Quinella, page-13

F-I-N-A-L-L-Y! Someone (other than johnnycrash of course) has come out and said it!


"Duponts". Has anyone read up on the "plastics" story to understand why it attained such massive critical mass? It was all due to Dupont.

"DuPont also established two of the first industrial laboratories in the United States, where they began the work on cellulose chemistry, lacquers and other non-explosive products. DuPont Central Research was established at the DuPont Experimental Station, across the Brandywine Creek from the original powder mills... In the 1920s, DuPont continued its emphasis on materials science, hiring Wallace Carothers to work on polymers in 1928. Carothers invented neoprene, a synthetic rubber; the first polyester superpolymer; and, in 1935, nylon. The invention of Teflon followed a few years later. DuPont introduced phenothiazine as an insecticide in 1935.”

Dupont had enough money to back itself with the scientific search for more uses for its product – fair enough. SYR, TON and others don't have this money (participants like Energizer, etc excluded obviously). But Dupont's strategy of taking their product to the lab happened at the beginning of the 20th Century. They kept their discoveries inhouse so that they could own 100% of whatever results their research turned up.

The 21 century is an "open source" world. You let other people do the work for you now - you don't keep it in house. There’s no money in creating something new and keeping it to yourself – costs of policing your own intellectual property are too high.
Big tonnage players are the only ones that will have the ability to foster growth in the graphite market, because they have lots of the one ingredient the scientific community needs to pioneer new ways to use graphite. Since we are incessantly reminded that there's over 1000years supply, why not sell the good stuff, and... wait for it... give the rest of it to science for free. Science gets it and experiments - the donator of graphite gets to keep the fruits of those experiments.

Vein vs flake - why is it a discussion of which one will survive, or which one will do better. It is way too early for that. Most, if not everyone, will profit from the graphite story in the immediate term. Longer term - Is it not possible for better players of both to survive and feed off each other?

Whether it unfolds the way I see it depends on the actions the serious players take over the foreseeable future. All it needs is a good marketing strategy to get the ball rolling. This is how I see it and I don't know how to apoligise for it – love me, hate me, label me an emotional blowhard – I do not care one iota.


Where it ends up – Nobody knows.

But there’s a majority out there, and for the most part, this majority is smarter and better at this than we retailers are. It’s true – they are smarter. And the smarter people are telling us that the graphite market it doomed to fail. The problem is – how many times have you seen markets abide by the desires and prophecies of the majority, smart or not?