Iofina plc

Good afternoon, and welcome to the IFC and the PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in this lonely mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'm now allowed to hand over to Tom Becker, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Great, thank you. And welcome to this presentation from Iathena PLC. I look forward to sharing not only the accomplishments in 2025 of the group, but how Iathena views itself moving forward. We're very excited about the trajectory of the company. But before I start, I definitely want to say I want to thank all the IFINA employees for their hard work and dedication in 2025 without each and every one of our dedicated employees who wouldn't be where we are today. And I look forward to presenting the business plan that we have here moving forward to an investment group. It's part of the presentation. It's going to go through a number of parts today. We're going to go back quickly over the company overview and the global iodine market. I know most of the listeners today have a sense of who Iathena is, but for those who don't, we want to make sure we give a good enough background to all those potential people interested in Iathena. Then we'll go briefly over what happened in 2025, and Malcolm will get into some specifics of the financials of 2025. But we're really excited about what's next for IFENA, the step change and growth of our iodine production, the opportunities that we have, and what we believe is a strong investment case and outlook for the organization. So just to get started, a little bit about the company itself and the performance that we've had and the overall iodine market. So who is IFENA? We always consider ourselves a specialty chemical company. with expertise in iodine. And we have two business units, all which manufacturing takes place in the United States, Iofina Resources and Iofina Chemical. Iofina Resources is the arm of the business that has really a main focus that's well-defined. It is to explore for and produce iodine. And how do we do this? We use our unique technology where we take brine water that's co-produced from oil and gas operations, It's a waste product for these producers. And we partner with these either oil and gas companies or midstream partners that handle the wastewater. And we use our IonZorb technology to extract iodine and use that resource to produce iodine and then sell it into the open market. We've been doing this for a number of years. We have eight plants all in the state of Oklahoma. You can see from the chart here on the slide, there's two core areas. in the state of Oklahoma. One in northwest Oklahoma, where we have five operating plants, and three more plants in the central Oklahoma core area, where we've built our plants here recently. Very proud of the production from our Iathena Resource Group, produced a record number of metric tons of our crystalline iodine at 743, and we're well on pace to exceed those production values in 2026 and beyond. So what happens with that iodine that we produce at Iathena Resources? Well, as we're exploring for and producing more and more iodine as we move forward, there needs to be an outlet of how that iodine is vertically integrated into the market, whether that's through compounds that we make at Iathena Chemical that contain iodine or direct sales of that iodine into the global market. And that's what Iathena Chemical's purpose is, is to take that iodine that's produced by Iathena Resources and either sell that iodine to global customers, produce value-added derivatives based on historical and new applications that we've done in that organization. And we also have a small legacy business of non-iodine-based chemicals that feeds biocidal, odor control, and semiconductor industries. The iodine market itself is a pretty unique market. It's not a large market. It's a niche market of about 40,000 metric tons. Most of the world's iodine is produced from an ore in Chile, Sixty percent plus of the world's iodine is produced in this manner. Iathena and most of the rest of the people in iodine production produce their water from primes. But what makes Iathena unique is that we gather our brine from third-party oil and gas producers. So we are not drilling new wells. We are not disposing of the brine itself. And our technology allows us to take this water that's real-world water, dirtier, has an oil content to it, and push it through our process and economically make iodine. We keep expanding our iodine production with the eight plants that we have in mind, and currently we make up almost 2.5% of the world's global iodine production. As you can see in the chart here, The iodine market continues to expand. The yellow line in the chart shows the incremental growth year over year, save a bit of downturn during the COVID era. And we believe that the iodine market is going to continue to grow here moving forward. I'll get into the applications of where iodine is used and why we believe that the market is ripe for continued expansion of our iodine production. Pricing is also indicated in this particular slide. using the red line. And as you can see, there was a pretty significant jump in the price after COVID when markets reopened. And this price has been normalized over the last three years. While we can never say for certain where item prices are going to go, we can say for certain that last year