Episode Transcript
Claire: Hello, I'm Claire Dorian, and I'm Head of our Sustainable Finance team in our capital markets division at LSEG. We very much use this platform to be able to engage with CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of businesses to make sure that we understand how they're being able to use our markets to grow their business, and enable them to share that journey with us. We'll discover how the businesses have been inspired to become what they are today and how our markets have supported the businesses and their growth and plans for the future. I'm therefore delighted to introduce Michael Laurier, the CEO of Symphony Environmental, a business that he co-founded back in 1995. He's bought to AIM in 2001, and today they're very much a leading developer of technology to make ordinary plastic much more sustainable and biodegradable. Could you share a little bit more detail on really what Symphony does, you know, the technology and how it impacts products that we are using as people in everyday life?
Michael: Yes, indeed. A great question and an answer that could go on for many hours, but we don't have many hours, so we'll keep it short. Essentially the company was founded on creating technology that would make ordinary plastic biodegrade in the open environment. The idea was to deal with materials that would escape collection, materials that couldn't be recycled. And we introduced this technology, which is basically an additive that goes into the extrusion, the manufacturing process, of ordinary plastic. You put this 1% of our D2W, which is what we call it, into an ordinary piece of plastic, and it will make it degrade and then biodegrade into the open environment. So you can imagine, when we launched it 25 years ago, we thought, wow, this is something that is globally very important, but the world wasn't ready.
And the course has been a long course, and it's only in recent years that the world has recognized the importance of dealing with plastic pollution. That is only one part of the business and the other part of the business deals with doing something different to that piece of plastic or rubber where might make it antimicrobial. You can put it into a glove, you can put it into food packaging to stop food becoming contaminated, to improving food waste, or in a glove to stop the cross-contamination of viruses such as coronavirus or bacteria that might be harmful, such as ecoli. So we're doing something to make a big difference to the world in terms of growing crop every day, ESG requirements. And part of that is also to deal with climate change and to ensure that whatever we do in this world, we do nothing to push up CO2 emissions or to cause more environmental impact. That's essentially what we do.
Claire: The technology that you're developing clearly has got a very strong environmental impact and contribution to the planet. Very timely given how much there is a big focus on sustainability at the moment. So what growth ambitions and aspirations do you have for the future for the business, perhaps sort of thinking in a three, five year time scale?
Michael: Well, you can imagine we're very ambitious. Our first major step was listing the company and the reason we listed the company was to increase our visibility. Also our credibility because it's well known that when you're listed, your compliance level goes up, you are forced to go up from where you may be comfortable to areas that you wouldn't even think about in that route to becoming a plc. So in terms of growth, you have your foundations, you have your visibility, you want to be global as we are. We're touching nearly a hundred countries globally. You want to engage with governments so you engage with governments. Being a listed company, it increases that credibility, that visibility, and your set. Now, in our case, our growth aspiration is global. We're talking about a world that consumes just in ordinary plastics, something like 340 million tonnes of flexible plastics.
On top of that, you've got a massive amount of rubber and plastic type articles from gloves to buckets to pill bottles, to all sorts of things. Even cling film, garment films, all of that. And so you can imagine we're in a market that can only be described as being in the billions because everybody on this planet will be using some form of plastic or rubber product in some way. It could be a drinking straw, it could be a toothpick, it could be today a toothbrush. It could be any of those. So you can imagine our aspirations are enormous, and we are looking at growth. We believe that will be many, many times where we are today. We put over the course of the last 20, 25 years, a huge amount of investment in the development of our technologies, our R&D, our marketing, our communications, and that's an ongoing process. And being part of the LSE on the A market, it gives us that visibility. It allows us to interact with investors. It allows us to keep them properly informed all the time of what we're doing, and we're getting a lot of visibility having that role, as well as, of course, essential capital. Capital is important when you're taking on a market size, a global market, the size that we've just taken on. That form of visibility, that access to capital is critical.
Claire: And it's great to hear how much innovation is happening within the business at the moment. And you've recently signed a deal in the US to make sure that you can supply your plastic technology and taking the business from what is very much a largely flexible plastic business to rigid products. What does this mean now for the business and the capabilities that you can develop?
Michael: I think this is the start of a major step forward. It's been ongoing. Like we have a lot of our projects, we've quoted that we're on more than a hundred different types of projects and doing vitamin bottles, which is a semi rigid, you're moving away from flexible, and you're enhancing it by bringing ridges in. And that opens up a global market. Now, we announced the move into this particular area about a week ago, but through our communications, through the LSE, the global effect was incredibly good. We're getting people from all over the world saying, we need to use this technology, can you assist us? Can you give us some of your data? And when I mean global, people in Korea, they're very involved in following our communications, and they want to copy it. They want to copy it on the basis that they know that it's credible. They know that the research has gone in and they know our communications are accurate. So yes, as I said, we have a massive flexible plastic market, but we have an even greater rigid market. So moving into vitamin bottles as we just announced is another major step forward.
Claire: I'd love to ask you a little bit more, Michael, about life as a public company, and what your drivers were for Symphony in becoming public. And what are some of the benefits that you have seen as well by being a listed company?
Michael: A great question because my story goes back more than 25 years, and I'd always wanted, being a family business, my family business started in 1920, a private business in cotton, and we moved into plastics in the 1990s. And as Symphony was formed in 1995, it was very, very clear that the technologies that we had needed to be shared with the masses. And the only way to do that was to share our paper with people that wanted to be part of it. But behind that, we created a distribution model. How do you get around the world? How do you speak the same languages? How do you unsterstand the culture? So around the world, we set up distributors because we needed local people that understood the business. Many of those distributors became shareholders, or they were given share options.
