Piedmont Lithium Inc.

for feed mode lithium earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the star one again. Thank you. And now I will turn the call back over to John Koslow, Investor Relations at Piedmont Lithium. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. Welcome to Piedmont Lithium's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. Joining us today from Piedmont Lithium are Keith Phillips, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Michael White, Chief Financial Officer. Keith will provide an introduction and review key updates from the quarter, and Michael will then review our financial results. Keith will provide closing commentary before we transition to a live Q&A session. As a reminder, today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements related to future events and expectations that are subject to various assumptions and caveats. Factors that may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation, earnings release, and in our SEC filings. In addition, we have included non-GAAP financial metrics in this presentation, and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today's earnings release and the appendix to today's slide presentation. Any references to EBITDA mean adjusted EBITDA, references to shipments or shipments of spodumene concentrate, and tons or dry metric tons. Copies of our earnings release and presentation in addition to a replay of this call, will be available on our website at piedmontlithium.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Keith Phillips.

Keith? Thanks, John, and thank you all for joining us today. In summary, Q4 was a good quarter for Piedmont. Operations at North American Lithium performed well with another quarter of strong production and impressive operating metrics. For Piedmont, the strong operational performance allowed us to make record deliveries in the fourth quarter. Our commercial strategy of delivering under our long-term off-takes, selectively hedging against the contangling lithium futures market, and making larger combined shipments resulted in another quarter of strong price realizations and improved profitability. On the corporate side of the business, we successfully reduced our corporate expenses as part of our 2024 cost savings plan and announced a merger with our joint venture partner at NAL, Ciona Mining. We'll cover each of these topics in more detail later in the call. Now let's move on to slide four. NAL achieved another strong quarter with nearly 51,000 tons produced in Q4 24 and over 190,000 tons produced in the full year 2024. Following the restart of production in March of 2023, operations have shown continual improvement with strong lithium recoveries and increasing mill utilization. You can see in the chart the uptick in mill utilization beginning in Q2-24, a direct result of the capital invested in the crushed ore storage dome earlier in the year. Increased production has led to improved operating costs, with unit costs per ton declining sequentially and a total decline of nearly 20% from the start of the year. Importantly, when excluding the impact of inventory movements, cash operating costs at NAL were $709 ton Q4-24, a new low. Further improvement is targeted through continued process improvement and with the ultimate move through the old underground workings in the mine, which has led to temporarily elevated mining costs. In January, CYANA announced some outstanding results from the large exploration program that was undertaken at NAL in 2024, and I will speak more about the implications of these results later in the presentation. The performance validates the strategy we undertook with purchasing NAL in 2021, namely bringing a brownfield asset in a premier location back into production in an expeditious manner at a significantly lower cost than developing greenfield projects. NAL is North America's largest lithium operation, and it offers direct leverage to an ultimate recovery in lithium prices. Now let's turn to slide five for an update on our development projects. There has been much focus on the energy transition following November's election as investors grapple with possible changes to domestic policy. While many have assumed the Trump administration would be a negative for the industry, we have always had a different view. On January 20th, his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency. Central to this EO is the reinforcement of the President's earlier commentary on the importance of domestic critical minerals production to avoid over-reliance on China, and indeed, to quote the President, national energy dominance. National energy dominance cannot be achieved without domestic sources of lithium, like Carolina Lithium. Our focus in North Carolina remains on advancing through the permitting process. We received our state mining permit in 2024 and a petition to challenge that permit was voluntarily withdrawn by petitioners earlier this month. We are optimistic that air and water permits will be achieved during this calendar year and we continue to assess the timeline for rezoning of our land package with the Gaston County Board of Commissioners. We will of course need their approval to proceed and we look forward to entering that process in due course. For our joint venture, Awoya Lithium Project, we were pleased to receive a mine operating permit from the Minerals Commission of Ghana in October. Awoya's mining lease remained subject to parliamentary ratification. This process was paused around Ghana's election in Q4, but we anticipate a positive outcome during 2025. Ratification is the final step in the approvals process, but any final investment decision will be subject to market conditions and the completion of funding. At Piedmont, we are obviously focused on developing our projects at a measured pace given current market conditions. Now I'll turn the call over to Michael to discuss our financial results.