we achieved a selling price on 100% basis of just over $74 a kilo. We are seeing those kind of prices here moving into 2026. And while we don't know exactly how things are going to move here in the future, the growth of the iodine market bodes well for iodine prices here moving forward. Again, what's causing this iodine market to expand? Well, here are the estimated amounts of iodine that is consumed in various industries and various applications. As you can see, X-ray contrast media, that is injectable iodine-based drugs to help pop images for certain x-ray and CT scans are the largest consumer of iodine in the world. It's been growing at a good pace over the last few years and anticipated to move at that pace moving forward. Estimates include up to potentially 1,000 metric tons of additional use per year over the next few years in this particular application, driving a lot of the iodine market growth. But Hydenmark is not solely used for x-ray contrast media. There's other human health care applications, including pharmaceutical applications, thyroid control used in diet for humans, but there's also a lot of other industrial type of applications, like for LCD screens and for heat stabilizers and automotives. I think You know, just to give you a sense, everybody's iPhone or whatever type of phone you have, it has a screen, an LCD screen. You're going to have a little bit of iodine in your phone or on your television set. The top right picture is probably somebody everybody's familiar with. It's an iodine-based antiseptic, either for use on cuts at home or even in the surgical application centers before surgery. So it gives you a little bit of an idea of where the iodine market is. And these areas continue to grow. likely 3% to 5% per year, 1,500 metric tons per year estimated growth from our view. And so that bodes well for not only increasing Athena's iodine production, but bodes well generally for the iodine market overall. So the next phase of the presentation that we want to be able to provide today is a little bit, a quick look back on 2025, which we're extremely proud of our success. And I'm not going to cover all the points on this slide because the next slide, Malcolm's going to talk a little bit about some of the numbers from 2025. But I get to be grateful of the record production, record EBITDA, and record revenues that the group has obtained last year. In fact, revenues have been increasing for the last eight years. And that's a result of execution of business plans, building out these IZOR plans year on year. and also the expansion of the iodine market and strong iodine pricing. What I can say is a few things I want to point out here is some of the last points on this slide. How were we able to achieve some of these? We built our IO number 11 plant, which came online in July of 2025 last year. We'll get into a little bit more details of that. That helped not only our record production, but then, therefore, the more iodine we produced, the more we have to sell and the more we can profit. And we are proud that we, in 2025, have started our next phase of iodine plant building, and that's in a new core area in the Permian Basin. And as you can imagine, we'll get into a little bit more detail of that a little bit later on in the presentation. And that plant is expected to be online in the third quarter of this year. So establishing three core areas of production, two in the state of Oklahoma, and now a third core area production in the Permian Basin. Very excited about where the opportunities are for IFENA here moving ahead. I'm going to throw it to Malcolm here briefly to discuss a little bit more details of the financials and key figures in 2025.

Okay. Thank you, Tom. So, as Tom's already said, the figures are records for us in terms of the key numbers and the production figures. First thing over on the right here is that we have the five year trend and it's pretty clear that the revenue has been moving upwards over the whole of that period and with our plans we expect it to move at an even greater rate going forward. EBITDA profit down below in the, whatever it is, yellow colour has had a bit of a bumpier ride but the trend is still strongly upwards where that's concerned as well. In terms of the numbers, As you can see, the revenue number hit 66.5 million, 22% up on the previous year, and that was a reflection primarily of production and also, if you look at the bottom line of pricing, because our pricing, our average realized 100% iodine price increased from $68.60 per kilo in financial year, $24 to $74.02 in 25, an 8% increase. So that also boosted revenue and gross profit. One point I'd like to make is that the production figure at the top of the first column for 25, that's 743 metric tons, reflects what was produced in the year. In fact, we actually sold 780 metric tons, and that additional tonnage is actually orders that we had at the end of financial year 24. but we weren't able to ship at the end of that year because shipping relied on boats sailing on time, and the boats didn't sail on time, and consequently that income has fallen into 25, and that makes a difference of about 2.5 million on revenue and about a million on profit, something to bear in mind when you think of these figures. Otherwise, I think there isn't a great deal else to say. At this point, we'll be coming back to some more detail in a few slides' time.

