The Paper's reporters Shao Wen and Wang Jingjing
Driving along Tamsuihong Road in Cixi, Ningbo, when it was about to reach the junction of Haifeng North Road, two large characters hanging from the roof of a high-rise building - "National High-tech Enterprise" and "Graphene Change the World" came into view, but what did not match the "vision" in the slogan was the overgrown weeds in the factory.
This company is the hotly hyped graphene concept, pulling up the stock price of the Gorgeous Family (600503), which claims to have "the world's first graphene production line with an annual production capacity of 300 tons" ningbo Moxi Technology Co., Ltd. (Moxi Technology).
The main entrance of Mexi Technology
Known as the "king of new materials", Graphene is a two-dimensional crystal composed of carbon atoms that is only one layer thick. As the world's smallest resistivity, the highest thermal conductivity, the highest electron mobility, the hardest and most flexible materials, graphene in the new energy, aerospace, electronic information, thermal management, energy conservation and environmental protection, composite materials and other traditional and emerging fields, have good application prospects.
In October 2010, physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester won the Nobel Prize in Physics for "successfully stripping graphene from graphite using tape".
From the following year, graphene flew into the homes of ordinary people, and even water cups, stockings, etc. began to rub the heat of graphene. Domestic graphene research and related enterprises "suddenly like a spring breeze overnight", Tianyancha data show that as of November 30, 2021, China has registered 11432 graphene enterprises.
Graphene was once called "black gold" because of its price of 500 yuan per gram. With the development of preparation technology in the past decade, "at present, the average price of graphene is 1,000 yuan per kilogram", Lu Hongbin, a professor in the Department of Polymer Science of Fudan University, stressed in an interview with the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) reporter that for graphene companies, cost is not the main problem, open up the entire industrial chain, and seek products that are suitable for the market is the key. However, the reality is still some distance away from Professor Lu's proposal.
Long Grass Factory: It is difficult to find "the glory of the past"
On December 20, 2013, the inauguration ceremony of the first phase of the 1,000-ton graphene production line project of Mexi Technology, the graphene scale production line with an annual output of 300 tons, was held in the factory located in Cidong Binhai District, Cixi City, Ningbo.
Mexi Technology Overlook
In September 2014, an important person appeared - Xu Xiang, the "private equity brother" at that time. Xu Xiang's Zexi Zengxu became the largest subscriber after the large-scale reduction of the major shareholder of the Gorgeous Family, with a subscription limit of 90 million shares, accounting for 5.62% of the company's total share capital, and is the second largest shareholder of the Gorgeous Family. Since then, the myth of the gorgeous family "graphene concept stock" has officially opened.
On January 20, 2015, the Gorgeous Family issued a "Suspension of Trading in Material Matters", stating that "as of the date of this announcement, the Company is discussing a private placement of additional share financing, which will be invested in the adjacent space vehicle project, the purchase of shares in Beijing Moene Holding Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Moene Group") and a series of other matters." The day's closing price was 6.65 yuan, up 5.25% throughout the day.
On May 6, 2015, the gorgeous family that gathered the "three hot concepts" (successively announced investment in graphene, robotics, and adjacent space vehicles) resumed trading and announced a fixed increase plan, planning to increase 476 million shares at an issue price of 5.60 yuan per share, raising 2.666 billion yuan. Since then, its stock has risen for 13 consecutive trading days.
On the day of the release of the "fixed increase plan", the share price of the Gorgeous Family was 7.26 yuan per share, and by May 28, the highest had risen to 30.91 yuan. In other words, in 17 trading days, the stock price of the Gorgeous Family rose by 350%.
In that year, the price of XuXiang Zexi Investment's participation in the fixed increase was 3.67 yuan / share, calculated by the closing price of 30.91 yuan / share on May 28, 2015 of the Gorgeous Family, Xu Xiang's market value of 90 million shares held by Zexi Investment exceeded 2.7 billion yuan, and the yield was more than 700%.
On January 26, 2016, Moxi Technology held the acceptance meeting of "technical transformation and expansion project of graphene production line with an annual output of 500 tons", saying that after the completion of this project, the company will be able to stably supply 100 tons of electronic grade graphene products on the one hand, suitable for new energy fields such as lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors; second, the annual output of ordinary graphene products is 400 tons, which is suitable for coatings, plastics, building materials and other materials and chemicals.
If the supply price of electronic grade graphene products is reduced from the original 3000 yuan / kg to 1000 yuan / kg according to the then, the unit price of ordinary grade graphene products is 700 yuan / kg, and the annual output value of Mexi Technology is 380 million yuan.
