Aqua Metals, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Aqua Metals prerecord. I would now like to turn the call over to Glenn Axelrod. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and welcome everybody to Aqua Metals first quarter 2021 conference call. Earlier today, Aqua Metals released financial results for the quarter ended March 31st, 2021. This release is available on the investor section of the company's website at www.aquametals.com. Joining us for today's call for management is Steve Cotton, President and CEO, as well as Judd Merrill, the company's Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, management will be making forward-looking statements. Please refer to the company's report on the Form 10-Q filed today, April 29th, for a summary of the forward-looking statements and the risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Aqua Metals cautions investors not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake and specifically disclaims any obligation to update or revise such statements. to reflect new circumstances or unanticipated events as they occur, except as required by law. As a reminder, after Steve's and Judd's formal remarks, we will be taking questions. Questions will be accepted over the telephone from analysts, and all other investors can submit a question using the online webinar portal provided in today's and last week's press release. We will take as many questions as we can in the available time slot. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Steve Cotton, CEO of Aquamental. Steve, go ahead.

Great, thanks, Glenn, and welcome, everybody, to our quarterly call. I'll move from our title slide to slide number two, which is our safe harbor, which Glenn basically reviewed, so that's for your reference. And now I'm going to move on to slide number three. And that's our mission statement, and I just want to remind everybody that AquaMetal's mission statement is to provide sustainable metal recycling for materials strategic to energy storage applications, inclusive of lead and lithium. Our proven breakthrough technology, aqua refining, does deliver raw materials back into the manufacturing supply chain in a clean and economical way that reduces the over-reliance on mining to meet demand. And with that, I'll move to slide four and summarize aqua metals at a glance. We've already developed our technology, our core technology, called aqua refining, which is now commercially ready, and it's a sustainable battery recycling technology. What's unique about aqua refining is that it uses water and organic acids to create 99.996 plus percent ultra-pure lead, and we create it one atom at a time for the $20 billion in growing lead recycling industry. We're also seeking to extend, for some recent announcements, our aqua refining technologies to apply to the metals recovery associated with lithium-ion batteries. and we've evidenced our commitment to continuing to develop aqua refining for this area through additional IP filing, through strategic investment and research and development that we'll talk about a little further throughout the day today. Aqua refining is also a transformative technology that benefits the industry and the earth itself. Aqua refining benefits the environment with reduced emissions, vastly reduced worker safety for their work on battery recycling. It also improves battery performance in life through the ultra-pure metal, resulting in better performance and better lifespan of batteries. And the economics of op refining are becoming more and more favorable when the operators particularly look at all of the aspects of the cost that they spend on worker safety and environmental The ticker on NASDAQ is AQMS, and we're headquartered in Tahoe, Reno, in Nevada. The company was incorporated in 2014, and we have about 68 million shares outstanding, and cash on hand in our report of late is 11.7 million, and we have zero debt and a very strong balance sheet. Moving on to slide number five, I'm going to talk about nine recent highlights of our quite active quarter since we last spoke to you. The first is that we continue to advance discussions with several potential licensing partners. As I've stated before, we're currently working through multiple active engagements that are all continuing to progress very well. These engagements include opportunities for off-refining upgrades to existing battery recycling centers, Greenfield builds of new hybrid aqua refining facilities with small efficient furnace and Greenfield builds of standalone aqua refining facilities. Some of these engagements also include a focus on our streamlined aqua refining direct to oxide application which we announced recently as well. Geographically, these active engagements currently cover North America, Europe, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. So with the progress we've made in the past quarter, we are still confident that the company will have more to say about this by the end of June as previously guided. Second, we received first business interruption insurance payments of $1.4 million with a total collection to date of $25 million. And we expect future insurance payments, but we made some great progress in the past quarter by breaking into the business interruption element in addition to the property and casualty. Appointed two additional board members with key industry experience. I'll talk about those board members