Lynas Rare Earths Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Linus Rare Earths quarterly results briefing conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded I will now like to hand the conference over to Linus.

Please go ahead. Thank you and good morning and welcome to the Linus Reris quarterly briefing for the December 2022 quarter. Today's briefing will be presented by Amanda Lacaze and joining Amanda are Gardem Sturzenegger, Chief Financial Officer, Paul Leroux, Chief Operating Officer, Daniel Havas, VP Strategy and Investor Relations, and Sarah Leonard, General Counsel and Company Secretary. I'll now hand over to Amanda. Please go ahead, Amanda. Good morning, everybody.

I guess I should start with Happy New Year for those who celebrate Lunar or Chinese New Year, Gong Xi Fa Cai. I hope everybody had a really lovely festive season and have come back with enthusiasm and excitement for a great 2023. So I'm pleased to have lodged today's quarterly results. relatively uneventful quarter, which was a delight after some of the challenges of the prior quarter, which of course we talked about in a lot of detail, including the catastrophic failure of water in Malaysia. We did have a few hangover challenges from that at the beginning of the quarter, but We finished the quarter back at Linus Next Rates and look forward to being able to continue. Both of our operational sites performed really well, just as an interesting aside, we had record quarter at Mount World and we are making some very good progress on ensuring that we really are optimising performance right through the value chain from mine to big bags at the end of the land facility. We also made really excellent progress on all of our major projects. Just as a refresher, that includes our big project at Mount Weld where we're expanding throughput by actually four times, which expands our output over time by double. We've got already, Bolters Works contractor has been mobilised We've started the procurement of the long lead time items. That project is prioritised in a way that we're making the investments that are creating bottlenecks for our production today first. So we will release those bottlenecks with our objective being that we will be able to progressively move production up rather than just jumping from today to the 1,000 tonnes a month, which is the target by the end of next year. In addition to that, we are building our stockpile for the Kalgoorlie facility. It will initially be fed with what we're describing as direct shipping oil, which is very high-grade material which we have segregated from the rest of the material, so there's not a constraint from the concentrator on our ability to actually build that inventory to feed the Kalgoorlie plant. Kalgoorlie itself really, our project manager She's telling me on Friday it just is a fabulous time to be on site. I'm looking forward to being there next Monday when we will be, and casually, importantly, signing a cultural agreement with traditional owners associated with our Mountwell facility. But Grant tells me that every day there is something new to look at and it is very exciting indeed to be operating at this time and seeing the huge progress, bearing in mind that it's still less than 12 months from receiving full approvals for that site. And we continue to work on our US processing facility, making good progress on deliverables associated with that project. And then, of course, in Malaysia, we have some significant development occurring to ensure that we can receive the mixed rare earth carbonate. which will arrive from... Sorry, I'm looking at the chat here, which is saying that someone can't get a question in. So I shouldn't look at that, should I? So in Malaysia, we've got a significant project to receive the mixed rare earth carbonate from the Kalgoorlie facility. But as with all of our projects, we will take the opportunity to improve a number of other elements of our processing facility, including in this instance things like soda ash loading and unloading. Because if we're going to be making an investment in a new building, a new capability, then it makes sense for us to use that opportunity to continue to improve efficiencies in our operations. So in terms of the business, The market continues to be very buoyant. Whilst the price was very stable through the quarter, it started to pick up in December and we continue to look into a market with strong demand and really very good pricing prospects for our business. And one of the other things which I think we sometimes sort of underestimate is we're not just an NDPR business. The value which comes from selling our other materials is important within our business. And you can see this when you look at the average price received over the quarter. that while the NDPR price was relatively flat, our average price actually lifted up, and that was a consequence of both the SEG pricing, heavy pricing remains very strong, but also increasing sales of higher value add lanthanum and cerium materials. So a good quarter. We're doing everything we can to make sure that the quarter that we're in is going to be an even better quarter. My colleague Paul has a very popular saying within the business that we are much better than yesterday but much worse than tomorrow and certainly that's our objective is to ensure that we continue to improve But a good quarter, pleased with it, pleased with the settings in the market, pleased with what we've been able to deliver in terms of production and sales, and certainly very pleased with the progress on sort of our really very significant projects. So with those as just sort of general opening comments, I'm very happy to take any questions that people might have.