Luke, A couple key takes I got here. First Shamokin Carbons is a US company. Its my understanding that the US car manufactures want the battery graphite sourced by a US company. Second, the 3 way partnership with Ashland for large volume, graphite, battery material. This might be part of the reason for the DNI financing, so they have funds to purchase the needed Graphite up front. I smell something nice cooking up in the background.
Shamokin Carbons and Great Lakes Graphite have also been working together on micronized natural flake graphite, for product development, product qualifications and initial product sales. The first commercial sale from this product line was to a customer based in Western Europe in early 2017. The order consisted of 400 kilograms of high quality natural flake graphite, sourced from Brazil and micronized by Shamokin in the United States.
The partners are working to put the systems and infrastructure in place to smoothly accommodate an increase in the manufacture of micronized synthetic and high quality natural flake graphite sourced from Brazil, as Great Lakes Graphite ramps up sales efforts and production requirements.
Great Lakes Graphite and Shamokin Carbons have also agreed to collaborate with Ashland Advanced Materials, LLC to prepare for large volume manufacture of graphite battery anode material.
Senior Vice President of Sales Mike Coscia said, "Working with Shamokin Carbons made it possible for Great Lakes Graphite to start fulfilling customer orders in 2016 and ending the year having worked together to sell 400 tons of synthetic graphite. We are fortunate to be working with a partner that has great industry experience and who shares our absolute commitment to quality and customer service."
Great Lakes Graphite Chief Executive Officer Paul Gorman added, "Having such a high quality partner with operating, ISO9001-certified facilities located in the United States provides us additional flexibility and advantages in a number of different areas, from logistics to risk mitigation. Shamokin is a great partner for us. With facilities producing well in excess of 100,000 tons per year of carbon products we will work together to achieve higher volumes than we originally anticipated and at a faster pace than originally anticipated in our plans."
