BluGlass Limited (ASX:BLG) Managing Director, Giles Bourne talks about expansion plans for its Silverwater demonstration semi-conductor foundry, key collaborations with leading LED and electronic manufacturers & its EpiBlu contract services business.Rachael Jones: Hello I’m Rachel Jones for the Finance News Network. Joining me from BluGlass Limited
(ASX:BLG) today is Managing Director, Giles Bourne. Giles welcome back.
Giles Bourne: Thank you Rachel, good to be back.
Rachael Jones: BluGlass is developing semiconductor processes for more efficient LEDs and power electronics. What can you tell me about this?
Giles Bourne: BluGlass has a technology called RPCVD, which is a semiconductor equipment and process, which is addressing the market of LEDs, microLEDs and power electronics, to name a few. And the value propositions have all been about making these devices more efficient and lower cost. And this technology is really now evolving from R&D to a commercialisation phase.
Rachael Jones: Now to your Institutional Placement and Share Purchase Plan. What is the purpose of your capital raising?
Giles Bourne: We’ve just completed an Institutional Placement and that’s going to be used mainly for capital equipment. So we’re actually expanding out our operations. We’re putting in new equipment and we have to build the facilities as well, to accommodate that new equipment. And that’s really being done because we’ve got increasing demand on our technology, and we don’t have the capacity at the moment. So it allows us to continue working with existing markets we’re working on, but also expands some new areas. Also importantly for us, it’s taking it into larger size equipment, so scaling up the technology to equipment that’s being used in operations right now.
Rachael Jones: How much do you expect to raise?
Giles Bourne: We’ve already done the Institutional Placement and in that we took in $9.2 million. And that was from funds largely overseas, also from Australian institutional funds and we’re now in the process of running a Share Purchase Plan. So we’re giving the opportunity for existing investors to come in and actually participate, at the same price as the institutional investors.
Rachael Jones: What price is the SPP and when does it close?
Giles Bourne: The Share Purchase Plan is being run at the same price as we did the Institutional Placement, which was 37 cents and is going to remain open till the 12 June. And that will help us with our capital investment, or making of our facilities and also our operational cash.
Rachael Jones: Now to the work in hand. How is business going as a whole?
Giles Bourne: It’s been a very busy start to the year, being dominated by our key collaboration projects, such as the Lumileds, microLEDs. We’ve been working with partners like IQE (AIM:IQE) as well, and others that we’ve been working on. But also we’ve added to the team. As we move into more of a commercialisation phase, we put on a Vice President Business Development, Brad Siskavich over in the US. We’ve also put on an adviser from the industry, someone who’s well known in the industry, Mike Krames who is helping us with our strategy, our IP and obviously our commercialisation.
And then most recently, we’ve just finished our Board refresh. So we’ve added a new member to the Board, a guy called Stephe Wilks, who comes from a long background of commercialising technology and he’s a great addition to our Board. So that completes the Board refresh and now we’re well-positioned, as we move into the second half of the year.
Rachael Jones: Last question now. What can investors look forward to in the second half?
Giles Bourne: So the coming six months can be very busy for BluGlass. Obviously, we’ve got our existing projects that we’re working on, the microLEDs, the Lumileds project, that’s going to dominate a lot of our activity in the laboratories. But then our engineering team also already started to be focused on getting the facilities upgraded, the equipment selection and obviously expanding our capacity of our operations.
Rachael Jones: Giles Bourne, thanks for the update and good luck with the SPP.
Giles Bourne: Thank you Rachael.
Ends
