TMC the metals company Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Metals Company first quarter 2024 corporate update conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question via the phone line, during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Craig Krzyzewski, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. And please note that during this call, certain statements made by the company will be forward-looking and based on management's beliefs and assumptions from information available at this time. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which may be beyond our control. Additionally, please note that the company's actual results may differ materially. from what we go through in this call, and that, except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. Our remarks today may also include non-GAAP financial measures, including with respect to free cash flows. Additional details regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, can be found in our slide deck being used with this call. And you're welcome to follow along with our slide deck, or if joining us by phone, you can access it at any time at investors.metals.co. And I'll now turn the call over to our chairman and CEO, Jared Barron. Jared, please go ahead.

Thank you, Craig, and thank you to all of you for attending our first quarter 2024 corporate update conference call. It's only been a month and a half since our last update, but even in that short time, we've seen some important project milestones and positive tailwinds for this industry. But I'd like to start with an exciting new addition to the TMC team. Last month, we were pleased to welcome Steve Jefferson to our board as vice chairman and strategic advisor. Steve is not just a legendary investor, but a visionary with wide and deep-ranging curiosity. Among other roles, he's a current board member of SpaceX and a former longtime board member of Tesla. His investments represent over $800 billion in aggregate value creation and include pioneering technology companies like tesla and planet labs and spacex and commonwealth fusion systems and i'm proud to count him both as a supporter of our mission and an exciting tmc shareholder and we are already benefiting from his contributions and connections so onto a quick liquidity snapshot total liquidity stood at 49 million as at march 31st 2024. Since that time, TNC has drawn down $2.9 million out of our $45 million available capacity on unsecured credit facilities. And the use of these facilities provided by our three largest shareholders, including myself, should indicate how confident we are on the path forward and the news flow in the coming months, which we believe will be well received by current and potential investors. The next slide is a summary since our last quarterly update in late March. I'd like to draw your attention to the news we announced this morning. We have now uploaded the largest ever submission of environmental data to the International Seabed Authority. Drawn from 22 offshore campaigns to the Nori-D area, this wealth of new data adds a further 75,000 biological occurrences to the ISA's catalog of contracted data for the Clarion-Clipperton zone, as well as a myriad of other data, which will further enhance society's understanding of the deep sea ecosystem and the potential impacts of our operations. NORI's data set is the largest of its kind ever gathered in the deep sea, and with much more data still to come, I am confident that our efforts over the past 12 years will provide the regulator with the data it needs to make informed decisions regarding our application. And as we move on to the agenda, you'll see we spend some time today focusing more specifically on the key questions that we'll be answering with our environmental impact assessment. The results from our investment over the past decade are now arriving almost daily, and we remain very encouraged by what we see. We are excited to share some of this with you today, along with some insight on why our team is increasingly confident that there are no showstoppers. We will progress, also review the industry headlines, provide an update on regulatory progress, and end with... Hey, sorry about that.