All right. Thanks, Malcolm. Before we get back to more detail on the 2025 financial numbers, I do want to review some things about our business units during the course of the year. And some of these we've talked about already, but I think this slide is just a show of what we do on the resource side. We produce a record amount of crystalline iodine with our eight eyes or plants. The eighth plant came online in July of 2025. The production is what we expected in the previous year. It's our third plant in three years that we built in our core central Oklahoma area. And so we're very proud of executing the business plans that we put out into the market and that we've internally expected ourselves. That being said, I think what's really exciting about IFA's future is the new plant that we have coming online in the Permian Basin this year and the pipeline of opportunities that we have to build plants here moving forward. So you can see here in the chart in 2022, we were at about 500 metric tons of produced crystalline iodine. In 2025, we were at 743. But once this plant opens, in the Permian Basin, we'll get into some of these numbers a little bit later, you know, we're going to be at or near a run rate of 1,000 metric tons. So going from 500 metric ton run rate to about 1,000 metric ton run rate took us about five years. It's a great accomplishment for the group, but we have even bigger and better plans, and we'll talk about the roadmap to 2,000 here shortly. So just looking back a little bit about I-11, which came online in July 25. Again, it's in our central Oklahoma area. If you've seen our presentations before, here are actually pictures from the I-11 site. We use our technology, again, to bring in water to these sites. We concentrate up the iodide in the water and actually isolate the iodine from these brine waters. This plant came online on time and on budget. It's about a $5.3 million plant. It has rapid payback. We believe to be three years is a decent number for you to think about with respect to paybacks on these investments for eyes or plants. And it's at a production rate of about 100 metric tons of crystalline iodine that it can produce on a year-to-year basis. One of the things I will point out is, you know, every single one of our plants are in a different water source. I have seen the technology and our experience in dealing with third-party produced brine waters, it's imperative for us to have the expertise in order to actually isolate iodine out of these brine waters economically. This particular plant, our geologists and our business development team have worked hard on locating this particular site. While it has lower volumes than most of our other plants, it definitely has higher iodide concentrations, resulting in a very efficient, low-cost iodine-producing plant. The iothene chemical division, as I've already said, is empowered to create iodine-based derivatives, so non-iodine-based derivatives, and to be able to sell and have an outlet for the iodine, the crystalline iodine that's produced in iothene resources and to maximize the value of all of those components. And you can see from the chart on the right, how trends over the last three years of these particular groups of products have moved. The group is one of the key driving components of Iathena Chemical moving forward is the need to continue to expand the customer base of Iathena Chemical as the production at Iathena Resources grows. And from the chart, you can see Higher and higher percentages of crystalline iodine have been sold into the market versus iodine derivatives. That will likely remain the trend, but you can also see the total amounts of Iathena chemical iodine derivatives have increased year on year. So while we believe that moving forward, the rate of direct iodine sales to customers will increase at a more rapid rate than the amount of revenue from iodine derivatives, Both of these aspects we anticipate will increase over time. And how do we do that? Well, we continue to expand our customer base not only with current customers, but other customers that's not only in North America but around the world. Our division of sales from North America and the rest of the world, we're about 50-50. And we are very specific. strongly looking at R&D opportunities in new areas of iodine technologies. Specifically, there's potential of new iodine uses in solar cells and other refrigerant gases in certain electric car applications that may be some significant uses moving forward. So, again, imperative for us to have that sales thing in mind. We continue to invest in our website and our sales team in order to ensure that we have the right sales division to match the growth on the IAFINA resource side. And to that, I'm going to throw it back to Malcolm, who's going to go over a little bit more in detail the results in 2025, and then we'll get into the what's next for IAFINA on its growth story.

