Versarien signs agreement with Luxus

AIM-listed advanced materials engineering group Versarien has signed an agreement with Luxus to develop a UK graphene enhanced polymer supply chain to enable the production in volume of graphene enhanced plastics.

Luxus makes high-quality thermoplastics from prime and recycled polymers and is the largest independently-owned plastic manufacturer in the UK, supplying the automotive, packaging and civil engineering sectors, among others.

Versarien has a contract with the Warwick Manufacturing Group to optimise the performance of graphene enhanced polymers on Versarien's behalf, including the employment of the company's dedicated resource.

This new collaboration with Luxus is designed to ensure that the developed plastics can be produced at commercial scale for supply to injection moulding companies, such as Versarien's AAC Cyroma, enabling products to be produced for a variety of industries.

Chief executive officer Neill Ricketts said: "We look forward to working with Luxus to ensure that a viable UK supply chain is established for the production of thermoplastics enhanced with Versarien's high quality graphene.

"The signing of this agreement is an important step in the commercialisation of graphene enhanced plastics. We are seeing strong interest from a variety of sectors in utilising the materials we are developing with WMG. Being able to produce these graphene enhanced plastics in commercial volumes will enable them to be more rapidly adopted for use in a wide variety of applications."

At 1015 BST, the shares were up 5.9% to 77.82p.