AFC Energy Plc AFC Energy Quarterly Newsletter
October 01 2015 - 2:57AM
RNS Non-Regulatory
TIDMAFC
AFC Energy Plc
01 October 2015
Dear Shareholder,
The past few months have witnessed some rather turbulent times
for the world's stock and commodities markets but we at AFC
continue to focus our efforts towards progressing our aggressive
commercialisation strategy.
Our RNS released today reported that Yady Worldwide ("Yady"), a
company wholly owned by the family of AFC's founder, has increased
its holding in AFC by 7.04% with the acquisition of all the shares
held by former shareholder, Linc Energy, for an undisclosed amount.
Yady described the transaction as: "a rare opportunity to increase
Yady's position in the Company at a time when we believe the future
value of the Company is undervalued by the market". This
transaction should remove any concern in the market of an overhang
due to the potential divestment of Linc Energy's position. I am
delighted that the family of AFC's founding shareholder has
reaffirmed their confidence in AFC and the direction it is taking
in accelerating the company towards commercialisation and achieving
the goal so many long-term holders have aspired to for many
years.
Again, I wish to acknowledge Linc Energy's support of AFC during
the past few years which saw substantial investments into the
company at various times over recent years in support of the
technology's development lifecycle.
From a technical standpoint, the POWER-UP project remains our
key focus, alongside further developments and advancement in the
fuel cell performance itself.
Over the past three months, many of you will have seen the
announcement in early August 2015 that we had successfully
commissioned and commenced operations of the first KORE fuel cell
system in Stade, Germany. In what I called one of the proudest days
for AFC, the AFC team achieved a peak output of 7.56kW from a
single operational fuel cell cartridge. Back in December 2014, we
committed to reaching this milestone by the end of July, and whilst
there were a few delays on the permitting of the facility, which
delayed our commencement of construction by a couple of weeks, I'm
pleased to say that due to the commitment of the teams both on the
ground in Germany and back in our offices in the UK (together with
a number of extremely late nights) we managed to achieve our target
operating performance late in the evening of 31 July. This
demonstrates to me not only the effort AFC's technical teams and
contractors are giving to the delivery of this project, but also
the seriousness by which we as a company give to the target dates
and milestones AFC put into the market, and our own expectations of
meeting or exceeding those targets.
We currently have two remaining project milestones for the
POWER-UP programme in Stade. These consist of: commencing operation
of a full tier (8 cartridges) of the KORE fuel cell system and
subsequent sale of that power into the German electricity grid, and
secondly, generation of the full 240kW nameplate capacity of the
KORE system before the end of this year. Having had the opportunity
to visit Stade yesterday, I continue to be confident of our ability
to meet the final two milestones in the timeline outlined to the
market. Indeed, we could expect to see the first tier operational
within the next few weeks which will present the first sale of
power into the German grid and provide further evidence of the
robustness of our technology platform.
I think you'll agree that for the next three months, which will
take us to the end of this year, you can expect some exciting and
historic announcements from AFC.
I also mentioned in a brief market update that we have seen
further evidence of fuel cell performance improvements over the
past quarter. Only this week, our fuel cell development team
achieved another milestone which, through the application of an
improved "recipe" for the fuel cell, further improvements in
performance were achieved. Whilst we will continue to perform
further testing on this new fuel cell electrode over the coming
weeks, I expect this to form the basis of our fuel cell platform in
the final 240kW trial at Stade in December 2015. More details on
this cell and its performance will be provided in the coming
months.
In order to make further progress towards the conversion of MOUs
and Joint Development Agreements with our international partners,
we've also welcomed on board a new Commercial Director. We continue
to engage with our partners internationally and whilst there is an
interest in observing some of the data that will come through from
Stade on the fuel cell performance, we remain confident that these
MOUs will crystalise into binding commercial contracts over the
coming months. There are other new opportunities which have emerged
over the past quarter which, with a new commercial director on
board, gives us added strength in reaching out to these and fully
assessing the opportunity to take it forward. Of course, as alluded
to in earlier announcements, this includes discussions with
prospective manufacturing partners, several of which we've met in
our offices in the UK over the past few months and which we
continue almost daily dialogue.
We are planning to hold our annual Investor Day event at
Dunsfold on Tuesday 24 November and I look forward to seeing many
of you there. Details of this event will be uploaded onto the AFC
webpage over the coming weeks.
In the meantime, we continue to work hard behind the scenes to
educate stakeholders about the benefits of the hydrogen economy. As
a result, you should see some trade and investment articles
appearing where I argue the case for hydrogen to be an essential
part of the future energy mix, in the UK and elsewhere.
I'm very much looking forward to the next three month; we expect
to be making a number of key announcements both with regards the
technology platform in Germany, but also other commercial
opportunities.
Yours sincerely,
Adam Bond
Chief Executive Officer
This information is provided by RNS
The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
END
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