Okay, thank you, Tom. So, a few points to mention. The first point I'd like to mention is that the geographical sales grid of our sales has been very consistent year on year, and we basically sell 50% into North America, and 50% the rest of the world, and within that rest of the world category, the biggest element by far is what goes into Asia. and that was true for 24 and it's also true for 25. The iodine numbers on the top row there, the 59.3 million of iodine revenue comprises sales of raw iodine from our plants and also sales of what we refer to as iodine derivatives, i.e. chemical compounds that are manufactured at our chemical facility in Kentucky when iodine gets brought up from the plants in Oklahoma. and there's a value add on those sales, and they are 30% of the total, and that's also been true both years you're looking at here, and we have that as, to some extent, a target going forward. Non-iodine sales, 7.2 million, you can see they're the 25 down from 7.8 the year before, a bit of a dip. attributable to one particular product, which is an etchant gas that's used to etch silicon chips to get more information onto them, and our customer didn't provide us quite the sales orders we were expecting, but that has bounced back to a degree at least during the current year. Going on down, cost of sales. Cost of sales is the cost of running our plants. I was pleased that looking at the average cost across the whole gamut of costs for the production plants down in Oklahoma, there was an increase overall of only 2% in those costs between 24 and 25. So that obviously helps us to keep the profits up, raised profit in particular. Moving on down, I think really the next place I want to stop is getting nearer the bottom, and that is government subsidies, 2.1 million, an entirely exceptional and one-off item. This money related to grants under a US government covered support program, particularly to assist with payroll retention and people keeping workers on even when their business was suffering. A lot of businesses made claims under this program, as not just us, and the US and the IRS, I suppose more specifically, Internal Revenue Service, eventually put a moratorium on paying them because it wanted time to work out whether some of them were not as properly prepared as they might have been. Anyway, long story short, payments finally came through during last year. Our claim sailed through with no problems and we've received that $2.1 million, but one off covered eventually is not going to recur. Incidentally, that money is also taxable, so that benefit to us is about $1.5 million. And then going down again, almost at the bottom current deferred tax, that's pretty much all deferred tax. What that means is that it's related It's a provision, but not a cash liability, and the reason is that we've been able to make very substantial tax allowance claims on our plants, assisted in no small part by President Trump's one big beautiful act signed into law in July last year, and that reinstated 100% tax allowances on quite a few categories of fixed assets. So we've managed to conserve cash there. Okay, shall we move on? Balance sheet. So property plant equipment, 31.8 up to $37 million. Main item there is the addition of IO11 plants. about 5 million in terms of the timing of its expenditure. Moving on down, intangible assets is an old historical figure that we're obliged by accounting standards to keep on the balance sheet. Inventories were a bit lower in 25 and 24, but as I've mentioned, 24 had inventories that should have, well, if things had panned out as intended, those inventories would have been lower because the orders that were received would have been shipped, but that didn't prove to be possible. Going on down again, receivables 25, 18.9, quite a high figure in relation to the previous year. We get quite a lot of variations in our receivables balances because of, well, two things, I guess, really. The pattern of our sales can be somewhat lumpy, and secondly, there are quite large amounts involved, invoices individually of over a million dollars, where we're shipping to overseas customers, and those overseas customers may have 60 to 90 days credit, so those sort of factors push up receivables balance. However, since the end of the year, there has been quite a flood of cash in, and we are now below 50% of that number. On down again, bank debt, 6.5 million we're showing here, of that 4 million is money that we drew against a facility last year to assist with Funding for the IO11 plant construction and the other $2.5 million is the remainder of a $10 million loan that we took out in 2020 when we did the major refinancing of the company. And that loan will be paid off in full by the end of next year. Cash balance, $11.7 million. We're pleased with the way that has melted up over the year. So our net cash, $5.2 million against $2.9 million. deferred tax figure is 3 million higher because as I mentioned we're actually providing tax payable later and probably quite a bit later given our depreciation rates rather than having a current tax liability to pay. Cash flow start with EBITDA 11.8 million, working capital was negative for us that again is related to to the high receivable that we talked about in the balance sheet there, rather capricious working capital changes, they vary and they don't necessarily have any great longer term significance, it's just about lumpiness in transactions. CapEx 8.4 major item there was just under 5 million on the IO11 plant, we also spent half a million the IO12 plant that we're in the process of constructing at the moment. There was also about a million dollars of expense in Iofena Chemical for both maintenance capex and also to put in improved processes for some of their products. And then going on down, we've talked already about drawing $4 million from the bank for CapEx funding, repaying $1.4 on the 2020 loan. There's the $2.1 added in for the payroll subsidies that we received. And the net result at the end of the day is that $11.7, which is a good number for us.

