FREYR Battery, Inc.

Hello, and welcome to Frere Battery's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings conference call. With me today on the call are Tom Einer Jensen, our Executive Chairperson, Berger Steen, our Chief Executive Officer, Oscar Brown, our Chief Financial Officer, and Jeremy Bezdek, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and President of Frere Battery U.S. 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 FERS control and are difficult to predict. Additional information about risk factors that could materially affect our business are available in FERS 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 Tom.

Thank you, Jeff, and welcome everyone to this fourth quarter earnings call for our year's 11th earnings call since we went public on the New York Stock Exchange on July 8th, 2021. I want to thank all our investors, shareholders, and stakeholders for the continued support, even as we have been navigating very challenging times and strong hang wins, both in the markets and as a company. I want to take this opportunity to provide some overall strategic reflections and perspective on where we are, where we're going, and why we're confident that we're on the right track to succeed as a company. Even though it is extremely challenging to build a battery company, we have been able to turn adversity into advantage. And we now see that the actions we have undertaken since the third quarter reporting are starting to yield significant operational and commercial traction. First of all, let me underline that the energy transition is happening faster than most realize and most are able to estimate. EV sales momentum seem to be back on track. with EV sales now showing 69% growth year over year from January 23 to January 24, and now surpassing 1 million cars in January for the first time ever. All markets are growing, and year-end estimates keep trending upwards in most markets. The ESS market in 2023 was furthermore twice as high as initial estimates by reputable agencies and closed above 100 gigawatt hours per year for the first time, and solar deployment continues to develop at record pace. Everything else that can will be electrified and be driven by continued energy density improvements and strong cost reductions. All of this requires massive amount of automotive, domestic, commercial and industrial scale storage solutions and everything else that will be electrified for balancing out the variability of the renewable energy generation. Demand for batteries will continue to grow at the highest growth rate within the renewable energy industry and could become the largest segment in the new energy economy as early as 2030. However, while current installed capacity in China outstrips demand, there are increasing challenges for Chinese companies to export products and establish presence and invest abroad. Supply will also increasingly be regionalized over time as batteries are becoming a critical part of energy infrastructure and the backbone of the new energy system. Ultimately, however, it will be the ability to ride learning curves and be on the left-hand side of the cost curve that will determine the winners in the long run. I'm therefore very proud to say that Freire has now finally proven that we're capable of producing electrochemically active electrodes through fully automated production of anodes and cathodes with the next generation 24M technology. We're furthermore also increasingly mastering the electromechanical challenges at the CQP, which is now 94% complete, and we're on track to start fully automated production of batteries for testing by customers in the first half of 2024. This means that we are moving from an aspiring battery company to a company producing batteries. Freya's strategy thus remains intact, and while we've had serious challenges to deal with, we are on track to become a Western Hemisphere-based global champion for clean battery solutions as our actions initiated since the Q3 reporting is starting to show significant results. As Berger and the management team will take you through, our technology-flexible strategy provides a differentiated and dual exposure to the battery industry, and we're making real headway along both tracks. We are developing next-generation battery solutions that ultimately will be cost-advantaged relative to conventional solutions, and our industrialization partner of choice approach is generating strong and increasing interest, which is opening significant new near-term commercial opportunities. All our strategic partners, customers and suppliers stand with us on this journey. And I would again like to thank our investors who have stood by us in these challenging times. We're deeply grateful for the patience you have shown us. And I can reassure you that all stones have been turned and we've pushed all possible boundaries to ensure we can get on the offense again and regain momentum and trust in the marketplace. I will now hand it over to Berger and the team to take a deeper dive into how we are trending towards becoming a global champion in clean battery solutions produced in the Western hemisphere through starting to produce fully automated batteries with next generation technology and delivering conventional solutions based on our partnership based model. Berger, over to you.

Thanks, Tom. And hello to everyone joining today's call. Turning to slide four. Let's look at where we stand today as our team is working on a number of exciting opportunities to generate value for you, our shareholders. As I alluded to in this morning's earnings press release, the changes we made in Q4 throughout the company are bearing fruit. We've cut cash outflow by more than half year on year and flattened the organizational structure to ensure information sharing, collaboration across our teams, and accelerated execution against our key objectives. As Oscar will touch upon later, battery production is capital intensive and we're committed to deploying your capital to only the highest value opportunities while we focus on our two capital formation initiatives. The DOE Title 17 application through the loan programs office and project level equity discussions for Giga America. Our Moiraana CQP is the other area where we're seeing impressive performance from our people in close collaboration with our global network of vendors and strategic partners. Mike Browse, our site lead in the Moerana, brings more than 30 years of experience working in and managing complex manufacturing and processing facilities, and he and his new team have driven strong progress in recent months. During the month of February, Mike and the team brought the CQP into operating mode under dry room conditions, and we're now producing automated electrodes with active electrolyte slurry. This is a meaningful step towards fully automated production at gigascale rates. We're in the process of transitioning the CQP from installation and commissioning to production of sample battery cells for key customers, which is Frere's number one priority for the first half of 2024. The CQP is our means to achieve technical validation and broad customer acceptance of the 24M semi-solid product family. Following customer testing and sample cell acceptance, we will move on to offtake conversions with key customers, in turn triggering our next wave of capital formations. Moving to slide five, our technology strategy is yielding several promising opportunities to accelerate commercialization. During our Q1 2022 earnings call, we unveiled a competitive strategy founded upon two key elements. Expanding on the battery value chain into high value adjacencies to cell production, point one, and cultivating partnerships across the cell production technology spectrum from conventional to next generation. and with the 24M Semi-Solid Platform as our foundational fit-for-purpose ESS and e-mobility solution as point two. Two years later, much has changed in the industry and the macro environment. Interest rates are up and still high. The ESS market is growing close to triple digit CAGR in US dollar terms and significantly above industry expectation. Capacity buildup in China and lower material costs have triggered a steep drop in sell market prices And finally, the IRA has materially changed capital flows. These rapid and to some extent unpredictable changes reinforce our view that our strategy of retaining flexibility in both technology platforms and partnerships continues to be appropriate for Freya. It will enable us to capitalize on our core competency in manufacturing and scaling while we expand our addressable markets in the U.S. and in Europe and build a profitable position as the leading U.S.-based battery makers. 24M is our next generation platform to scale a Western technology stack that we believe will be a source of long-term competitive differentiation. We love the dynamics of the ESS market, and we believe that 24M has enormous potential to be a disruptive solution for storage, as well as selected transportation applications. The flexibility of the semi-solid platform to work with different chemistries and to eventually evolve to fit new use cases is also an appealing characteristic of this technology in the longer term. While we scale 24M on the path to mass production at gigafactories, establishing a conventional technology footprint should also enable us to accelerate our path to commercialization and new addressable end markets. This approach has been validated by the industry leaders. Technological differentiation is essential long-term, but there is tremendous value in getting to market, engaging with customers, and driving transferable operational technical learnings, maturing our business as we grow our top-line. Turning to slide six, which I'll walk you through with Jeremy, we're receiving validation of this technology approach in real time. Our team is focusing on five distinct project opportunities across the US and Europe for semi-solid and conventional technology applications and addressing the ESS, commercial mobility, and potentially passenger EV markets. These five project pursuits, which are in various stages of maturity, collectively encompass more than 100 gigawatt hours of potential capacity. All of these projects involve industry-leading customers and partners. Beyond those five distinct project opportunities, Jeremy and his team are also discussing other avenues to accelerate phrase path to commercialization. Jeremy, over to you.