Two decades after graphene's Nobel moment, the material still hasn't found its commercial footing. A small Australian additive maker now has paying customers in cement, footwear, and pool chemicals, and a half year loss growing alongside them.
First Graphene does not have the most glamorous product in advanced materials. It sells powder that gets mixed into cement, footwear rubber, and swimming-pool chemicals. For two decades, the wider graphene industry has promised electronics revolutions, battery breakthroughs, and aerospace miracles that never quite arrived. The honest test of whether graphene can scale commercially now sits with companies like First Graphene, which sell the unglamorous stuff and try to make unit economics work in concrete.
The Perth-based company, listed in Australia as ASX:FGR and cross-listed in Frankfurt as FSE:M11 and on the US OTCQB as FGPHF, posted a 53% jump in revenue for the half-year ended 31 December 2025, according to its interim report lodged with the ASX. The customer base is small and specific: graphene additives for cement and concrete, for footwear compounds, and for swimming-pool water treatment. The revenue jump is real, and so is the context around it. The company's net loss attributable to members widened 18% to A$3,348,722 in the same period, and the absolute revenue base, implied by a mid-tier ASX micro-cap, remains modest.
The single most concrete data point came on 18 December 2025, when First Graphene announced the production of roughly 600 tonnes of graphene-enhanced cement in a single day at Breedon Group's Hope Cement Works in Derbyshire, incorporating about 3 tonnes of its PureGRAPH-CEM additive, according to Graphene-Info's summary of the company release. The headline number is a single-batch production record, not steady-state commercial throughput. The substantive claim is that the additive displaces enough clinker to cut CO2 from the cement by up to 16%. That figure comes from the company and its development partner, not from independent third-party testing. The University of Manchester is doing compressive-strength work on the material, but that testing is referenced as planned, not as published results.
Behind the milestone sits a string of real-world deployments. A graphene-enhanced concrete trial poured into a high-use truck wash bay on a UK motorway, also involving Breedon and Morgan Sindall, is the predecessor deployment. Three UK trials are now in motion: 30 to 40 tonnes of graphene-enhanced feedstock going into roof tiles manufactured by FP McCann at Cadeby, Leicestershire, in a five-month trial run at First Graphene's R&D facility in Knockloughrim, Northern Ireland, partly funded by a £15,000 Innovate UK Contracts for Innovation grant, plus two further infrastructure projects with Morgan Sindall and Breedon, per Graphene-Info.
International expansion got a structure on 4 February 2026, when First Graphene signed a three-year distribution agreement and memorandum of understanding with India's Syron GreenThrust Dynamics covering India, the UAE, and the SAARC nations. The deal sets a structured volume ramp from 0.25 tonnes in year one to 20 tonnes per annum. Hitting the 20-tonne threshold triggers an option to negotiate in-country manufacturing in India. The ramp is a target, not a sales commitment, and the in-country manufacturing is conditional on reaching it.
The wider market framing comes from CEO Michael Bell, who described the industry in an interview with AZoNano as moving "from exploration to execution." Bell's pipeline is unglamorous by graphene-industry standards: composites, coatings, elastomers, fire retardancy, construction, and energy storage. He calls cement and concrete the largest long-term volume opportunity, with composites, coatings, and elastomers providing nearer-term commercial traction. The strategic logic is straightforward: avoid the consumer-electronics markets where graphene has over-promised for two decades, and chase the industrial additives markets where unit economics and customer integration are actually tractable.
Balance-sheet movement sits alongside the loss. Net tangible asset backing per share rose from 0.50 cents to 1.00 cents across the half-year, a quiet signal that capital position is shifting even as losses grow. Warwick Grigor remains Chair, with non-executive directors Dr Andy Goodwin and Michael Quinert, Michael Bell as Managing Director and CEO, and PKF Perth as auditor.
The honest read is that First Graphene has the kind of customers the graphene industry has spent twenty years claiming it would eventually find. Cement, footwear, and pool chemicals are not the high-margin applications that early graphene investors were promised. They are, however, the markets where a small Australian additive maker can actually ship tonnes of product and have someone pay for it. The 53% revenue growth is a real signal. The 18% wider loss and the trial-stage nature of most deployments are a real counterweight.
What to watch next: whether the Syron GreenThrust ramp converts from 0.25 tonnes in year one into a steady 20-tonne annual run rate on actual purchase orders, whether the FP McCann roof-tile trial produces documented performance data that supports the company-disclosed 16% CO2 reduction figure, and whether the University of Manchester compressive-strength work publishes rather than stays at the planned-testing stage. The market will not be convinced by another 600-tonne single-batch milestone. It will be convinced by recurring revenue at industrial scale and a path to operating cash flow that the half-year loss does not yet show.