Okay. Great, Malcolm. Thank you. Thank you. So with that background of the financial performance in 2025 and what I'll say is that, you know, we have worked as an organization very hard, especially on cash management, the balance sheet, reduction of debt, while still expanding the organization. And it's a key component. It's a key for us moving forward to make sure we have financial prudence in everything that we do. And leading to what I think is an interesting future for IAFINA. So the current... in 2025, very successful, continuing to grow, building this plant in the Permian Basin. And how does the current lead to the future? Well, our Athena Resource Division is working very hard in order to continue to expand our Ivan production. And with the financial balance sheet that we have in place, with the banking partners that we have, with the financial support by being prudent financially, we feel like we can still expand Iapena at a greater rate. So what's happening now, we're building our newest plant in the Permian Basin. It can handle about twice as much water as the main plate capacity of our Oklahoma plants. so about 50,000 barrels of brine water. It's with a new partner for us, Western Midstream. Western Midstream is a midstream company that takes waters from multiple oil and gas companies and handles the water for them. They handle over two and a half million barrels of water a day. Our Iathena plant is only going to handle a small portion of that water that they have handling of their system. We believe this plant, due to our, from our modeling, is going to produce somewhere between 150 and 220 metric tons when it comes online later on in Q3 this year. It's a big step change for us. It's an exciting step change for us. And, you know, going to a bigger plant that can produce 200 metric tons, if you remember, the Iowa 11 plant produces about 100 metric tons. This plant is on budget. We're predicting between $8 and $9 million, somewhere around $8.5 million build. And comparing that back to the I-11 plan of about $5.3 million build, we can build these plants that basically can double the production size for less than double the cost. So while the water generally in the Permian Basin, a lot of the water doesn't have economic amounts of iodine, there's still 20 million barrels of water produced in this particular region. And we found multiple sites that do have good concentrations of iodide in this region for us to build our plants. So we're excited about not only the new Permian plant, but also the perspective plants that we have in this region here moving forward. And whilst I'll say that the concentrations generally in the Permian Basin are less than what we see at most of our plants in Oklahoma. This new plant will not be our lowest concentrated plant. So we have proven in Oklahoma the ability to produce iodine economically on sites with lower iodide concentrations. When we model this particular plant, we believe the economics of the iodine production at this site is pretty much in the mid-range of our total iodine production that we see from our current plants. And it gives us even more diversity of supply. By us operating nine particular plants, it gives our customers surety that if there is a production issue of one particular plant, that we have eight other plants running. Our partners can't say the same. A lot of our partners have single facilities or a few facilities, and if they have major production issues, it could provide a supply glitch for their customer base. Moving on a little bit. We talked about iodine production, 743 metric tons in 2025. This new Permian plant coming online and with IO11 operating the full year of 2026. Once this Permian plant comes online, we should be at or near a run rate of 1,000 metric tons once the Permian plant comes online. This is an exciting step change for us. Although it took us between four and five years to go from 500 metric ton run rate to 1,000 metric ton run rate, We have really evaluated the business and our growth opportunities and have a plan in place to go from this thousand metric tons to a 2000 metric ton target. And it's not going to take us eight to 10 years to do that. We're predicting that this is a three to four year plan. And how do we do that? Well, we've done a right job being fiscally proper in our actions. have a strong balance sheet and cash position currently, good banking partners, ongoing plant expansion program with multiple targets for larger plants like we do in the Permian Basin. And we believe with the growing iodine market that now is the right time to step on the accelerator a little bit harder, but not do a burnout, but step on the accelerator a little bit harder and increase the rate of our increase of iodine production. So, with the opportunities in the Permian Basin with larger production plants, 200 plus metric tons at a time. And even with some opportunities that we still have in the state of Oklahoma, building these plants at a little bit more rapid pace instead of one a year, potentially one right after another, which are typically nine month kind of builds, will allow us to hit this 2,000 metric ton target in the next three to four years with this current strategy. As we model out the financial needs for this, it's likely we're going to have to use some of the debt facilities that we have with our banking partner in order to reach that goal. But once these larger plants come online and once we have the revenues coming in, these plants at current item prices will be very lucrative for Iathena and we should be self-funding for future plants down the road. So really exciting business opportunity that we're trying to get out into the markets. from 500 to 1,000 metric tons, the opportunities with 10 plus new sites in our pipeline that we believe are viable item producing opportunities, the business negotiations with these potential partners are moving well, and we do anticipate building these at a more rapid than one plant per year. So to summarize a little bit before we take some questions and answers, you know, I think it has come a long way. Our expertise is our technology. Our expertise is being able to deliver on what we anticipate. And we've done that by building new eyes or plants. Three in three years, the new permeate plant will be four in four years. What's the result of that? By increasing our production, we can increase our sales, which results in increased profitability for the group. And what we're doing with that profitability is reinvesting that into our core operations, staying with what we know. We are experts in item production from third-party