Ionic Industries has taken the the first steps in the development of a comprehensive collaboration arrangement with Tata Steel (“Tata”). With a market capitalisation of USD 27B, Tata is one of the world’s largest steel manufacturers and the largest in India. As one of the world’s leading industrial players, Tata Steel has strong market presences across a range of sectors, an ambitious sustainability mandate and high emphasis on the importance of new materials to support ever growing demands in materials technology applications.
The first step in this process has been the signing of an MOU with Monash University for the creation of a Centre for Innovation on Environment and Intelligent Manufacturing. Monash and Ionic are in esteemed company as Tata has formed similar partnerships with only two other universities: Imperial College and The Henry Royce Institute (Manchester University). Tata Steel CEO, T V Narendran explained their reasoning for seeking partnerships like this: “As the oldest steel maker in India, Tata Steel has taken upon itself the responsibility of leading the change towards more sustainable manufacturing practices. Today, we are building a comprehensive ecosystem that involves partners from academia and the world of startups.” Ionic, with our long-standing partnership with Monash University, as well as ourposition as a major partner in the Advanced Manufacturing with 2D Materials Hub, is in prime position to contribute to, and benefit from the building of this ecosystem.
This step comes after nearly 12 months of thorough discussions and exploration of ways to deliver new materials technology through Tata to global markets. This has involved a range of technical exchanges on several of Ionic’s technologies, including our sensing geosynthetic products that are currently sold in market in Australia and the Pacific. Vice President for Technology and New Materials, Debashish Bhattacharjee visited Ionic’s manufacturing facility in August last year and had the opportunity to see first-hand our capacity to manufacture graphene materials at industrial scale with profitable revenues from our large area sensing surfaces.
