ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING
Neill Ricketts
A busy year conquering the world
It has been quite a year for Versarien – from its boss and founder Neill Ricketts flying to China with the Prime Minister, to a long and eclectic list of trade deals. The Cheltenham-headquartered engineering firm has been ensuring it owns as many pieces of the action as it can in the potentially vast market place for the super- thin carbon material Graphene. To give you a little flavour, it has signed deals, contracts and memorandums of understanding in sectors as diverse as aerospace and cycling, inks, football boots, consumer goods, motor
end of September 2018, released in December 2018, you might be astonished to find it is still making a loss before tax (stable at £0.78 million). But that ignores the “increased investment” it has been making in its business and misses out that group revenues increased by 19 per cent to £5.22 million Neill Ricketts, CEO of Versarien, is not been getting carried away, despite sharing a military
jet to China with Theresa May. And despite it looking like 2019 and beyond will keep the family man and Forest of Dean resident equally busy. “The last few months have seen significant progress across the group, in both our emerging technologies and more mature businesses.
manufacturing and construction. At the start of December it revealed it had formed what the City called “an early-stage collaboration pact” with China Railway Group to end a supercharged year. If you turn straight to the bottom line from its interim results for the six months to the
“Expansion of the graphene business into China has attracted a large number of suitors and we are repeating the process in other Asian territories,” said Mr Ricketts, who
Grapehene
52 | December 2018 | www. punchline-gloucester .com
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