Canadian clean technology company Nano One [TSX:NANO / NDQ:NNOMF] said it closed the first financial quarter of this year with cash and cash equivalents of CAD23.1 million and working capital of CAD21.2m. Total assets stood at CAD41.1m and total liabilities at CAD5.3m, but more importantly, the company held no long-term debt.
Worley alliance underscores plans for this year
It has been a busy start to the year for Nano One, the specialist in the lithium-ion battery materials sector. The company has partnered with engineering firm Worley Chemetics, the Canadian subsidiary of Australian engineering group Worley Ltd. [ASX:WOR], to work together on their “design-one-build-many strategy” as their jointly develop, market and deploy Nano One’s One-Pot plant design. This solution allows the two partners to sell a ready-made plant design using Nano One’s low-impact, low-cost patented solution for the production of battery cathode materials, particularly lithium-ion batteries.
Worley brings its substantial global presence in this space to the game. This large engineering firm is already active across the globe and over the last few years has been expanding its battery materials business to bring in a revenue of $1.5 billion.
Combining Worley’s experience and a long list of customers with Nano-One’s first-of-a-kind technology, which has a significantly lower environmental footprint and overall costs than any of the processes currently used to make electric vehicle batteries, will align well to help create a product that will not only be of huge interest to companies making battery materials but that can also be tailor-made to each individual industrial customer.
While Nano One has its own customer base and has strong links to key players in this industry such as Sumitomo Metal Mining, BASF and OEMs, this collaboration will help it reach a wider range of customers over a shorter period of time.
The agreement signed by the two companies earlier this year oversees the sale of cathode active materials (CAM) packages, including necessary cross-licensing of intellectual property, license fees, and payments to both parties over a period of up to 20 years.
Nano-One and Worley plan on marketing, selling and deploying the CAM package to a wide range of customers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The beauty of the package is that it can help customers reduce both risk and costs – the plant design has been already tried and tested and is therefore a known quantity – while at the same time speeding up the permitting processes, helping with the overall acceptance from various stakeholder groups and providing project certainty necessary for financial investment decisions.
Other key steps taken this quarter have been the Full Feasibility Study as well as optimization and product validation which will help with generating sales revenues from Nano-On’s Candiac plant in Quebec. Now that its production design has been validated and the company already shipped a tonnage of LFP samples to key collaborators the company expects to secure a larger offtake agreement which will drive growth but also help inform future design, marketing, licensing, and deployment of its CAM package.
- Nano One secures raft of new patents in Asia Pacific
- Nano One receives C$18m from Québec Government
- Why Nano One’s ‘One-Pot’ LFP process could transform the battery materials sector
Where to next in 2024 and 2025 for Nano One?
The battery materials maker plans on continuing with the LFP optimization and product validation work throughout this year and into the next.
Also in the pipeline is expanding capacity at its Candiac facility up to between 1,000 and 2,000 tonnes per year, securing larger volume customer offtakes in support of the current 25,000 tpy LFP plant development project and also financial investment decisions for the same project.
Separately, because of unexpected personnel matters the company rescheduled its 2024 shareholder meeting from 27 June this year to 1 August. The time and location have yet to be announced.
