Jon Mabbitt, CEO of Applied Graphene Materials

Teesside firm Applied Graphene Materials says it has made strong progress and is hopeful about the future, despite seeing half-year losses widen.

Interim results for the six months ended January 31, 2016, show the business, which is based at The Wilton Centre in Redcar, was hit by an EBITDA loss of 2.1m. In the comparable period of 2015, the loss amounted to £1.8m

The company’s loss before tax likewise grew from £1.9m to £2.3m.

However, the period did bring many positives for the business, which produces speciality graphene materials.

During the half-year, over 70 evaluation samples were provided to customers.

Applied Graphene Materials was also working closely with more than 20 other companies via collaborations, joint development agreements and near-term production opportunities.

It has likewise begun a new collaboration project with Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine Coatings and has been progressing well on production capacity expansion

At the end of the six months, the company’s total cash amounted to £10.2m, up from £6.6m the previous year.

CEO Jon Mabbitt said: “Applied Graphene Materials is set apart from other producers of graphene by our ability to cost-effectively produce a tailored portfolio of graphene nanoplatelets alongside our understanding of how to best unlock and transfer optimal material enhancements into host materials.

“As the business pursues production orders we have made strong progress during the period in the key areas of graphene formulation know-how and strengthening our commercial pipeline. “In January we were pleased to successfully raise £8.5m from existing and new shareholders, and have since made progress on scaling up the group’s production facilities to increase manufacturing capacity.

“We continue to be focused on three target market sectors where we believe our products can add most value and where we see large scale and long term commercial opportunity.”