Fusion Fuel Green PLC

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Fusion Fuel Green's second quarter 2022 investor update. My name is Ben Schwartz, and I'm head of investor relations at Fusion Fuel. I would first like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward looking statements, including, but not limited to the company's expectations or predictions of financial and business performance, which are based on numerous assumptions about sales margins, competitive factors. Industry performance and other factors, which cannot be predicted. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, and they are not guarantees of performance. I encourage you to read the disclaimer slide in the investor presentation for a discussion of the risks that may affect our business today or may cause our assumptions to prove incorrect. The company is under no obligation and expressly disclaims any obligation to update, alter, or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. Okay, thank you for joining us today. As always, I will run through our agenda for the next hour. We'll open with some remarks from Fusion Fuels Chairman, followed by an overview of our value proposition, as well as some observations about valuations in the green hydrogen sector. And the management team will share second quarter highlights, financial results, the latest on our technology, and an update on our commercial strategy and pipeline. As we always do, we'll end with a recap of our 2022 milestones before opening up the floor for facilitated Q&A. As in previous calls, questions can be entered in the chat box in the webcast platform at any point during the next 58 minutes. Alternatively, you can also submit your questions to the investor relations mailbox at ir.fusion-fuel.eu. So without any further ado, I'll pass it over to Jeffrey Schwarz, Fusion Fuels Chairman.

Thanks, Ben. I'm Jeffrey Schwarz, chairman of Fusion Fuel Green PLC, and I want to add my welcome to our Q2 and six-month investor presentation. The equity markets have not been kind to growth stories this year. The Federal Reserve's efforts to rein in inflation by raising interest rates has had a disproportionate effect on the share prices of fast-growing companies due to the discounting of out-year cash flows, or so Wall Street analysts would have you believe. Then again, most of those strategists began the year predicting double-digit equity market returns, so I take their advice with more than a few grains of salt. I know I say this almost every quarter, and I apologize if I sound like the proverbial broken record. But I've been in the investment business for more than 40 years, and the one investment strategy that has proven to work consistently over time is to uncover businesses that serve a growing market with a superior technology and a strong management team. That is what we identified in Fusion Fuel Green. And recent events, in particular, the energy crisis in Europe and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in the United States, have only served to magnify the opportunity. A chief concern for producers or off-takers of green hydrogen is a concept called the levelized cost of hydrogen. which is driven primarily by the interplay of two factors, the cost of electricity required for electrolysis and the capex for the electrolyzer imbalance of plant. Fusion's solution offers advantages on both counts. Grid independence and scalability are what make our solution unique and especially ideal for the high value added mobility market, which is a key near-term target for fusion. In the production of green hydrogen, grid independence enables eliminating exposure to highly volatile prices for electricity and natural gas, a benefit very much in focus during this time of historically high energy prices in Europe. The benefit of eliminating this form of uncertainty is quite straightforward. The fact that our HEVO solar generators can produce low-cost green hydrogen at even the very modest levels of production eliminates risk in a less obvious but potentially more important way. And I beg your indulgence for a moment as I use an analogy to explain. Imagine, if you will, two suppliers of equipment, which are used to produce widgets. Supplier A offers a machine that can produce 10,000 widgets per year, but at a high cost, or alternatively, a second machine that can produce 100,000 widgets per year at a lower cost, but with a significant upfront capital investment. Supplier B has a machine that can produce 10,000 widgets per year at that same lower cost, but with just a fraction of the required capex. Also, let's assume that the expectation is that the market for widgets will grow significantly over time. But next year, when the equipment will be delivered, the market is projected to be 10,000 widgets. Well, which one would you recommend purchase? To me, the answer is obvious, supplier B. The ability to meet current demand while retaining the potential to grow productive capacity as the market grows is the slam-dunk winner. And that's even more so if one believes the price of widget-making equipment may well decline in the years ahead. Well, I suspect it won't come as a surprise to you that in this analogy, manufacturers of centralized electrolyzers are supplier A and fusion is supplier B. And this feature of being able to start with modest production of green hydrogen and grow as demand grows is especially important in a nascent market like mobility. With a very large existing stock of diesel fuel trucks, buses, and heavy duty equipment, the demand for green hydrogen today is modest. However, it is expected to grow over time as existing equipment reaches end of life and is replaced by equipment powered by hydrogen fuel cells. I'll conclude by saying this. Keep your eye on the prize. If you believe that the future of green hydrogen is bright and believe our Hivo Solar solution offers unique advantages, then there is every reason to believe, as I do, and mind you, I have never sold a share of Fusion, that we will be successful in building a company that is valued highly in the marketplace. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Ben.

Great, thanks very much. So with the benefit of that context, let's begin with an overview of Fusion Fuel's business case and value proposition. So for those of you who are new to the theme or in need of a refresher, Fusion Fuel is in the business of developing and delivering cost-effective clean hydrogen solutions to accelerate the global energy transition. as i've said before at its core fusion fuel is a technology company we have developed and commercialized a proprietary integrated solar solar to hydrogen generator that unlocks grid independent green hydrogen production at a market leading levelized cost our decentralized approach is a truly unique source of differentiation in the market where everyone else is going bigger to drive down costs we have gone small scale and modular and in doing so had been able to eliminate some of the cost and complexity of hydrogen production and distribution. While others are talking about developing green hydrogen projects, we're doing it. As we speak, our HIVO Solar Technology is producing green hydrogen at our demonstration facility in Portugal, And our unique approach and differentiated technology have enabled us to build a robust commercial pipeline of tech sale and development projects led by our pilot project with Exolume in Madrid, which will be up and running by the end of the year. Yet despite all that, it's not lost on us that we continue to be persistently and significantly undervalued relative to our peers in the green hydrogen sector. a group of names that undoubtedly has advantages from a maturity, scale, and balance sheet perspective. But as our chairman rightly pointed out, in a market where most everyone has fundamentally the same offering, what customers care about more than anything is levelized cost of hydrogen. That is and will continue to be the key differentiator. That also happens to be where we believe we have a clear competitive advantage, Not only can we offer known long term certainty of costs through our integrated solution, but we can do so at market leading levels, agnostic of scale and without grants. We have a differentiated business model of selling both technology and green hydrogen and have a clear path to revenue generation and delivery at scale. So another way of looking at this chart would be to say fusion fuel is the cheapest green hydrogen pure play stock out there today by an order of magnitude. And hopefully the next 50 minutes or so together will leave you sharing a similar perspective. So I'll now pass it over to Frederico, who will provide an update on the quarter and subsequent events.