5E Advanced Materials, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the 5E Advanced Materials first quarter 2025 shareholder update call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation and prepared remarks, 5E's executive management team will conduct a question and answer session with the company's sell-side research analysts. Please note that today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to pass the call over to Joe Caminiti in Investor Relations. Joe?

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for the 5E Advanced Materials Fiscal First Quarter 2025 Shareholder Update Conference Call. During this call, management will be referencing our press release and a presentation that can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website. For a copy of our press release or the supplemental presentation, you may contact Alpha IR Group at feam at alpha-ir.com or go to our investor relations page on our website. Please turn to slide two of the presentation where we've presented our legal disclaimers. As a reminder, the remarks made on today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements, including our expectations of future results, future operational initiatives, cost and cost savings, production capacity, capital expenditures and capital savings, market dynamics, liquidity, cash spending, and other items. Our actual results may differ materially or adversely from those projected or discussed in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause the results to differ materially or adversely from these forward-looking statements are contained in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on September 9, 2024, as updated from time to time in our other public filings with the SEC. The company is under no obligation to update forward-looking statements. This afternoon's conference call is hosted by 5E's Chief Executive Officer, Paul Weibel, Vice President of Engineering and Construction, Rob McClain, and Vice President of Commercial Products, Mark Zamek. Management will first lead off the call by making some prepared comments, after which we will open the call open to your questions. Now, please turn to slide three of the presentation for a corporate update. Now, I'll turn the call over to Paul. Paul?

Thank you, Joe. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. When we last spoke a little over two months ago, we laid out a plan for our next strategic steps that would lay the groundwork in two critical areas, our first phase of commercial engineering and the strategy for customer commitment. I'm pleased to say that since our last update, we believe 5E has made meaningful progress across a number of the key focus areas that have the potential to continue to drive our success within these two critical areas. We are getting closer to the realization of critical project advancing catalysts and that we are in a solid position to deliver on our near and longer-term goals while establishing the foundation for sustained shareholder value creation. We want to use this time to ensure we give timely updates to our investors, stakeholders, and the broader market as we prepare ourselves for the calendar year ahead and target a financial investment decision at the end of calendar year 2025. In this quarterly update call, I'm excited to be joined by two of 5E's senior leaders who are helping advance the company through its strategic roadmap. Today, you'll get the chance to hear from Rod McLean, who serves as our Vice President of Engineering and Construction, as well as Mark Zamek, who serves as Vice President of Commercial Products. Both Rod and Mark are serving in vital capacities within 5E's development, and we're excited at the opportunity to familiarize our shareholders and broader stakeholders with what they are accomplishing now and on a go-forward basis. Each will give you some prepared marks on their respective focal areas across our operational and commercial strategies, and will be alongside me to answer additional questions in our live Q&A session. First, on slide four, I'd like to provide the market with a brief State of the Union on our 5E Boron Americas project as well as the company. This update will include our small scale facility, first phase of commercial engineering, and commercial efforts. As we announced last month, we've made solid steps forward in our plant level operations. This is evidenced most notably by our plant team achieving steady state operating rates with much improved purity for boric acid production and sustainably removing calcium and other metal salts. We have overcome the initial maintenance headwinds from the previous quarter and the growing pains of starting up our facility as operations leadership has applied significant focus and operational rigor to drive improved and consistent operating rates. Specifically, our operations team has worked to improve the overall production process by redesigning and improving the facility's conveyor systems that had previously caused bottlenecks. optimizing the boric acid belt filter feed rates after testing various options to increase purity and yield, programming our crystallization unit such that distillation occurs on a continuous basis, and installing new spray nozzles on our belt filter such that we have optimized flow and have kept sulfur rates below 100 ppm. These were important steps as they have improved boric acid consistency and overall product quality. as well as help to ensure that we can consistently exceed the specifications required for our prospective customers. This effort resulted in a major company milestone last week when we delivered our first truckload of boric acid super sacs to a Western U.S. customer. As disclosed in our press release, we are steadily producing one short ton per day of boric acid, an operating level that was chosen strategically as it optimizes for two of our most critical needs. Firstly, this operating rate is at a level that produces adequate sample product that allows 5E to support our ongoing customer qualification process. Thus far, feedback we have received from interested and prospective customers has been increasingly positive. Second, we believe this production rate strikes the ideal balance for our operating costs relative to our existing liquidity profile. to ensure we are utilizing our cash resources in an optimal fashion as we advance the data collection for our commercial strategy. We've been intently focused on optimizing our organizational plans, striking a sensible balance between scaling up operations and making sure we get the most value out of our capital resources. We have been diligent in our efforts to eliminate unnecessary costs and the burden of any overhead that isn't properly aligned with the company's needs. Part of these efforts, we recently underwent a strategic reduction in workforce to optimize our team, reduce fixed and variable operating costs, and find greater efficiency at current production levels. We estimate this initiative would allow us to save approximately $2.2 million in operating expenditures in the upcoming calendar year. This brings me to our initial discussion on our decision-making and go-forward planning specific to our byproduct strategy. Since I assumed the CEO role in June, we have continued to analyze various byproducts from an economic, technical, and operational lens. Specifically, the two main byproducts of focus have been gypsum and calcium chloride. At this stage, we have made the decision to pursue a calcium chloride byproduct, include this in our commercial basis of design, and work towards partnership and offtake with multiple strategic players. Holistically, we believe it makes strategic, and synergistic sense given the positives that we'll outline shortly. With that said, I'll turn the call over to Rod, who will outline the rationale behind this decision and provide an update on our roadmap to FID.