However, after 6 years, the reporter went to the Mexi Science and Technology Factory, and it is difficult to trace its "former glory". Standing at the entrance of Mexi Technology, you can see the words "Holding Company of Gorgeous Family Holdings Limited (stock code: SH.600503)" hanging on its central building.
The east side of the factory is covered with weeds half a person high, and on the west side are scattered with three or two mounds of dirt, which are also overgrown. Compared with the front door, the side door on the west side of the factory is closer to the factory, and the side door is piled with gravel and weeds inside and outside, and the contact information of the crane is written on the wall on both sides.
Inside the Messy Tech Factory
In winter, the street lights near the factory area have been lit at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, but in addition to the lights in the hall on the first floor of the central building, the other factories are dark and silent.
The official website of Moxi Science and Technology said that the factory covers an area of 140 acres, but the reporter visited and learned that the northern land of the Moxi Science and Technology Factory has become "Zhejiang Leku Kitchenware Co., Ltd." When the reporter tried to contact the staff of Mexi Technology, the security guard said bluntly, "You are looking for people in the kitchenware factory behind, there are many people there." ”
On the railing outside the factory building of Zhejiang Leku Kitchenware Co., Ltd., Morsh is still printed (Editor's Note: Moxi Technology).
The staff is rarely seen in the Mexi Technology Factory, and around the 8:30 a.m. working hours, only seven or eight private cars enter sporadically. The reporter learned from relevant sources that there are nearly 50 registered employees of Mexi Technology in Ningbo, including Liu Zhaoping, chief scientist of Moxi Technology, and about 5 researchers, and only about 20 people usually come to work in the factory.
The reporter stayed outside the factory for 3 days, except for december 8, when the Cixi Binhai Economic Development Zone stopped production for one day due to the epidemic, and squatted and observed that only one forklift, one truck, and one van were in and out of the entire factory.
Mexi Technology side door
In addition to the on-site observation, the reporter tried to contact Moxi Technology to do a more detailed understanding of the graphene business, but was told to contact the Gorgeous family first, when the reporter contacted the Gorgeous family to inform the intention of the interview was declined, the company's chief scientist Liu Zhaoping's public office phone has been unanswered as of press time, and Shanghai Nanjiang Group said for the reporter's interview that the colleague responsible for the docking interview is taking annual leave, and there is no follow-up.
Foreshadowing: 3 years loss of 140 million yuan
Grass snake gray line, thousands of miles, the current situation of Mexi technology has long been foreshadowed.
In early 2015, when the concept of graphene was still very hot, Wang Dong, president of Shanghai Nanjiang Group, said at an internal meeting that the Gorgeous Family would gradually withdraw from the real estate market in the future, transform into an investment holding group, and make it clear that the technology field, including graphene, will become the company's main investment direction in the future.
In May 2015, the Gorgeous Family announced the acquisition of 100% of the shares of Beijing Moene Holding Group (the parent company of Moxi Technology, hereinafter referred to as Moxi Technology Co., Ltd.) jointly held by Shanghai Nanjiang (Group) Co., Ltd. and Tibet Nanjiang Investment Co., Ltd., which hold Chongqing Moxi Technology and Ningbo Moxi Technology, respectively, in the main directions of powder and film. However, the asset appraisal prospectus at that time showed that the operating income of Ningbo Moxi Technology in the previous year was only 310,000 yuan, while the income of Chongqing Moxi Technology was 0.
Relevant people in the industry said that single-layer or small-layer graphene products are currently difficult to achieve mass production in the industrial field, and more are "graphene-like" products that do not have the physical properties of graphene.
It should be noted that the Gorgeous Family and Shanghai Nanjiang Group had agreed on a performance commitment in the acquisition transaction, and the transferor promised that the actual accumulated net profit of Moene Holdings from 2015 to 2017 was not less than 74.11 million yuan, but contrary to expectations, in the agreed 3-year period, Moene Holdings not only did not make a profit, but also lost 95.65 million yuan.
In fact, the Gorgeous Family has long noticed the poor performance of Moene Holdings, and pointed out in the announcement that when the formal agreement was signed in December 2016, the controlling shareholders and the board of directors of the Huali Family had paid attention to the fact that the performance of Moene Holdings in 2015 and 2016 had not completed the profit forecast, but underestimated its future development trend.
