Versarien Regulatory News (VRS)

Versarien plc

("Versarien" or the "Group")

Trading Update

and

First commercial contract for VersarienCu product

Versarien plc (AIM: VRS), the advanced engineering materials group, provides the following update on trading as well as details of the first commercial contract for VersarienCu since the Group's admission to AIM.

Trading

Since Versarien reported its interim results, the Group has continued to make good strategic progress in the second half of the current financial year, especially in its Total Carbide ("TC") subsidiary which has now been successfully integrated into the Group.

Versarien Technologies Limited ("VTL") has also made significant advancements with its VersarienCu product in the period including its first commercial contract with a leading provider of advanced thermal solutions. The Board anticipates that VTL's revenue streams will commence in the new financial year.

The results of the second half of the year to 31 March 2014 are expected to be broadly in line with those of the first half reported at the interim stage.

Versarien Technologies Limited

The Board is pleased to report that VTL has signed its first commercial contract for the development and pre-production supply of VersarienCu in DNA heat spreading plates. VTL has been working with this customer for the last two years, a period in which multiple positive test results have been achieved. Product test results showed between 35-100% system cooling performance improvements which has led to work commencing on a 16 week work programme for VTL to scale up production to meet the customer's needs. There is potential to also roll-out the same technology to additional product lines with the same customer.

In addition to this commercial contract, VTL continues to make progress with a number of large global organisations and now has customers actively developing VersarienCu in their own specific applications. As a result of positive testing, the Board has continued to invest in resources to accelerate VTL's development capabilities. 

Total Carbide Limited

Since acquisition TC has continued to perform robustly and its order intake continues to grow as a result of increased manufacturing flexibility and an underlying increase in customer demand, especially in the oil and gas sector. The Board is particularly pleased with TC's on-time delivery performance which for its largest customer has seen an increase from 40% to 95%.

TC has commenced pilot manufacturing of VersarienCu porous metal components using its high volume equipment and re-commissioned its twin chamber vacuum furnace to meet additional demand for non oil and gas components. Its results for the current financial year are expected to be significantly ahead of those reported in its last set of reported accounts.

Neill Ricketts, CEO of Versarien plc, said: "This first commercial contract marks a significant milestone and demonstrates the progress that VTL has made towards commercialising its VersarienCu product. I am also particularly pleased that the integration of Total Carbide is already generating upside for the business.

"This is an extremely exciting period for Versarien with a number of additional opportunities emerging and we look forward to reporting on these in due course."

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Notes to Editors

Versarien develops advanced micro-porous metals for thermal management. The open celled metallic foams produced by the Group at its manufacturing factory in Cinderford, Gloucestershire, are 'biomimetic' - that is they mimic the sponge like structures of biological materials, e.g. bone and coral.

Versarien's porous metals have an exceptionally high surface area relative to volume which means they are ideally suited to any function where surface area is important, for example heat transfer, heat exchange, catalysis and energy storage. Versarien is initially targeting the thermal management industry due to the material's superb heat transfer properties. The thermal management market is expected to reach US$S11.1 billion during 2013 (Source: BCC Research).

The Group's lead product is VersarienCu, a micro-porous copper. When incorporated into liquid cooling systems, VersarienCu can improve efficiency by up to ten times. Versarien's key market is cooling systems for central processing units (CPUs), hardware that is found in high performance workstations (engineering, science, CGI, animation), computer clusters, supercomputing infrastructure and data centres. VersarienCu can be retrofitted into 'cold plates' within existing infrastructure and the Group also intends to produce complete cooling systems containing VersarienCu.