FREYR Battery, Inc.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the FRERA Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Harry, and I'll be your operator today. If you'd like to ask a question after the presentation, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand over to the host, Jeff Spittel, Vice President of Investor Relations.

To begin, Jeff, please go ahead. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to FRERA Battery's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. With me today on the call from Oslo are Tom Einer-Jensen, our Chief Executive Officer, and incoming executive chair, Jan Arve Haugen, our chief operating officer, Oscar Brown, our chief financial officer, Jeremy Bezdek, president of Frere Battery US and EVP of Global Corporate Development, and Berger Sten, our incoming CEO and board member. 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 Frayer's control and are difficult to predict. Additional information about risk factors that could materially affect our business are available in Frayer's S-1, an annual report on Form 10-K-5 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on the investor relations section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Jeff. And good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone joining today's call for our second quarter results presentation 2023 and our ninth overall quarterly presentation since we were in public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2021. It is a privilege for us to provide an update on results for the second quarter, along with our outlook for the business. Following our recent capital market day in late June, our teams have continued to work tirelessly to advance several important initiatives. But before we get down to the business at hand, I am extremely delighted to announce that we have strengthened our organization materially with the addition of our new Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Berger Steen, who is with us today here in Oslo on the call. Berger brings more than 30 years of leadership experience at some of the world's most admired companies, including Microsoft and McKinsey & Company. He also has deep expertise in the technology sector, and we'll elaborate on how that dovetails so well with Friar's strategy in a moment. In conjunction with Berger's appointment, I will be assuming a new role as executive chair of Freyer's board of directors. With the day-to-day management of the business in such capable hands, these changes free up much of my time to focus on key initiatives that are critical to our long-term success and the creation of shareholder value. Going forward, I will be concentrating on three key areas. Global corporate development with our customers and strategic partners, large scale capital formation and engagement with the investment community and our other capital providers. Our ability to attract the talented and highly respected executive, such as Birgit, to strengthen our team is a testament to the progress Freyr has made as an organization. And I'm very much looking forward to collaborating with him, the rest of our management team, and my colleagues on the board of directors as we continue to execute on Freyr's growth plans. On that note, let's now turn to business. I'm pleased to report that the operations at the CQP are proceeding according to plan and that we're on track to achieve key milestones during the second half of the year and beyond. As Enarive will document shortly, the operations and project teams have continued to make remarkable progress. We have now commenced on a testing program for Nidec at the CQP, and we will start up fully automated dry runs of the entire production system later this month. The continued progress we're making in commissioning the CQP leaves us on track to begin producing fully automated active battery cell production in the fourth quarter. Ramping the CQP is a highly complex and challenging endeavor. And as we have indicated previously, you should expect us to encounter some adversity along the way. But we have incredibly talented people working day and night that have solved and will continue to solve problems as they arise. And thanks to their continued devotion, professionalism, and creativity, our progress at the CQP is positioning us to drive capital formation on multiple fronts, which I will dedicate more of my time on moving forward. As Oscar and Jeremy will talk about later, we are on track to execute up to a $1 billion project-level equity raise for Giga America, which will facilitate FID on Phase 1A of our Giga America project by year-end. We have also launched an application process with the U.S. Department of Energy Loan Program Office for Phase 1B of Giga America. Furthermore, we have initiated a process with Norwegian government financing institutions to formalize the government's incentive packages, which will augment the 100 million euro grant we recently announced from the EU Innovation Fund. But our ongoing progress is hardly limited to the CQP. Freyr's board of directors has approved a process to redomicile the company from Luxembourg to the US by the end of 2023. This decision is particularly relevant for our investors as it will dramatically expand our eligibility for inclusion in equity indices, along with the associated passive and active investment in our equity. Although the redomiciling won't change Freyr's Norwegian DNA, The move strongly aligns the company with our accelerated growth agenda in the US, which is underpinned by the Inflation Reduction Act and the US Department of Energy programs. Our progress with strategic partners continue to progress and the underlying interest in our products keep increasing from existing partners and new customers. Our continued progress is underpinned by a very healthy demand supply environment for Freyr's fit-for-purpose energy storage system solutions based on LFP chemistries. Contrary to what you may have read recently, we are not seeing evidence of Chinese capacity from the EV market spilling over into the ESS space, nor do we expect the favorable supply-demand dynamics to deteriorate over the next several years. And as we'll touch upon later, a report we recently commissioned from Rijstad Energy supports our view that the deep market short of clean fit for purpose LFP storage solutions will persist for the foreseeable future. We are daily witnessing the catastrophic climate catastrophes around the world from heat waves, ocean temperatures at record levels, droughts and flooding, which is increasingly driving governments to push through larger and faster incentives for accelerated deployment of renewable energy technology. This urgently required acceleration is further augmented by the need for regional security of supply of critical renewable energy infrastructure, of which batteries form an absolute necessary backbone for a decentralized, decarbonized and therefore democratized energy system. Against this backdrop, Freyr is increasingly recognized as an industrialization partner of choice, based on our ambition to deliver the most environmentally friendly, and cost-effective batteries, catalyzing and accelerating renewable ESS projects at the multiple hundreds of gigawatt hours over the coming years. In short, demand is there and increasing. Support for the energy transition is accelerating from targeted government incentives around the world, while our CQP is starting up automated production, which enables non-dilutive funding at our Gigafactory projects to deliver Freyr as a clean battery solutions champion that we have aspired to become since our start in 2018. I am very excited about the latest addition to our leadership team, our soon-to-be Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Bergerstein. Before I introduce Berger, it's my privilege to share a bit about his background. Berger comes to Freyr as a seasoned and accomplished executive and board member with deep expertise in the technology sector. He is currently board chair of Nordic Semiconductor ASA and Pagero Group and a thematic partner at Sama Equity, and his experience include leadership roles at Microsoft, Parallels, Shipstead, and McKinsey. Berger brings a unique set of capabilities that aligns seamlessly with Freire's aspirations to become an industry leader in the application of next generation technologies to the battery space. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Berger to say a few words. Berger?