KUALA LUMPUR: Graphjet Technology Sdn Bhd (GTSB) has today signed a merger agreement with Energem Corp, which will see the former become a public-listed company and trade on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
The targeted listing date of GTSB is slated in October, with a pro forma enterprise value of US$1.49 billion upon listing.
The business combination will provide around US$115 million to GTSB, which will be used for its business expansion.
GTSB has successfully developed a patented technology that will transform palm kernel shells into high-demand graphene materials at a significantly lower cost than the current graphene production.
The average selling price for graphene ranges from US$300 to US$400 per gram, but GTSB's single layer graphene technology will lower the price to between US$20 and US$25 per gram.
"Our success will put Malaysia on the world map as the first in the world to transform renewable raw materials such as palm kernel into graphene," said its chairman Lim Hooi Beng.
The company noted that its single layer graphene is the thinnest and lightest available material with about 200 times the strength of steel and is also one of the best conductors of electricity and heat that is visually transparent.
The 'super material' discovery was attributed to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.
According to Lim, GTSB succeeded in developing the patented technology in collaboration with the best researchers in the world to ensure the sustainability and assurance of the single-layer graphene produced.
This includes one of the world's top universities, Imperial College London, Kwansai Gakuin University and Shibaura Institute of Technology in Japan.
GTSB will also mark its foray into the export market with an exclusive distributorship agreement with Toyoda Trike Inc, Japan's developer and manufacturer of pure electric vehicles (EV) and electric bicycles.
The exclusive distributorship agreement with Toyoda will generate significant earnings growth for both companies and is expected to contribute around US$30 million of revenue per year for the company.
"The exclusive distributorship agreement will allow us to expand our products into Japan.
"As the EV industry's key raw materials, the prospects of graphite and graphene are enormous. The first phase of our expansion is to focus on Japan's collaboration, and we are looking forward to expanding into the US and European countries where demand for graphene is on the rise," Lim said.
Lim added that the merger agreement with Energem is timely as it put the company on an accelerated growth trajectory with a plan to set up its manufacturing plant in Kuantan, Pahang.
"Given the ample source of raw materials (palm kernel) in Malaysia, this gives us a competitive advantage in terms of the logistics and sourcing of the raw materials for our production," said Lim.