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There are more different combinations of gene sequences that you can shake a stick at. KBLB has a few of the under patent as well as exclusive rights of the PiggyBac insertion method into silkworms. Entogenetics, as I stated before, also used the PiggyBac insertion method for their silkworms, so they might be in violation of that exclusivity agreement unless they made the insertions prior to the agreement being made, though i don't think this is the case. They also use a different gene sequence, so that isn't really covered.
In fact every company attempting to create spider silks created their own gene sequences to do so and inserted them into different hosts: bacteria, yeast, goats, alfalfa, silkworms, and even potatoes. Some will be more viable than others, but Bolt Threads and Spiber both have their own unique methods and patents pending for them, so there is no legal issue if that is what you are questioning.
Patagonia has already partnered with Bolt Threads to implement their spider silks, but Columbia should still be a possibility. Under Armor gets thrown around a lot and would be an ideal partnership opportunity, but I haven't heard anything aside from speculation.
The applications that you mentioned should be good for Dragon Silk, especially in tactical environments. Hopefully once KBLB is set up commercially, they can start showing us the full capability of their silks.
Ah, makes sense. I agree that KBLB has a lot of potential, else I would not have invested in the first place. When they can prove their silk through the US military's tests and start to show positive revenue through other contracts i believe is when this stock will truly take off. It will spike at news until then, especially with the new stockholders that seem to have recently bought in, but we wont start seeing the big money until we have products on the shelf imo.
Huh, that is a lot of shorting activity. Did buyins.net send this e-mail to you? Are you on their e-mail list?
KBLB has a lot of activity recently. Any shorts, if they do exist, will eventually need to cover and the PPS will rebound if it is shorting that did keep the PPS down. Maybe that is why we had a high close?
I agree, Dr. Kaplan has more patents on man made spider silk applications to his name than anyone else that I have seen, but has not ever attempted to create a company or utilize them in practical applications that can make money. Not saying he won't in the future, but he has historically shown no desire to. He has collaborated with other people in the industry including KBLB, Bolt Threads, and more recently Cocoon Biotech, but never seems to take an ownership position, always just being an adviser or collaborative researcher. He is definitely a leader in the spider silk research field, discovering new applications all the time, but I would not consider him a competitor at this time.
I have been under the impression that it is pretty difficult to short penny stocks, but not impossible. Because of that i doubt you did, but if you did, good for you. You made money.
I e-mailed Ben asking the address and ballpark expected max output of the new facility as well as the addresses for the Vietnam and East Lansing offices two days ago, but never got a reply. I doubt I will get one, but figured I would try to ask anyway. Hopefully there will be more info about that in the upcoming quarterly, but I wouldn't bet on it at this point.
It was Japan's National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS), the same group that made the vest and scarf from spider silk (HERE), though they are a research lab, not really a company.
You mentioned it the first time in your Post #83427. You linked to this pdf: http://www.cera-gmc.org/files/cera/docs/cera_events/era_srilanka_2014/P.J.Raju.pdf
It mentions working with transgenic silkworms with glowing eyes on slide 10. On slide 50, it mentions not allowing commercialization. On slide 37, it mentions the NIAS being there evaluating the site.
In TRUTH's Post #87225, it mentions Prof. Yamaguchi, one of the lead scientists at NIAS, deciding to raise transgenic silkworms there.
To my knowledge, they have not pursued any additional R&D toward spider silk since the vest & scarf.
I agree with you, i think that a reverse split is inevitable.
I base this on the conference call where Kim stated that he plans on uplisting to a higher exchange upon achieving his commercialization goals. In order to do that, he would need to be over $5 per share which is over a 25,000% increase of the current pps.
While I feel that acquiring government contracts and entering into major, high profile production agreements with large companies such as Under Armor, Nike, or Columbia Sportswear will help the price per share significantly, i don't think it will be enough to reach $5. I feel a more realistic value would be somewhere a little over 50 cents per share. At that point, I believe Kim will do a 10:1 reverse split in order to uplist KBLB. I don't expect this to happen for several years yet. This may be a little optimistic since this is still assuming they resolve their quality issues, negotiate these agreements, and have no other major setbacks, but I think it is well within the realm of possibility.
The May 27th amendment states:
Alright, you got me there. I cannot see into the future. I edited it to reflect that it is my personal belief.
Based on the competition's projections and assuming that they meet their timelines or are reasonably close and taking into account what I know via online sources about how long it takes to set up a silkworm farm and breed silkworms into commercial amounts, i believe that it is extremely likely that Spiber and Bolt Threads will beat KBLB to market in mundane textiles.
I agree with you there. Randy Lewis has the fame of being the first to produce artificial Spider Silk and has the cute "Spider Goat" mascots to show off. IMO, it is pretty apparent that Spiber and Bolt will be the first with actual textiles that you can affordibly buy. KBLB seems stuck in the middle with a lot of initial hype, but nothing but missed timelines since then to being down confidence in them.
I think focusing on their supposedly superior fiber properties and aiming for the technical textile market will be their saving grace, assuming they actually can solve their quality issues and commercialize sometime in the next couple years. IMO, they need to stop dumping so much money in IR and put that money toward getting a worm farm up and running. That will help the share price and keep it up more than a hundred Joe Noel and Chris Lexingtons, imo.
You have a point for the most part, but Bolt Threads, for example, seems to be building their corporate identity as a very eco-friendly company focusing on sustainability, renewable resources, and closed loop production processes as major advantages over the non-renewable, petroleum-based textiles that undergo toxic processes to make. This is very evident based on their website content as well as their partnership with Patagonia. Insinuating that their processes aren't as clean as they promote can damage that image.
I believe that was part of the plan when putting out this report. Personally, i believe that people that live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but that is another issue...
The KBLB disclaimer at the bottom of his report states that he was paid $25k a month to promote KBLB. It tracks with the Jan 23rd hiring of an IR guy for $25k a month for 4 months stated in the filings.
I'd love to see someone who is impartial, unbiased, and not being paid $100k to do so.
Paid Promoter. Looks like this is who the following statement from the filings refers to:
The competition has not made much information public, but they are not public companys, so they have no obligation to. The vital information on the competitions' fibers that I really want to know such as fiber properties or cost to produce are likely given to their investors or partners under a non-disclosure agreement. Kim does not have that luxury since he is in charge of a public company, so he has to release his info publicly to drum up investor support.
I feel that this analysis, while it does have a lot of good information, does jump to a lot of conclusions and make a lot of assumptions based on old or incomplete information. The cost to produce is a good example that I spotted right off the bat. In a recent article, it was stated that the current cost for Spiber to produce is between $200-300 per kilogram witht he goal of producing under $100 per kilogram. Another article stated that Bolt Threads expects their cost to be under $100 per kilogram as well. It was even strange that it stated that KBLB's threads would be $300 per kilogram when Kim himself stated in an older article that the cost would be around $150 per kilogram. Has the cost gone up? I have a feeling that if i looked into the other statements made, i would find other similar incorrect or dated conclusions drawn.
Honestly, I don't see much good coming out of putting out biased speculative information about the competition like this on their website, especially calling out the competition by name. If anything, it shows Kim's hand on how ignorant he truly is about their costs and processes and does not reflect well on the company, imo. I guess it might look nice to a new investor that has not really looked into it, though it is a bit misleading, imo.
That is kind of reaching, especially since this is a followup to the newsletter that Chris Lexington from Next Level Stocks put out.
KBLB rehashed website header, unprofessional font, misspellings, broken English, picture of sheetweb spider silk (notoriously weak silk), a couple of stock Golden Orb Weaver photos, a photo stolen from AMSilk, a photo stolen from the Golden Orb Weaver Spider Silk Cape.
I would be willing to bet every share that I own that this is not official material. Honestly, i hope that something like this is never taken as serious promotional material. This kind of thing can cause damage to a company's reputation or even potential lawsuits.
Practically any application that uses fibers or plastics that could be better improved by greater strength, biocompatibility, or toughness combined with less weight would be better served by using spider silk products. There are thousands of applications for it which makes it such a revolutionary substance. All we need to do is sell it...
Wow, that was quite a post. You seem to have a lot of facts and a lot of good info on the company. I love posts like this. I agree with a good portion of what you mentioned, but I want to address a few things:
There is also the Federal Trade Comission (FTC) due to the new category of fibers that will be entering the market. One of the founders of Bolt Threads recently went into detail about it (Click Here, Relevant info is at 12:20)
Ah, that makes sense. I had always wondered how Entogenetics and Japan's National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences were able to use the piggyBac insertion method despite KBLB supposedly having exclusive access. I always figured that it was OK for use in research, but commercial production would create an issue.
Maybe Kim can work something out with Dr. Brigham. After all, he has several years experience working in the states now trying to scale up production as well as a large amount of Mulberry trees growing right there. Maybe if Entogenetics and KBLB work together, cooperate and collaborate, they could grow both companies into something great and be a force that could really give the others a run for their money. IMO, It would be better than a lengthy expensive fight over IP and KBLB venturing into unknown territory trying to set up over the next several months.
Ok, if that is the case, it seems they apparently failed to satisfactorily rework the fibers and complete the extensions, but it looks like they were able to at least complete the initial part of the contract back in 2013 as described Here. I don't know why it would show all supplemental parts of the contract as a $0 "Current Contract Value", though. Maybe it drops to zero if it was not awarded?
Per the Public PAIR Search for patent #9,131,671, it doesn't state any issues after final approval and move to the public database on 09-14-2015. Am I missing something?
That site seems a little outdated. I was looking at the site at https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?k=entogenetics
That site states that the full amount was awarded initialy on 6/17/2013 and there were multiple extentions and a final one for "SUPPLEMENTAL AGREEMENT FOR WORK WITHIN SCOPE" which had a completion date of 9/17/2015. It seems like any extensions or extra work that is required is treated as an extra $0 contract on top of it with the same Award ID. That's what I get out of it, anyway. Am I misreading it?
The "Goo" companies need a lot of upfront capitol in order to build a decent enough lab to produce the fibers, but after that initial cost, it seems pretty cheap to operate, especially in Bolt Thread's case. It is very expensive to scale larger, though, which is why they need the tens of millions of dollars. There are many advantages to the protein method, but the initial cost makes it a very difficult market to get into.
Spiber seems to be concentrating solely on the Japanese domestic market for the time being and Bolt Threads is looking almost exclusively at mundane textiles from companies that are really big in environmentalism and sustainability. If KBLB focuses initially on Technical Textiles (which it seems like they are), then there shouldn't be very much competition between the big three spider silk makers for a while.
They did have some revenue the previous year as well looking into their only other filing available: https://www.spiber.jp/pdf/spiber_annual_report_2014.pdf
I am assuming a lot of their sales in 2014 is with their collaborative efforts with Kojima Industries and 201 is both them and Goldwin. After all, Spiber only sells the proteins and fibers, It would be the other companies that works them into practical applications such as the Moon Parka and potential automotive applications.
Are you sure they lost the contract? I was under the impression that they at least partially fulfilled it. I do know they were working with Gaston College to weave their silk into fabrics to be used for ballistic testing as of the end of last year, so they did have something at some point in time. I haven't found anything concrete that says they lost any contract.
Its not much of a secret. Spiber's revenue is well documented in their recent public filings: https://www.spiber.jp/pdf/spiber_annual_report_2015.pdf
They arent profitable yet, but i doubt any company would be in their first quarter of sells.
You have a point, but there is a silver lining. Jon Rice has proven his abilities over at Ultra Electronics by helping that company grow significantly from when he started. While I am concerned about how they will obtain the financing for the new domestic facility, knowing that Jon is helping and possibly driving the company in this direction is what makes me believe that this company still has a good chance of doing well.
IMO, a US sericulture facility is something that should have been put into motion 3 years ago when the pps could support something like that, but the timing and situation that the company is in in regards to financing (or lack thereof) does not speak well to their pursuits in Vietnam and will likely be hard to support at the current pps.
After all, Kim has always been very frugal and deliberate with the direction of the company. The additional statements in the "Liquidity, Capital Resources, and Management Plans" section of the 10-Q combined with the statement: "Domestic large scale production of silk in the USA is not the most economical due to climate and food source limitations. However, the current regulatory hurdles described above, coupled with the demand for materials from several potential commercialization partners, has led us to the decision to establish an ancillary production facility in the USA." from the newsletter gives me the impression that Vietnam isn't going to happen any time soon and Kim is starting to get a little desperate. I bet the recent developments of Spiber and Bolt Threads is a pretty big contributor to this as well.
IMO, the 10-Q statement below is the most likely to occur in order to get this new facility up and running:
The section entitled "Liquidity, Capital Resources, and Management Plans" seems to go into quite a bit more detail regarding the difficulty of obtaining future financing and potential outcomes if they cannot. It is not very optimistic to say the least.
Hmm, that's interesting. Just last month in an interview with Foundation Capital's Steve Vassallo and Erik Torenberg (Link Here), David Breslauer, Bolt Thread’s Chief Scientific Officer and founder, stated the following:
Would it? A few simple mosquito nets and screens on the windows & door should do the trick. Maybe even place the net around the building. Seems like it wouldn't be too difficult.
Honestly, I believe that Kim is aiming for the Technical Textile market with these newer fibers. While Monster Silk will be ideal for standard textiles and sportswear, Dragon Silk and this new silk may have the properties to be used in more comfortable and concealable bullet resistant clothing. It seems that Bolt Threads and Spiber are not looking to enter these markets anytime soon, so hopefully KBLB will be the leader there when they eventually commercialize.