FREYR Battery, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to today's Freya Battery second quarter earnings conference call. My name is Candice and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines have been placed on mute during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for question and answer at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jeffrey Spittel, President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to Ferrer Battery's second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. With me today on the call are Tom Einer Jensen, our Chief Executive Officer, Jan Arve Haugen, our Chief Operating Officer, and Oscar Brown, our Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, management may make forward-looking statements about our business. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Most of these factors are outside FRER's control and are difficult to predict. Additional information about risk factors that could materially affect our business are available in FRER's S-1, an annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on the investor relations sections of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Jeff. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. A true pleasure, of course, to welcome you back to our fifth quarterly report for our second quarter earnings of 2022. Since the first quarter earnings call, the momentum around Freyr has increased significantly. And today, along myself, Jan Arve and Oskar will take you through the status and progress and outlook of the company, which continues to strengthen on an accelerating basis. So we'll take you through a broad variety of updates in the company. And I'll do that as stated together with our chief operating officer and our chief financial officer. As stated last time, we're starting to look like a battery company and we're now increasing our ambition levels based on our demonstrated ability to deliver on commitments and the increased market demand that we're seeing and manifesting itself across all market verticals. Lithium-ion batteries is a solution which increasingly can support an accelerated energy transition and can provide direct or indirect support for close to 75% of all climate mitigating targets. A lot of players are entering this space, but only the ones who move at pace and build at scale and pay true attention to sustainability will prevail. We are increasing our penetration across the board with customers, technology providers, investors, governments, talent, raw material providers, and equipment suppliers to name but a few. We see very strong momentum to accelerate delivery of modularized and scalable solutions for clean battery solutions, while an increasing number of customers are increasing their appetite for the same. When we started FREI more than four years ago, we had a dream on what we could become, but we had not envisaged that we would be able to move as fast and as forcefully as we have. We have more than tenfolded the organization over the last 18 months and implemented what I dare say is a world-class industrialization system resonating with an increasing number of stakeholders around the world. Demand keeps increasing and our customers need both that we speed up in our delivery at the same time as we deliver the most cost competitive solutions to reduce energy inflation, which is all around us at present. We are doing all of that and in a sustainable manner. And I'm very proud to say that we are largely on track, even in the most challenging macroeconomic environment seen for decades. This is due to deliberately and diligently building up an organization based on the century-long experience Norway has in producing and exporting energy, energy-intensive and process-intensive products in both direct and indirect forms. Freyr is on track to deliver on our previously stated ambitions by 2025, and we are doubling that ambition in the following three years and then doubling that again two years after that. Size does matter in this business, and the market situation and our increasing number of customers demand it. We now have more customer dialogues ongoing than what we realistically can cover, and that is a very good situation to be in, which all in all leads us to double our target capacity installed globally to 200 gigawatt hours by 2030 across multiple geographies. As in any renewable industry, analysts and consultants to keep up with the pace of development. And this manifests itself over and over again in the battery industry. Demand forecasts are constantly changed upwards, and this trend has been even more pronounced in the industry that we find ourselves in. What is very encouraging for Freyr is the massive underlying momentum that we're now seeing manifest itself in the energy storage space, which some argue could and should more than 40 fold by 2030. We don't disagree to this statement, by the way. We do, however, target all market verticals, but we could, if we wanted to, dedicate all of our focus entirely on the storage space and applications, as there is more than enough to do in this space alone for Freyer's organization for decades to come. We do, however, see that our industrialization partner of choice approach, coupled with the cleanest battery solutions, attract a lot of interest from existing as well as emerging players across all verticals and across all geographies. Our aspirations currently of 200 gigawatt hours of installed capacity by 2030 will make us a relevant player on the global arena. But as these illustrations suggest, if