FREYR Battery, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jessica and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Friar Battery third quarter 2023 conference 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 star one again. I would now like to turn the call over to Jeff Spittel, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hello, and welcome to Fairbattery's third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With me today on the call are Bergerstein, our Chief Executive Officer, Oscar Brown, our Chief Financial Officer, Jan Arbe Haugen, our Chief Operating Officer, Jeremy Bezdek, Executive VP of Corporate Development and President of Ferrer Battery US. 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 Ferrer'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 section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Berger. Thanks, Jeff.

Good afternoon, everyone. Please join me in today's call. We'll start today with an overview of what we believe is FRER's compelling equity story. Their value proposition is based on the premise that electrification is both inevitable and reliable mass deployment in batteries. But in today's higher for longer cost of capital environments, the companies who will emerge as the next leaders of the energy transition must balance growth aspirations with rigorous financial discipline. Our team at Frere is unified in that vision of the business and we're committed to build upon a unique competitive position with that approach. With that in mind, We're excited about the opportunities we have to establish FRER as a leading developer and scaler of battery technologies across the energy storage and electric mobility sectors. As Tesla asserted earlier this year, the long-term growth potential in our core markets is profound and aligned with decarbonization initiatives, Western energy security, and accommodative public policy, highlighted by the Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S. As stewards of your precious capital, our responsibility to maintain the liquidity we need to convert these opportunities, which are punctuated by a growing universe of real options into lasting shareholder value. We intend to do that by protecting our strong balance sheet and deploying capital selectively while we advanced our ongoing capital formation initiatives, diversifying on the technology spectrum and battery value chain, maximizing the IRA incentives, and finally developing our highest return projects. Turning to slide four, let's review our key messages this quarter. As you saw in this morning's release, we're contending with the delay in our progress to fully automated production at the CQP. And we have implemented a detailed plan to address the complex challenge of scaling the 24-hour semi-solid platform. A lot of the current CQP calendar The U.S. team has rescaled Giga America to pursue the full-scale project on two parallel paths. Pack one is based on the 24M semi-solid technology, and pack two is the leveraged conventional technology. As Jeremy will document shortly, these two paths are not mutually exclusive options for the Giga America site, and they're aligned with our strategy of expanding on the battery technology spectrum. Turning to the Giga Arctic project, we have elected to minimize spending in 2024 while our work continues at the CQP and while we engage with Norwegian and European government stakeholders to establish framework conditions that place the project on globally competitive economic terms. Moving to slide five, the playbook to navigate today's high volatility environment is as follows. We're initiating a cost rationalization program to reduce our total run rate cash spending by over 50% in 2024, which will extend our liquidity runway to two plus years. Oscar will elaborate on it shortly.