‘You need to be five years ahead of the curve’: Vikram Handa

The space must touch an accord on vital minerals processing and minelaying if it wants to meaningfully reduce dependence on imports from China, Epsilon Advanced Materials Managing Director Vikram Handa told HT in an interview, while discussing the company’s $650-million investment to build a manufacturing facility in the US state of North Carolina, and how access to US capital and technology, as well as a bilateral understanding with Washington that India is a trusted partner, will allow a domestic EV battery supply chain to come up in India. Edited excerpts:

Can you tell us a little bit about Epsilon Advanced Materials and what the company does exactly?

I set up Epsilon Carbon, which is our parent company, back in 2010 and later established Epsilon Advanced Materials in 2018. Our focus is really to go down the value chain in the sustainable battery space. We started off by taking waste from a steel plant called coal tar, manufacturing coal tar pitch from it, and developing our own intellectual property to convert this waste into coke — a raw material needed to make synthetic graphite. And thereafter, we set up a pilot plant in India to make synthetic graphite that is used in electric vehicle batteries.

In 2023, your company announced a plan to build a $650-million graphite anode manufacturing facility in North Carolina. Can you explain the vision behind this expansion and what it hopes to achieve?

The vision began in 2021 while we were qualifying graphite anode materials from our Indian facility with customers in Japan and South Korea. It became clear that to support Korean and Japanese automotive customers at scale, we needed to manufacture in the United States in the future. We began a site search in November 2022 and must’ve reviewed more than 100 sites before finalising North Carolina in October 2023. The site stood out for its proximity to a port, strong workforce, competitive incentives, and great support from state and local governments. Within 18 months of the announcement, we secured all permits in April 2025. Today, we are the only synthetic graphite manufacturer in the US with a fully permitted facility, while all other battery material manufacturers are still in the permitting or planning phase. We are now in the process to commence work at site, and we expect to begin operations by early 2028.

Can you talk about whether the H-1B visa restrictions impact your ability to hire skilled workers to help set up your manufacturing presence in the US?

It won’t impact us very much. Our manufacturing process is more mechanical, technical and highly automated, operating at temperatures between 700 and 3,000 degrees Celsius, so it does not rely heavily on specialised skills. That said, we do need a workforce for maintenance, electrical, back office, and quality control, for which we can train the workforce locally in the US to work for us and we’re also looking to work with the local county government on this.

China has dominated the EV battery space and this has created a level of dependence that India and other countries around the world are uncomfortable with. How does India deal with this?

Yes, India does not want to be dependent on China politically. But the fact is, China is a major player in the critical minerals and electric vehicles industry. My approach is, you need to partner with someone and be willing to learn really fast. You need to get to market quickly. At the same time, you need to keep innovating and be five years ahead of the curve. So, many of our business processes are based on what has already been proven in China, while we also continue to invest in new technologies and new materials. Companies can go with what’s established and then innovate and be ahead of them in five years.

India, the US, Japan and a number of countries have been trying to set up their critical minerals supply chains to cut dependence on China. Have you seen any of these deliver results so far?

I’ve not seen it play out on the ground. Two or three years ago, the focus was all about securing the supply of critical minerals. But if you look at the whole of this last year, it has brought in the awareness that the challenge really lies in the system of processing minerals, which is dominated by China. So the problem is not necessarily upstream in the mining of those minerals. Even if we have the minerals in the country, can we process it? Instead, we send it to China to process. And now you see the US government is funding processing capacities in rare earths, lithium and other critical minerals. This is where I think India is not aligned with the US government. I think the US is such a key market for this industry to develop in India. We need to have that understanding that India is a trusted partner in processing. We are operationally efficient, we understand the chemical industry as a country, and we have a great, skilled workforce. But can India become a hub of minerals processing? The Indian government hasn’t given a clear signal that they want to develop it.

So is de-risking from China actually possible? What would it take?

There are dependencies on China. But there are signals from China that it can just cut supplies off. And what happens then? There has to be an agreement at the Quad level between the US, India, Japan and Australia. The US has these arrangements with Australia and Japan and not India. So India could be the missing puzzle in this Quad. Now, the Chinese are cost-effective and they have done a great job innovating. What I tell customers is, you should buy from China. They are really good and you will learn from them. But also buy 20-30% from India. So the day that tap stops, you will have other options. The problem in India was that the industry went out and bought a lot from China and got addicted to it. And the day the Chinese said, we are not giving it to you, they were running to the government to say, solve our problem. But you created the problem. You could have developed suppliers in India.

So what more can India do to develop its domestic capabilities?

So let me put it this way. As an industry, our biggest tasks are access to capital, access to customers and technology. Now technology is fairly separate, but we need capital and customers. Both of these sit in the US. And why would the customer come to India to buy? If there was a clear bilateral understanding that India is a trusted partner and that in the next 5-10 years, it will be a part of a supply chain on critical minerals and EVs. And we have to work with other key countries like Japan. I think there’s no clear signal from the Indian government that critical minerals processing is an important industry and that a policy push is coming. I think the clarity on policy will lead to funds going in this direction and the industry coming up.

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