brines, and being able to come up with these additional plants is the right way for us to grow. We've had strong financial discipline, $5.2 million net cash position at the end of 2025, and we will have a prudent financial strategy to ensure that We don't get over our skis in any of these growth plans that we have. By building these plants, by understanding and having the experience of the know-how to handle third-party grinds, we're very confident we can execute this business plan, and we believe now is the right time. The item market is expanding. We would not have an accelerated growth strategy if we weren't confident in the item market. continue to expand led by human health care applications. So as we do the whole market, as we view our opportunities, as we view our balance sheet, we believe we've laid out a plan to get from 1000 to 2000 metric tons here in the future. And as you can see from the profitability that we've had going from 500 metric tons to 1,000 metric tons, at current item prices, being a 2,000 metric ton producer, at the type of plants that we build, it's going to be very lucrative not only for IFE and the business itself, but should correlate to shareholder value as well. And just to finish up, before we take some questions and answers, to summarize a little bit of how we started here in 2026, you know, the Ivan market itself continues to expand with X-ray development and new applications. We continue to develop new chemical derivatives and new customers to meet the demand, not only from our derivatives that we produce, but the Ivan that we're producing as we grow. We are diversifying our customer base in order to meet that challenge of our production, but We're also off to a very good start in 2026. We got a little lucky that the winter in Oklahoma wasn't as harsh as it is normally. We also are proud of our production teams to be efficient in their iodine production, and we've already raised our target in the first half of the year from a range of 225 to 255 metric tons, and we believe we're going to be closer to about 385 metric tons of crystalline iodine production in the first half of the year. The new Permian plan is on time and on budget. It should be operational later in Q3 of 2026 and will be our fourth plan in four years. With the iodine economics continue to be strong, we do believe we are on track to meet the targets in 2026 and believe it's the right time for growth. So with that said, I want to thank all those who are in attendance today for this webinar. I want to thank our current investors. We appreciate your investment in iAthena, and we hope that we've laid out a clear vision for how iAthena can use its technology, stay in our lane from our core technology, and expand this business in a in a way for us to get to that magical 2,000 metric tons, or almost 5% of the world's iodine production. And for that, that ends the presentation. We'll throw it back as we consider questions for, give us a second for question and answer.

That's great. Thank you very much for your presentation. And if I may just bring back up your camera. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via our investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. So please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

All right, thank you. We're looking through the questions now. There's a number of questions. I'm sure we won't be able to get to them all, but we'll try to answer all the pre-submitted questions and take a handful of the other questions, and as appropriate, we'll answer those questions after today's seminar. So I'll go ahead and read the first thing. So first question is, what hedging forward contracts do you have in place, if any, for the price of Ivan and at what prices? So just to give you a general idea of how We sell most of our products. Most of our products are being sold on the spot basis. So they're not contractually obligated, but we do have a strong, consistent customer base of our products. Larger buyers of iodine tend to have some contracts in place and buy some on the spot basis. As we continue to grow our iodine production, it's likely in the future that we will have some more contractual obligations with respect to iodine price. But what I can say is that prices in the market are generally, while volumes may be contracted, prices are generally updated on a quarterly to half-year basis. In general, iAthena updates its pricing to the market on a quarterly basis. Next question is, you seem to have a pretty high revenue concentration by customer, with at least two represented over 10% of your sales and a few 5% to 7% share. Can you describe what type of customers are they? Which countries they are based in? Do you see this as a risk to your business and the ability to raise price? We don't see this as a risk. It's been pretty historical that we've had these type of customers basis from time to time. These customers are global. Our largest customer, which I believe was at 17% last year, is a combination of North America sales and Asia sales. So it's not concentrated in one particular reason. These concentrations of customers I don't think are atypical for businesses our size. We continue to increase the breadth of customers that we sell to. So in my view, it's not a concern for the company. Do you have a brief update on the iodine market, please, for the key growth factors, sectors, countries? What is your view on the current and mid-term price for iodine? I think we covered that mostly in the seminar, gave some historical iodine stuff as far as application. Applications are driven by X-ray contrast media. There are some exciting new technologies that we may have not covered that could happen in the next three to four years in solar cells and refrigerant gases, so that could be a driver in the future, but I think we covered that question pretty well in the presentation. Is the strategy now to build more than one large plant per year in the Permian Basin? And the answer is the strategy is to be at a more rapid build pace of more than one plant a year. I think if you had to hold me down right now, it would probably be one every nine months or so. the opportunities that we have are not only in the permian basin but in our other core areas in oklahoma so we'll be announcing um one of those plants um the next plants at the appropriate time um what's your capital allocation plans for the next two to three years please any chances shareholder distributions at some point so what i can say is that most of the capital and most of the cash that we um that we bring in. And in fact, even some, uh, some debt will