Origin Materials, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Origin Materials Third Quarter 2024 earnings call. As a reminder, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question team, you may press star and then one on your telephone keypad. If you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I'd like to turn the call over to Ryan Smith, co-founder and chief product officer. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us, everyone. Speaking first today is Origins co-CEO, Rich Riley. Co-CEO and co-founder, John Bissell, and CFO, Matt Plavin, will speak next. Then we'll open the call to questions from analysts and discuss questions submitted as part of our Ask Origin campaign. Ahead of this call, Origin has issued its 2024 third quarter press release and presentation. These can be found on the investor relations section of our website at originmaterials.com. Please note that during our discussion today, we will be making forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect our view as of today, should not be relied upon as representative about views of any subsequent date, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For further discussion, On the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our quarterly report on Form 10Q filed today. During today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of origin materials performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. You will find additional disclosures regarding the non-GAAP financial measures discussed on today's call in our press release issued this afternoon and our filings with the SEC, which will be posted to our website. The webcast of this call will also be available on the Investor Relations section of our company website. With that, I will turn the call over to Rich.

Thank you, Ryan. Good afternoon, everyone. With our caps and closures business, we have achieved product market fit. Customer demand is strong, and our ability to produce Origin's premium PET caps is largely what will determine our rate of growth. Because of the recent success of our first cap former system and its completed factory acceptance test, we are now able to execute our scale-up plan for building additional systems more aggressively and with higher confidence to meet pent-up demand. We expect to see healthy growth exiting 2025, and we anticipate that Origin will be EBITDA positive on a run rate basis in the first half of 2026. Now let's talk about how we got to this moment. First, this quarter we achieved a milestone on our journey to profitability, the successful factory acceptance test of our initial cap former system. In the course of this test, we produced several million fully functional PET caps. Our cap former subsystems ran as expected, including quality systems such as visual inspection, as well as our finishing systems. Everything necessary for turning recycled PET sheet into fully formed caps. This isn't the test system. It's our first commercial line, and the success of this test means that Origin's proprietary system is performing as envisioned, with over 98% efficiency during the acceptance test. As most of you listening know, Origin's CapFormer system offers the world a breakthrough for recycling circularity and packaging performance. In this quarter, we revealed some of its secrets, the novel applications of thermoforming, finishing, and post-processing, and other design elements, which you can see in the video released in September. Our prospective customers and partners visited us and witnessed our cap former system producing PET caps at commercial speeds firsthand. The prospective customers attending, whose total cap consumption is in excess of 100 billion caps per year, saw the validation of our production approach with their own eyes. Simply put, our manufacturing system works, and along with our current and prospective customers and partners, we couldn't be more excited about it. Furthermore, our commercialization plan centered on launching our caps and closures business and going to market with the world's first commercially viable PET beverage closures is on track. Commercial production remains on track to begin this quarter, at which time we will continue to engage in customer qualification as we scale our caps output. Our caps and closures revenue expectations are on track. We expect initial caps and closures revenue generation during the first quarter of next year, with significant gross profit generation projected to begin in 2025 and a healthy growth trajectory thereafter. Customer momentum, as I've alluded to, remains strong alongside our announced $100 million MOU for PET caps. Our caps are now in the hands of multiple potential customers engaged in testing and qualification, offering a strong pipeline of potential buyers who can purchase billions of caps as our systems come online throughout next year and beyond. I know many of you want to know more details about our respective customers. Let me tell you why we aren't talking about them yet and what would cause us to talk about it more. Presently, multiple prospective customers are engaged in a qualification phase. That means we've delivered caps to them and they're performing their own testing. Many of them have attended our trials and tests, and we've explicitly discussed geographies, volumes, ramp up timelines, and economics. This qualification period will extend through the start of commercial production, which is slated for the fourth quarter of this year. Once we've completed the qualification period with each customer, including the delivery of caps following the commencement of commercial production, we will be in position to sign definitive purchase agreements, at which time we expect the rate at which we announce customers to increase. We will continue to qualify new customers on an ongoing basis as we expand production capacity and develop new cap formats and features. We believe we can sell every cap we can produce, and our prospective customers can't wait to begin accepting shipments. With customer demand as strong as it is, and with commercialization progressing as planned, we are in a great position to scale our production capabilities. For more on this topic, I will turn it over to John, who will share details about our plans for growing the business in the quarters ahead. Thank you, Rich, and good afternoon, everyone.