Over the last financial year, Ceramic Fuel Cells (LON:CFU) , the AIM and ASX listed fuel cell company, has succeeded in taking orders for 51 units of their key ‘BlueGen’ modular fuel cell generator including a single order of 30 units with the Victorian Government’s Office of Housing. It’s been a long road for a company that has been operating since the 1990’s, but in tandem with other leaders in fuel cell markets, their products are finally seeing real world installment. The company recently successfully raised another £10m from new investors to ramp up their production capabilities and drive the business forward into 2011. We spoke again with Andrew Neilson, the Group General Manager - Commercial, to discuss the progress made to date and the outlook for the next 12 months and beyond.
Q. Andrew, since we last spoke in May, Ceramic Fuel Cells has made many announcements of BlueGen sales to utilities and government bodies across the globe. Can you tell us about the progress you've been making?
As you've pointed out we've had quite a few sales. Starting out in the first months of the year in Germany, almost exclusively through German utilities. Since then we've had strong support in Australia, the Victorian Government order for 30 BlueGen units is particularly significant for us and recently we've made great progress in Japan - Osaka Gas have ordered their second unit and Tokyo Gas their first - and more recently we’ve had our first sale in the US . The utility that will be installing BlueGen there is Southern Californian Gas, the largest Gas company in the US. So the progress has been very strong.
Our approach at the moment is to target early foundation customers who are ideally in the position to place large follow on orders themselves like utilities, or those who are in position to influence other people like VicUrban or the Victorian Government - those early customers can effectively give the product the tick of approval or an endorsement into the market. We do get lots of people wanting to buy BlueGen themselves, and we are working with Neco and Harvey Norman (Australias largest electronics retailer) to market to retail customers, but we haven't made sales through those channels yet. In time absolutely we want to sell to the residential market, but at the moment we are focusing on…
