HPQ Silicon Inc V.HPQ

RE:New interview

[BCONTVentures]

Great interview, thanks to @ordos for his summary:

@ordosMy notes from the latest interview with the CEO of HPQ Silicon:

- Just like with fumed silica where there results seemed to be too good to be true, the SiOx for batteries results are so good that people are asking "Is this really true?". This is why having French military formally approach HPQ to try this out in the field is massive validation. It is important to understand that this testing is not complicated since it is literally swapping 18650 batteries with those of HPQ Silicon/Novacium
- The soldier of the future is going to be a "walking battery" and therefore reducing weight of the battery and increasing operational efficiency is top priority
- Nanograf, a "competitor", when published results at some point got financed by the US military to build their first plant, so there is a good analogy there. Here is dynamic of funding for Nanograf, as a comparison
Year Entity USD
2020 U.S. Department of Defense 1.65M
2021 U.S. Department of Defense 1.00M
2022 U.S. Department of Defense 10M
2023 U.S. Department of Defense 8M
2024 U.S. Department of Defense 15M
2024 U.S. Department of Energy 60M
- French military came to HPQ Silicon, they approached first. This confirms that there is growing number of "eyes" watching HPQ Silicon's progress and reaching out. Not just any entities are reaching out, serious ones, such as military industrial complexes, large graphite producers, large industrial groups
- 3rd party validation. French military is part of NATO, so all other military entities under NATO will have automatic validation
- The number of conversations behind the scenes with interested parties exploded when Gen3 testing results went over 300 cycle mark
- HPQ Silicon's business development team in Europe has been invited to have conversations at one of the biggest giga factories in Europe
- In the past 2 months HPQ has been approached by multiple investment banks to try and sell battery patents from other battery startups. Upon looking at the patents HPQ/Novacium could quickly tell that their processes won't be competitive, it's all based on CVD (chemical vapour deposition) to produce the silicon metal, which is very expensive and involves dangerous chemicals
- Possibility of spinning out the business lines as separate entities, to maximize value of each:
   - Fumed silica is already a separate entity HPQ Polvere
   - Others may spin out in time, depending on how things evolve
- (!) Inventors of the mass production of SiOx have elected to receive shares of HPQ, instead of cash, which makes them even more motivated to deliver
- When you have discussions such as with Quebec government or investors in general, they want to know what is your patent situation/strategy, and mass production of SiOx is something that they wanted to see 100% owned by HPQ
- It appears that Agoracom is moving toward tokenization, e.g. rewards for engagement and that Bernard and Derek (director of communication) will be answering questions going forward (whatever they can answer). Part of the reason is that it becomes harder to answer single emails with the same questions, better to just have many go and read the answers. Another reason is that all other public forums are more about numbers and negative vibe to drive the numbers, rather than quality discussion, which, I am sure all of us, real long term investors, are very well aware of

Renaissance wrote: