The scale of the operation...
The many news articles that TRUTH found indicated that KBLB is interested in 2,000 to 2,500 ha of land for mulberry production. That got me interested in what quantity of silk could be produced with that acreage.
Answers were not easy to discover, but it appears that one needs approximately 5 ha of land for each metric ton of silk produced. Let me stress this is an approximate number. It depends on the variety of mulberry tree grown, weather conditions, variety of silkworm, and so on. The true number might be 10 ha/metric ton, but it should not be 100 or 1000.
A quick bit of math gets us to an annual silk production estimate of around 400 metric tons of silk/year. Currently Vietnam produces about 520 metric tons/year, so KBLB's plans will approximately double the amount of silk produced in country.
For some reason, KBLB evidently has good reason to believe the demand for their engineered silks will ramp up to 400 metric tons/year. Sales at a conservative $50/kilo would be on the order of $20 million/year.
Again, all estimates are approximate and may be off by a factor of 2 or so. It's hard to know what the market will bear for DS, MS, etc. If KBLB can get $100/kg, sales would look more like $40 million/year.
Now if we only knew who wanted all that silk and was willing to front a measley $50 million to get us started...
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