Losses are still increasing, the Gorgeous family publicly disclosed that from 2017 to 2019, the net profit of Moxi Technology was -14.89 million yuan, -18.7 million yuan and -105.61 million yuan, and the net profit of another subsidiary, Chongqing Moxi, was -19.71 million yuan, -34.09 million yuan and -157.41 million yuan, respectively.
In this context, the Gorgeous family began to shrink the graphene business. In 2019, the Gorgeous Family issued an announcement that based on the judgment of the current application market size, the existing production line of Moxi Technology can fully meet the needs of the current and future years, in order to avoid idle production capacity and control investment risks, Moxi Technology will submit the "Application for Termination of the Implementation Plan of Industrial Strong Foundation Project" to the Cixi Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology.
In May 2020, the Gorgeous Family continued to issue announcements that it would no longer invest in the graphene business, "The focus of the work of Moxi Technology and Chongqing Moxi at this stage is to shrink the scale, destock the existing inventory, and revitalize the idle and existing assets".
In July this year, an investor asked the Gorgeous family how the company's graphene business is progressing. The gorgeous family recovery is affected by technical standards, product costs and market expansion and other convenient factors, and the development process of graphene downstream application market is relatively slow.
Since then, on September 17 this year, at the collective reception day and the performance briefing meeting of the mid-year report, Wang Weilin, the former chairman of the Gorgeous Family, said that the sales of Graphene products of Moxi Technology and Chongqing Moxi have still not formed an effective scale, and Both Moxi Technology and Chongqing Moxi are currently in a state of continuous loss.
Imaginary "Black Gold": Waiting for a "killer" app
Nobel laureate Heim once said: "Generally speaking, it takes about 40 years for a new material to go from the laboratory to the industrialization, but graphene only takes less than 10 years." This is because graphene has many excellent properties, its hardness, electrical and thermal conductivity, etc., making graphene become the fastest material from academic research to practical application. ”
Looking back at the past decade, the graphene market, which is regarded as "black gold" by industry volunteers, is extremely lively, and there are more listed companies involved in the graphene industry in A-shares, including Fangda Carbon (600516), Alkene Carbon New Material (000511), Huali Family (600503), Del Home (002631), Sixth Element (831190), Chint Electric Appliances (601877), Nanyang Technology (002389), China Baoan (000009), etc.
Related products have even entered the homes of ordinary people, graphene socks, graphene clothes, graphene electric heaters, graphene masks, etc., with the concept of graphene, the price is often higher than ordinary goods, and it is difficult for consumers to explore how much performance graphene can play in it.
Several scholars such as Martin Pumera of the University of Chemical Technology in Prague have questioned the phenomenon that "it is easy to get performance improvement when various substances are mixed with graphene" and they mixed bird droppings with graphene, and finally found that it is indeed better electrocatalytic than graphene that is not doped with bird droppings.
The study was titled "Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect?" It was featured in ACS NANO, the authoritative journal on nanomaterials.
The authors write, "To show that efforts to co-dop graphene with various elements by experiment are pointless, we evaluated in this work whether guano-doped graphene has any advantage over non-guano-doped graphene, and concluded that it is." ”
In August 2020, Fortune released a report that the global graphene market size in 2019 was 225.1 million US dollars (equivalent to 1.433 billion yuan), which can be used as a reference for the market value of the Gorgeous family at the peak of its stock price in 2015 was as high as 49.1 billion yuan, and the concept of graphene made its market value increase by more than 40 billion yuan in less than half a year, equivalent to the output value of the global graphene market in the past 30 years.
Li Yichun, Secretary-General of the China Graphene Alliance (CGIA), said at the 8th China International Graphene Innovation Conference that the cumulative number of domestic graphene patent applications has reached 69,000, accounting for 78.18% of the world's patent applications. The market size in 2020 is 14 billion yuan, and the market size is expected to reach 100 billion yuan in 2025.
In the past ten years, graphene, as the king of new materials, has been pinned on many beautiful expectations, but from the perspective of industrial development and downstream applications, it is necessary to continue to explore. Professor Lu Hongbin shared a set of data from the China Graphene Innovation Alliance, and the total production capacity of graphene in China in 2020 is about 10,000 tons, and the capacity utilization rate is less than 5%.
For the current situation, Novoselov believes, "At the stage we are at, we are trying to find some application directions of graphene, and some corresponding products have appeared on the market." But graphene products do not appear overnight 'killer' products, and the arrival of that day will take a long journey. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Li Yuequn
Proofreader: Luan Meng