when we get further on in the deck, and we're very pleased to welcome Molly and Eddie to the team. We also filed a provisional patent for the aqua refining application to lithium ion recycling. There's a lot of companies that are talking about lithium ion recycling and trade secrets. Aqua Metals, of course, has trade secrets, but Aqua Metals is pursuing IP because in order to be an equipment supplier and licensor of technology, it's very important to secure the intellectual property of the technology and the processes. We've also evidenced our progress in lithium-ion by investing in a clean tech lithium-ion recycling innovator, Linoco. Linoco stands for lithium, nickel, and cobalt, three of the metals in the multi-metal lithium-ion recycling environment. And Linoco purchased, with a lease to purchase of our oak refinery, and we expect that we'll be working with them towards helping stand Lineco up very quickly. Commenced our lease to buy agreement for the non-core facility with Lineco and that was an important step for us also from a financial perspective because it released the burden of the capital heavy environment that Aqua Metals wanted to transition to our capital light environment and allows us to have a better financial runway which Judd will be talking about in a little bit here. We also filed another provisional patent which is a patent around creating lead oxide directly from aqua refining and that therefore streamlines the overall link between battery recycling and battery production by eliminating the need to melt and cast and refine metal and instead take the briquettes that come off of the aqua refining process and put them directly towards the battery manufacturing process. We've also established a global partnership with BASF, which is one of the world's largest chemical companies in the world, to help secure the supply of one of our key chemicals and work with us to market our solution on a global stage. We've also raised additional net proceeds of a half a million dollars through some opportunistic ATM sales. So I'm going to go on to slide six now. and point out that the company from an IP perspective and execution perspective in developing the technology is quite mature. We have over $200 million invested and that sets up the equipment supply and global licensing opportunities that we are currently engaged in. The robust IP portfolio makes us the only company with IP for clean lead and lithium battery recycling. with 61 patents now, total issued and allowed, and 53 additional patents pending. This is a very important area, again, to be a technology and licensing and equipment supply company that you have to get your IP coverage in the markets that you're operating in. As I was mentioning from our sales funnel earlier today, and if you look at the map, it maps together quite well. So slide seven talks about our experienced management team and our engaged board, which is truly focused on execution. We've really de-risked a lot of the technology, particularly in the lead space, and we are focused now on execution as a management team with a great independent directors on our board. And on the management team side, myself, I come from a background of battery monitoring and lead acid battery supply management. and understand the battery manufacturing and battery recycling industries quite well and have been with AquaMetals since the very early days in January of 2015. Judd Merrill, our CFO, is from a mining and metals background. So Judd understands very similar processes in terms of metals and metals production and has brought a great deal to the table in terms of not only our financial management but our strategic initiatives. Ben Packer, Our Vice President of Engineering and Operations comes from one of our investors in Aqua Metals, Clarios, which happens to be the world's largest battery manufacturing company. And Ben has joined Aqua Metals years back and has really risen to the task of being a very productive Vice President of Engineering and Operations for the company with that domain experience and background. On the independent director side, Shark Yusufzai is our non-executive chairman as an independent chairman, more like the European model, and held various positions at Chevron, including president of global marketing and has been on many boards and brings a steady hand as the chairman of the board for Aqua Metals that has been a wonderful addition to our board for years now. Vinny DeVito has been with us since the beginning and is just a fantastic chair of our audit committee. Molly Zhang, and Eddie Smith are our two recent additions. And Molly is somebody that has quite a bit of licensing, global licensing experience and background in executing and licensing deals through Dow Chemical Company. And Eddie Smith, who's joined us, is president and CEO of SMTC, a manufacturing, contract manufacturing corporation, and has over 25 years of extensive experience in manufacturing and and remember we are going to be an equipment supplier here in electronic components distribution industries. So we're very pleased with the team that we have that's focused on that execution because it is an execution play as we move forward and that team is really what you have to believe in to make sure that the execution succeeds. So with that, I'm going to turn over the presentation to Jud Merrill, our CFO, to take everybody through the financial overview. Jud. Thanks, Steve.