We are focused on bringing our platform technology to market for our partners and customers through innovation and research
About our business model
Our business model has a number of key strengths. It also enjoys a diverse range of potential income streams. This was amply demonstrated over the last two years where services income featured strongly compared to previous years. Our medium-term goal is to maximise our revenue from direct product sales by Nanoco and also through royalty income on sales by our channel partners.
Intellectual property (“IP”)
IP and process technology know-how are foundational assets for the Group and a key strength. Our technology is heavily patented to secure its use for the Group. New IP is continually generated through our R&D activities and all potential patents are reviewed by our internal Patent Review Board for commercial value before being filed.
It is worth noting that on top of our formal IP portfolio, we also have significant know-how around our methods and processes. We tend to hold this information as commercial secrets rather than as formally registered IP.
Platform technology
Our nanomaterials have a wide range of electronic properties, usually opto-electrical in nature. These include absorption of different forms of energy, its emission and potentially its conversion to a different form of energy (electricity to light, for example) or a different variety of the same energy (blue light to green light, for example).
One specific class of our materials is our CFQD® quantum dots which avoid the use of toxic cadmium in display applications. The same absence of toxic chemicals means we can also develop dots which can be applied in life sciences applications for use in the human body.
Expertise and agility
We take advantage of our extensive technical expertise and agile workforce to be able to respond to complex and challenging customer requirements. We can also do this much faster than many of our competitors. The example of the US Customer is a case in point: within eleven months of starting work, we solved a number of technical challenges to develop and scale up a novel nanomaterial and then built a new production facility capable of manufacturing that new nanomaterial (once the facility is commissioned and validated).
Licence partners
Our licence partners create an excellent opportunity for the Group to access very large global markets which our own scale might make difficult. Our partners have global scale and reach and in a number of cases are closer to potential end market uses which might go unnoticed by the Group.
Our licence partners also bring significant skill sets in the respective supply chains that would be too difficult or too costly for the Group to develop internally. This partner reach has allowed the Group to move to the “dot only” strategy where we focus our expertise and resources on our core capabilities and allow the licence partners to exploit their core strengths
in collaboration with Nanoco.
Employees
Our staff are highly skilled in a number of specialist areas. There are 14 employees with PhDs and other postgraduate qualifications. In R&D our expertise ranges from chemistry to physics, and from biology to pharmacology. Staff are also adept at taking lab scale process and scaling them up to industrial production scale. We also have strong process improvement and yield optimisation skills that improve both production volumes and our input costs. It is this extensive range of specialist skills which makes our team such a valuable asset which, when combined with our IP portfolio, helps generate a compelling investment proposition.
Production capacity
Our Runcorn production facility has two distinct production labs. One is focused on CFQD® quantum dots for use in display, lighting and life sciences. The other, new and recently completed facility, is focused on nanomaterials for use in infra-red sensing applications. In combination they create an extensive revenue-generating capacity for the Group through direct product sales to our customers. The nature of the facilities means they also deliver strong operational leverage if additional volumes are added with additional shifts.