go to fund mainly these eyes or plants, especially the larger eyes or plants that are, uh, eight and a half million dollars or potentially higher if they're even larger plants. And that's where most of our capital will go over the next two to three years. As far as, you know, when potentially it could be shared back with, uh, investors. I guess my answer is once the, once the company becomes largely cash, uh, generative is, um, generating a lot more cash than the projects that we are funding once we get to that time. And that could be after we get a number of the two or three of these larger plants built, then we would consider how to return some of that to investors, or whether that's through dividends, buyback, or other means. What's your cost dynamic? Will there be any structural change in costs as you expand your production geographically and add more specialized products? Not sure exactly what this question says, but with respect to the cost dynamic, I think we talked about this new plant in the Permian Basin being pretty much what we're modeling in the mid-range of our current Iazor plants. So we believe the cost of production will be similar to our current plants with respect to Iazor. Expanding our production geographically, again, that goes into the Permian versus the Oklahoma plants, and add more specialized products. So we are working hard to, at the IP in a chemical plant, add more specialized products. In the last year and five months, we've added an animal feed product to the IP in a chemical product line and are working hard to add more products to the IP in a chemical usage. The next question is, are we expecting IO13 to have 300, 400 tons of production? Is that from higher PPM or water volume? Has the site for IO13 been identified yet? The answer to that is I'm not sure yet. We have a pipeline of plants and opportunities that we have in our pipeline. We are working through the potential business partners to determine what the order of plants will be. It will depend on the business development negotiations with the individual partners. Obviously, we have priorities which plants we would like to do first, but those will all depend on the commercial terms that we're able to come up with. So, stay tuned for that. We don't have an answer for that for the IO13 plant. I'll answer a few more here. CapEx forecasts for 26 and 27 basically doubled from a combined 26 million to 45 million over those two years. What explains the higher capex in 26 as IO 12 is already known about? We think an IO 13 can be brought forward. As I said, we do believe we'll be in construction for IO 13 here moving forward. Anything else? It's just that. It's just that from the capex view. Let me hunt through a few others. Do you have a time frame for hitting 2,000 metric tons, or would you consider share buybacks and dividends in the future? I've already kind of covered. The board has always considered dividends and share buybacks at the appropriate time. We're currently funding these new plants from cash generated. It will be a board decision of what timing any kind of buybacks or capital would be shared back with investors. It's my personal view that as we are building these plants and we'll have to use a little bit of debt to build these plants now is not the right time to do that, but we will be considering the market economics as we move forward here. And then we've already talked about the pathway to 2000, which is probably in a three to four year timeframe if we're able to execute our business plans. There's a question in here, recent tornadoes in Oklahoma, are the plants able to withstand cope or were affected in any way? I can proudly say we have not been affected by tornadoes in any way. One of the things I will say with that particular question is because we have eight plants in operation and a ninth under construction, if there was going to be some kind of catastrophe, we do have diversification in our production to help keep the company at a pretty steady rate, to keep iodine to our customers that are needed for that iodine. and can weather any kind of storm. And we have obviously these plants insured as well. I will also say that while tornadoes are a risk, other weather factors I think are even more of a risk for Ithena and any kind of plant in Oklahoma. And then I'll pick one more. The last question that we have, I think, is an interesting one, and we'll try to take that now, and that's, will new plants in the Permian Basin be less affected by lower iodine volumes during the winter period? We can't say that for sure, but that is yes in our model. So there are a couple things in the wintertime that affects our production. One is the brine temperature that we see at our plants. Our technology is more efficient with warmer waters of brine. And we do know that the brines in the Permian Basin that we will be looking at for the IO plant that's currently under construction in the Permian Basin are at higher water temperatures. The second reason is in the wintertime, there's sometimes some electrical issues, especially during icing and snowing situations in the Permian Basin. I mean, sorry, in the Oklahoma region. that shuts down production on our partner sites. So that's less likely to happen in a warmer weather Permian Basin. And I think we'll kind of leave it there.

That's great. Thank you for answering those questions you can from investors. And, of course, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses on the investment company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, Tom, can I please just ask you for a few closing comments?

Yeah, I guess I want to say a few things. I want to thank everybody that's been on this path with us. I think the company has executed a number of developments over the next few years. We have some pretty bold plans here moving forward. I want to thank those who have come along this journey with us. And I think the last thing I want to say is something we don't talk about a lot, and that is, you know, we're a specialty chemical company. We have employees that handle hazardous chemicals all the time. And we're very proud of the safety record we have as an organization. It is very paramount in everything we do to keep not only our employees safe, but our community safe. And very proud of our safety record and our safety culture. That will always be a top priority of the group. If you're not safe in what you do, you're not going to be a company for long. So I want to thank, again, all of our investors, all of our employees, and thank you for your time today.

That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.