anything, the risk is on the upside as long as we continue to deliver on our promises. Having a broad spectrum of customers across the market verticals that we are targeting and the industries that we're engaging ourselves in will allow ourselves to optimize our customer portfolio and therefore be value accretive to our investors in what we believe will be a massively market short environment for the coming decade. A core part of this interest is driven by our relentless focus on stating what we want to achieve and then reporting against these achievements. Today, we'll always be transparent and direct about our status and progress. And so far, we have been able to overcome a number of challenges and keep momentum. This is driven by our mantras of speed, scale, and sustainability. And to be able to report that we are on track for startup production for GigaArctic in the first half of 2024, and that we are on track to have all equipment installed in the customer qualification plant by year-end, is something that I'm deeply proud of being able to reconfirm to our investors. Governments have an important role to play in this very capital-intensive industry, and we have very strong support from the Norwegian government, and we're very encouraged by the Inflation Reduction Act announced in the US, which Oscar Brown, our group CFO, will cover a little bit later. We therefore see... that we can leverage the Norwegian development even further and accelerate our plans in the U.S., and we very much look forward to announcing our choice of site in the U.S. already later this year. We should be able to start up what we now label Giga-America in the 2024-2025 timeframe at an even higher capacity than the Giga-Arctic, which will deliver our current ambition of 50 GWh installed by 2025. Let me talk quickly about GigaArctic. This will be our flagship development, and it's becoming a showcase for us. And we have upsized and improved this facility several times through our excellent organization. We now believe we can build 29 gigawatt hours of LFP capacity, which is almost three times larger than what the equivalent facility Giga 1 and 2 would be, as we announced when we went public on the New York Stock Exchange last year. This facility will be one of the most modern battery facilities in the world, in stunning environments in the north of Norway, inside what we believe is the best and most effective industrial park in Norway. We've already cleared ground and we are working day and night to pour concrete and establish foundational works so that we can be ready to start up this more than 120,000 square meter facility, which will be one of the most, if not the most efficient battery facility worldwide. In this context, it is extremely encouraging to see how capital effective this facility will be compared to all other facilities in Europe in operation or under construction. This very strong capital efficiency is primarily due to the highly space efficient nature of the 24M technology, as I've talked about many times, coupled with our upsized facility compared to previous and our excellent project execution centric organization leadership who have been able to optimize the capital efficiency of this facility. As the world needs to build hundreds of gigafactories over the coming decades to keep up with demand in the market segments I just alluded to, finding the most capital efficient solutions will be key to success. And therefore, we are extremely encouraged to have this highly comforting starting point. We are very proud to be the first to take the commercially proven 24M technology to gigawatt hour scale. And we will lead the way into next generation lithium ion battery solutions. On top of this, we will also be able to produce more than 200 times more batteries per employee than current conventional lithium-ion battery solutions, and we will use 100% renewable and ultra-low-cost electricity to deliver on those battery production capacities. So the future for Freyr looks very strong indeed, and we have a very strong cost-competitive starting point to replicate around the world. This is then what the Norwegian government has been seeing as we have been in intense dialogue with them since we started to make ourselves known in the Norwegian scene some four years ago. And six weeks ago, the Norwegian government decided to launch their national battery strategy on-site together with Freyer in Moerana. Clearly a testament to our leading position in the Norwegian battery industry. Norway aims to become a leading nation, not only in battery cell production, but across the entire battery value chain and our very close relationship with the Norwegian government and all Norwegian institutions is cementing our position as the lead in Norway. This deep financial, strategic and political support unlocks additional value-creating opportunities, including the establishment of the entire value chain and battery ecosystem in Norway and the Nordics. And the Nordics is emerging as a core hub for battery production and the materials going into it. We are very grateful to the Norwegian government, who will now channel Norway's century-long experience in energy, energy-intensive and process-intensive industries, and apply this to the battery ecosystem. Let me now hand over to Oscar Brown, our group CFO, who will bring you our perspectives on the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, which is already accelerating our activities in our plans in the US together with our excellent partners, Koch Strategic Platforms. Oscar, over to you.