FREYR Battery, Inc.

Hello, and welcome to Frere Battery's first quarter 2024 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, Jeremy Bezek, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and President, 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 Frayer'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 and 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 first quarter 2024 earnings call, Friar's 12th earnings call since we went public on the New York Stock Exchange back in July 2021. When we launched our mission to become a global champion in clean battery solutions, we advocated that deep electrification would happen across the board, and we particularly emphasized the massive growth expected in the ESS segment with LFP batteries. It is interesting to look back on our market predictions from back then, which were notably higher than most other estimates at the time, and see that the development in battery deployment is well in line with our predictions. As per the recent International Energy Agency report, the storage market continues to grow exponentially and is exhibiting the benefits and added momentum from established, and emerging structural growth drivers, such as renewables proliferation, electrification of everything, but also now the AI and crypto on the horizon. We believe this market will continue to surprise on the upside, and we are very well positioned to play a significant role in it. Against this backdrop, we have made significant progress behind the scenes this quarter on augmenting our technology strategy, evaluating, maturing, rejecting, and pursuing value-accretive deals, refining further our end-market focus on ESS and commercial mobility, and preparing to fund a build-out of our presence in the U.S. battery value chain through our Giga America efforts. As a listed company with no debt, a strong balance sheet and valuable assets, we are increasingly being recognized as an industrialization partner of choice and our optionality is strong and increasing. Our dual strategic approach on technology has been to develop next generation technology development through innovation. the 24M platform, and complement this through securing rights to build, own, and operate conventional top-tier technology currently penetrating the accelerating markets. Berger and the team will take you through the details of where we are on this journey, but I'm very excited about the significant progress we have made through our highly professional and dedicated people on both sides of the Atlantic. During the quarter we are in, we expect to move from an aspiring battery company to a battery-producing company with strong optionality and top-tier technology partnerships in the making. Despite the enormous complexity of bringing a novel cell production technology to scale, I am very proud that our teams and partners have solved a majority of the remaining challenges in this world-first production platform at gigawatt-hour scale. We are now in the home stretch of fine-tuning and aligning the highly complicated machinery to enable production with the full automation of the next generation casting and unit cell assembly later this quarter. When this happens, we will be in a unique position with one of the very few US IP-based battery technologies at a scale not yet seen in operation. As for every battery producer, we will face multiple new challenges as we ramp towards test production, but we will deal with them and communicate accordingly. Turning now to slide four. We have furthermore strengthened our board of directors to maximize shareholder alignment and value creation through the appointments of Todd Cantor, Tori Ivar-Slettemuhl, and David Manners. We are deeply grateful and honored to have our largest shareholder, our original founder, and a distinguished U.S. intelligence officer with unique geopolitical and public affairs expertise join Freyer's board. These gentlemen each bring decades of experience across the global capital markets and energy sectors, and they are aligned with you as fellow shareholders in our business. Furthermore, their dedication to our journey is already supporting accelerated development for the company while we safeguard our financial position and strengthen our optionality for a highly dynamic and exciting future. On behalf of Freyer's board of directors, I would like to extend our appreciation and gratitude to our investors who, despite the challenges, have continued to believe in us. We relentlessly continue our pursuit of becoming a clean battery manufacturing company in the Western hemisphere. This is a tremendous challenge and not without heartache, but we are very close to material breakthroughs. And I promise you that we will not rest until we have become a force to be reckoned with in this industry. With that Birgit, I hand it over to you.

Thanks, Tom. And welcome to everyone joining today's call. Turning to slide five, let's begin with our key messages from today's release. Although we had a quiet first quarter of 2024 in terms of formal news releases, our teams have been diligently working several exciting opportunities behind the scenes while we continue to approach our most significant milestone to date at the CQP. Let's start with our progress on the CQP. Thanks to the efforts of Mike Brose, his team, and our valued partners at AssetMall, We continue to expect that the first unit cell production trial with a full automation of the CQP's next-generation semi-solid casting and unit cell assembly will take place in Q2 2024. Turning to our board of directors, as Tom just mentioned, we were delighted to welcome three seasoned professionals to our board in recent weeks, Todd Cantor, Thori Varslet-Demon, and David Manners. Third, as I mentioned earlier, our business development and commercial teams have been busy evaluating and pursuing opportunities across the globe. As Jeremy will detail shortly with an update of our Freight 2.0 growth initiative, we've streamlined our project and new pipelines to focus on the initiatives that align with our objective to accelerate our path to market and with a view to generating positive operating cash flow as quickly as possible. And finally, in the prevailing interest rate capital markets and industry environments, cash is key. And we remain focused on preserving and deploying your precious capital to generate shareholder value. We'll hear from Oscar shortly about our commitment to maintaining strict capital and cost discipline while we build our business and advance our capital formation process. Over to slide six. Let's dive into our continued progress at the CQP. There's no change to our prior expectation to commence automated unit cell production with the full functionality of the casting and unit cell assembly in the second quarter. In preparation for this key milestone, the teams have been focused on the complex and delicate process of integrating the cathode, anode, and merge units with the casting and unit cell assembly machine on what we believe is the world's largest multi-carrier system, or MCS for short. Let me provide some additional context about the unique characteristics of the semi-solid process and our next steps at the CQP. Unlike conventional lithium-ion battery manufacturing, which involves producing electrodes on separate equipment before assembling them into cells, the semi-solid technology employs a continuous and integrated process. The semi-solid process starts with electrode coating and proceeds to electrode stacking. The next-generation semi-solid casting and unit cell assembly unit which is the heart of the production system, then creates independent unit cells, each containing a cathode, anode, and separator. The subsequent steps required to produce a complete cell in a pouch, which is a stack of multiple unit cells, have already been developed and validated on the semi-cellular platform. As such, when we begin producing these unit cells continuously, and with the full automation of next-generation casting and unit cell assembly, it will be a meaningful achievement for Freire. As you can see from the photos in this slide, we've continued to make and test cells at the CQP while we approach the final stages of automating the casting and unit cell assembly. This next milestone is a step change on our journey to becoming a battery production company. Demonstrating our ability to produce cells on a novel technology platform is not only a key precursor to validating the semi-solid manufacturing process, it's also an important step to prove our technical and operational credentials as an emerging partner of choice for our customers, alliance members, and global network of vendors. We appreciate the acumen required to hit this next milestone and we're grateful for their continued support on our scaling journey. I'll turn the call over to Jeremy to discuss our ongoing business development opportunities.