Westwater Resources, Inc.

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the West Water Resources Inc 2025 year end results. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. For analysts joining on our call, please press star one on your telephone keypad to ask a question. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. I will now hand the call over to Steve Cates, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Westwater Resources' fourth quarter and full-year business update. Our 2025 Form 10-K was filed after market closed yesterday, and you'll find the press release and investor presentation posted to our website under the Investors section at westwaterresources.com. Joining me today on the call are Terrence Kryan, our Executive Chairman, and Frank Bacher, our Chief Executive Officer, both of whom will be available to answer questions after the call. As a reminder, today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. These statements reflect management's current expectations regarding a number of factors, including projected demand and pricing for natural graphite, expected timelines and costs related to the development of the Kelleyton graphite plant and the Coosa graphite deposit, as well as potential capital raising activities. As always, these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. which are discussed in detail in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year end of December 31, 2025, as well as in our other SEC filings. Please also refer to the cautionary statements included in our press release and presentation. With that, I will turn the call over to our Executive Chairman, Terrence Ryan, for opening remarks.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'd like to begin by stepping back and discussing the broader market Westwater is currently operating in, and importantly, how we fit into the evolving battery materials supply chain. Over the past year, our sector has experienced a period of rapid regulatory, financial, and commercial change. Near term, EV growth has moderated in the U.S., though EV adoption growth continues in the rest of the world, which bodes well longer term. This has created some near-term pressure across parts of the battery supply chain, including battery materials. Although the thesis remains firmly in place, that domestic customers benefit greatly and insulate themselves from price shocks best by establishing a domestic supply chain. As you can see on slide four, most industry EV forecasts continue to point towards strong longer-term growth. By 2030, global EV sales are expected to reach 27 million as compared to 14 million in 2025. And by 2040, they're expected to exceed 65 million units That's a four-fold increase in just 15 short years. At the same time, grid-scale battery energy storage systems are expected to expand to support needed grid capacity growth in data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, and other renewable power generation technologies. which are expected to increase several fold over the next 20 years. Given these factors, demand for natural graphite anode material is expected to grow by approximately 185% over the next decade. This is exciting news for Westwater and our industry. More good news for us is the need for domestic reliable sources of critical minerals, especially graphite. China has dominated the graphite active anode market for decades. And as can be seen on slide five, it continues to show they will dominate over the next decade. making a foreign entity of concern country a critical link in the global battery supply chain. This is problematic. As such, governments, OEMs, industrial customers, and battery manufacturers are now increasingly focused on building a safe, secure domestic supply chain for critical minerals and battery materials. Here in the US, we're seeing growing support and targeted governmental investment to strengthen the domestic supply chains, from upstream mineral development to downstream processing and manufacturing. There is now broad recognition that materials like graphite are essential to the establishment and long-term competitiveness of the North American battery industry. And this dynamic is central to Westwater's strategy. Our vertically integrated mine-to-market approach, as shown on slide six, will deliver domestic, secure, battery-grade natural graphite via the development of two complementary assets in Alabama, USA. The first is the Cusa Graphite Deposit, which is the largest and most advanced natural flake graphite deposit in the contiguous United States. The second is the Kellyton Graphite Plant, which will process graphite concentrate into coated spherical purified graphite, or CSPG, the material used in lithium ion battery anodes. Together, these assets form a vertically integrated domestic graphite platform. As a result of the progress we have made advancing these projects, we believe Westwater is currently the most advanced American developer of battery-grade natural graphite in the United States. By linking resource development at KUZA with downstream processing at Kellyton, we are leading the establishment of a domestic supply chain for battery-grade graphite. And we're doing so at a time when the current U.S. administration and domestic customers are increasingly recognizing the strategic importance of U.S. produced graphite. In 2025, we made great strides to advance our strategy. We progressed construction activities at Kellyton, delivered samples to potential customers via our qualification line there, and progressed mine planning and permitting activities at the Coosa Graphite Deposit. As you can see from slide seven, we have a strong value proposition and our efforts to date are positioning Westwater to play a leading role in the development of a domestic battery material supply chain in the U.S. Our goal is clear. We are establishing Westwater to be America's source for battery-grade natural graphite. We're confident in our ability to complete the balance of financing needed for Phase 1 at Kellyton. Once secured, we believe we're just 12 months away from delivering secure, reliable, domestic battery-grade natural graphite. With the investment we have made to date at Kellyton, which exceeds $130 million, the cash we have on hand, and the success that we have had maintaining our overall project budget at $245 million, which contains an untouched contingency of about $20 million, We believe obtaining the remaining finance needed can be accomplished through a range of options available to us. Our focus now is on completing Kellyton with non-dilutive debt financing on a timeline which will support commercial production in 2027, consistent with the delivery forecast in our off-take contracts. timeline to commercial production reinforces our first mover advantage over our North American competitors, who largely remain at a conceptual stage and are two to five years behind Westwater in the customer qualification process in constructing a battery anode processing plant. With that context, I'll now turn the call over to Frank to walk through our operational progress in more detail and discuss the key developments from the quarter.