The COVID-19 crisis has of course posed a number of challenges for us.  Nevertheless, we’ve been getting by reasonably well and made some progress in a few areas.
 
We have been able to shore up our financial position in several ways:

• We’ve received some further investment from existing shareholders;
• We have been able to negotiate with Monash to defer some payments;
• All of our people (Directors, employees and contractors) have all been taking higher proportions of their pay in shares;
• We have leveraged our R&D expenditure to borrow in the form of a loan from Radium finance; and
• As previously announced, we were awarded a grant from the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre and we have now received those funds.

Monash University has been closed down so we have not had access to the labs for some time now, however we have made significant progress in the planning the next phases of our super-capacitor program – scaling up production of our electrode materials is a large piece of work that will see us ahead of the curve once we are ready to begin scale up production. We have also progressed on the preparation of scientific data for use in patent applications and peer-reviewed articles, which will demonstrate further value in Ionic’s work.
 
We have remained in good contact with our various commercialization partners, who are all still engaged and supportive even while dealing with their own COVID-related challenges.  We have also begun to explore several other collaboration options in an effort to de-risk our collaborative arrangements in light of global geopolitical issues.
 
So, while the situation has been far from ideal, we are in a sound position and well-prepared to make significant advances as soon as we are able to get back to some semblance of normal.