fantastic. Well, why don't we take the one that's had the most votes? Actually, JB's right at the top there. Will you be licensing Stereax IP to your larger clients in coming years? Yeah, the answer is definitely yes. You know, that's really our business model for Stereax, is that we aim to fill the facility that we've currently got. You know, there are customers within the current portfolio that we are speaking to who have an addressable market, which is, by their own estimates, larger than the entire capacity of our fab.
What we will be doing is saying to them, once we've supported their development and initial commercialization activities, you can take a license and you can either build your own facility or use a third-party fab, and manufacture under license from ourselves. That's a key part of our growth strategy.
That's perfect. Thank you very much indeed, Graeme and Steve, for updating investors today. Look, I will shortly redirect investors to give you their thoughts, expectations, and their feedback. I guess before doing so, Graeme, if I could ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, and then I'll redirect investors.
Yeah. I'd like to thank everybody, actually, who's taken the time to participate in today's broadcast and especially those that have gone to the effort of submitting questions. It's been a very lively and well-informed Q&A session. I think Steve and I have really enjoyed participating in that. I look forward to interacting with you all in the future. Thank you.
That's great, Graeme, Steve. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as we'll now automatically redirect you in order that you can provide feedback so the management team can really better understand your thoughts and expectations. It may take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Ilika plc, we'd like to thank you for attending this evening's presentation, and good afternoon, or should I say good evening to you all.