In that way, we were aligning our interests. The more they sold, the better they would help the value of the company. So it was all part of a stepping stone where you don't create wealth, you don't create success by yourself, you've got to be with other people. You have to have the support and the support that we got through the global network that we have, which is based on the LSE position of being now a Green Economy Mark, elevates the company to help us move towards our objective. Our objective, as I said earlier, is to have our product properly used in all those great countries that we're supplying. And we touched nearly 100. Now, the IPO was not easy. It was far from easy because the time we IPO'd this, we had 9/11, and our advisors at the time were saying, can't be done.
Nobody was raising money at that time. But, you know, we had the right technology. We knew that 9/11 was not a long-term issue. We stayed focused. We had very, very strong connections, and we were one of the very few during that period of time that actually got away a successful IPO in 9/11. It was quite an amazing year for the world. It was a pivotal work year for us. When we finally became public, we raised our first amount of capital, and we also found that that process of raising capital would continue as the global challenges continued to face us, which required more people, more investment, more capital. And we never stopped investing in our technology or in our people. It's our people that we invest in. And those people are concerned with the globe. They're concerned with environmental protection. They're concerned with protecting food, they're concerned with food waste, all of that. So we tick all the right boxes and we've got a growing amount of people coming into the symphony technologies either supporting us, being shareholders with us, or simply passing the message. Knowing about this technology is complicated, but on the other hand, quite simple, but it's a confusing subject to many.
Claire: Michael, thanks so much for all of that, that's great advice there. I'd love to now just ask you a few more questions around that engagement with stakeholders that you have already alluded to. Symphony's really operating at the heart of driving solutions to some big environmental problems like that global need to reduce our reliance on plastic. Considering that increased focus that we are really seeing in the public markets on ESG compared to the days when you first brought the company to market, what impact do you think that this has had on the company and your engagement with stakeholders and how you communicate in that strategy?
Michael: I think the core strategy is to communicate the science, which is really the facts. And I'll give you an example of that. At the moment, the world is concerned over plastic. But today the world doesn't really understand plastics. They think plastics is really, really bad and we should avoid it when actually the opposite is the facts. The facts are based on independent research, independent science. The plastic happens to have the best lifecycle impact out there. The only problem with plastics is that it's designed to last forever. So we have, and I bring it along with me today, this is an ordinary piece of plastic that's got our additive in there, and we can predict the life of that product should it end up in the open environment. But the confusion is that everybody today thinks composting is the answer, when in fact the answer is biodegradability.
There are two types of products in this world today. Once it's described as compostable, you might see a plastic envelope come in the post, it says compostable, but it's not designed to biodegrade in the open environment. Whereas our technology, which is putting a 1% additive into an ordinary plastic, is designed to organically recycle back to nature. Simple facts based on science versus just PR. So it's a hard one to communicate. You can imagine, we try and communicate to our government, we've communicated to ministers, we've communicated to MPs, we communicate to investors, and we try and say to them, please don't be fooled. The facts are that the plastic today still will use plastics as well as multi-use plastics are the best in terms of environmental products to use. The only issue you have is if that product ends up in the open environment, when will it degrade and when will it biodegrade?
This technology that we have today, founded more than 40 years ago, and heavily researched and heavily invested into by us, we now know the answers. We know that we can ensure the product can be collected, recycled, reused, but we also know as an insurance policy, it will degrade without leaving any microplastics and biodegrade into the open environment. How do you get that message over if you're not a credible PLC with the Green Economy Mark. And the Green Economy Mark, of course, is work in progress. It's quite new. Not many people have heard of it, but we heavily support it because this initiative is fundamental to companies like us that need to communicate in incredible way, great science, science that's proven and science that the world needs to actually use.
Claire: Thanks so much for sharing those insights. You talked already about the Green Economy Mark, which we are really proud that we've created at the stock exchange and recognizes businesses that are deriving 50% or more of their revenues from green environmental products and services. What benefits do you think that you've seen for Symphony Environmental from the perspective of receiving the Green Economy Mark and your interactions with investors and your shareholder base?
Michael: Well, it is very, very early days to see the impact. And, the reasoning behind that is we've just suffered two years of covid restrictions. And, getting in front of people in that two years was something that was impossible. And even getting in front of them, it was very limited. But we can see even during those hard times that globally, some very serious investors and governments looked at what we had and they noticed it, you know, it had a very, very big tick. And I think they want to know an awful lot more. And I think the work that the LSE is doing in this sector is crucial and very important, but important that the people that are honored as we are to be awarded such a mark, they keep going with it. They use that mark, they clearly need to get their products out globally.
And I think the two go together quite well. And in our case we're very optimistic on where we're going to go being part of the LSE green mark. So it is an important part of the ESG commitments that we've got is part of our communications. It adds credibility to it. And keeping in mind, we don't think we're going to be a tiny company for that long. We can see enormous growth and being part of the LSE and being part of the green mark is all a very, very important part of what we're doing, part of our communications, part of our sharing, part of being visible.
Claire: Michael, it's really great to hear all of the optimism that you have about the business and the future prospects. That optimism we share at the stock exchange as well about the future growth of the green economy. Thank you so much for sharing your experience today about the business, and we've learned a lot more about the technology and your insights into life as a public company and also that important topic around stakeholder engagement and the importance of communicating with the market around your strategy and future growth plans. So thank you very much for your time and thank you. Please do engage with looking at the Be Inspired series that we have available on the London Stock Exchange website, on our issuer services platform. There's a lot more content like this available there for you to, to listen and learn. Thank you.
