Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2013. It is a snapshot of that month: the list of graphite and graphene companies, their listing status (such as Oxford Instruments on the OTC market as “OXINF”), the claim that Avanzare, Graphenea and Graphenano were unlisted, and about 8,000 graphene patents.
More and more people are asking how to invest in graphene, a material that could be part of the future of the technology industry thanks to its supposed uses in flexible touchscreens, faster-charging batteries that would put an end to today’s silicon batteries, solar panels with multiplied productivity, and hundreds of other applications.
If graphene could eventually do everything it’s said to be capable of, investing in graphene would be one of the most profitable long-term investments in history, since we’d be looking at the new gold or the discovery of the new oil. Even so, and even if we were absolutely sure graphene is going to gain value, we’d run into some doubts and, above all, some difficulties. Let’s look at how we can invest in this material.
When we learned that 3D printers were going to revolutionize the market, it was very easy to make money from them, because there were only three companies positioned to dominate the market for these printers. That isn’t the case with graphene. If we want to invest in graphene, we have to buy shares in companies that benefit in some way from one of the processes involving this material. It isn’t a commodity yet, so it isn’t traded on the derivatives market.
On the one hand, we could invest in companies that currently work with graphite and are researching how to develop graphene within their industry, which makes investing in them highly speculative. Graphite mining companies that could benefit include, among many others, Alabama Graphite Corp, Carbone Lorraine, China Carbon Graphite Group, Hexcel and SGL Carbon.
Among current graphene producers we’d have CVD Equipment Corporation, listed on the Nasdaq, and Oxford Instruments, traded on the OTC market under the symbol “OXINF”. Both may already have priced in the graphene boom, since their shares have risen sharply.
Spanish companies that promise to be leaders in graphene production include Avanzare, Graphenea Nanomaterials and Graphenano, which for now aren’t listed and have very little business, although, I repeat, they aspire to get a slice of this pie.
If we look at the patent “market”, there are already close to 8,000 patents related to graphene or in some way linked to its future applications. China and the United States hold the largest number of patents, while Samsung, Sony and IBM are the companies that have registered the most.
Does this mean we should invest in Samsung, Sony and IBM because they’ll benefit from the graphene boom? Not at all.
The main problem with graphene
The biggest problem and risk for investors betting on this material is that, for now, it’s all speculation. People say graphene can do “X”, but it hasn’t yet made its way into industry. What’s more, graphene isn’t cheap at all, and using it could push up the price of the products that include it.
In other words: if graphene ends up as a disappointment one day, many companies could be delisted from stock markets and others could cause big losses for their investors or even go bankrupt. If, on the other hand, graphene is the future, we don’t know yet which companies are going to rise. Add to this that most of the companies we’ve mentioned aren’t exactly cheap given their small volume of business, and investing in graphene means taking on too much risk.
After consulting several scientific experts, some of them assured me they aren’t convinced that graphene is the future of batteries, since there has been great progress in other directions; for screens it would be an excellent material, with the added problem of its high cost. They insist that, so far, only graphene’s virtues have been talked about, but some flaws could still come to light.
Featured image: AlexanderAlUS, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
