Li-Cycle Holdings Corp.

Hey, everyone. My name is Todd, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the fourth quarter 2022 Lifecycle Holdings earnings call and webcast. 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 at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you should need operator assistance, please press star zero. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Nala Azmi, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today for Lifecycles review of our fourth quarter and year 2022 results ended October 31. We will start today with formal remarks from Ajay Kochhar, co-founder, president, and chief executive officer, Debbie Simpson, chief financial officer, and Tim Johnston, co-founder and executive chairman. We will then follow with a Q&A session. Ahead of this call, Lifecycle issued a press release and a presentation, which can be found on the investor relations section of our website at investors.lifecycle.com. On this call, management will be making statements based on current expectations plans, estimates, and assumptions, which are subject to significant risks and uncertainty. Actual results could differ materially from our forward-looking statements if any of our key assumptions are incorrect, including because of factors discussed in today's press release, during this conference call, and in our past reports and filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Ontario Securities Commission in Canada. These documents can be found on our website at investors.lifecycle.com. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements, whether written or oral, made during this call or from time to time to reflect new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required. With that, I'm pleased to turn the call to Ajay.

Thank you, Nala, and good morning, everyone. It has been a phenomenal year for Lifecycle and our team. we continue to be very excited by the growth opportunities we see ahead and remain laser-focused on the execution of our spoke and hub network. Beginning on slide three, covering key achievements from the past year that positioned Lifecycle as a preferred global battery recycling partner. In North America, with four spokes in operation, we grew our total processing capacity by nearly three times versus the prior year, In Europe, we made strategic strides, having advanced development at key commercial sites. At our Rochester hub, we made significant progress on engineering, procurement, and construction, keeping us in line with our targeted budget and schedule. We are reiterating that we expect commissioning to commence in late calendar 2023. Continuing to expand and diversify our customer base, within the battery material supply chain, including notable multi-year commercial arrangements with strategic global participants, LG and Glencore. And we further strengthened our balance sheet with the receipt of $250 million from strategic partners and have significantly progressed meaningful debt financing alternatives in support of our future network growth. Moving to slide four for our fourth quarter highlights. We continue to enhance the company's foundation on the financial, commercial, and operational fronts. Financially, we ended the quarter with approximately $578 million cash on hand. We continue to time our capital investing needs with advancing the development of key projects. Importantly, we made significant progress towards securing meaningful debt financing and expect to provide more details in the first calendar quarter. We continue to expand our sources of battery materials through meaningful multi-year commercial relationships with key global customers, including a global strategic recycling partnership with VinES, a leading Vietnamese battery manufacturer. And more recently, we entered into multi-year agreements with top-tier global EV and battery OEMs to recycle battery materials in Europe and North America. Operationally, Our fourth quarter black match production exceeded 1,600 tons, reflecting a sequential increase of more than 70%. Arizona and Alabama are ranking to target throughput. Importantly, we've advanced construction at the Rochester Hub on key engineering, procurement, and construction milestones. Turning to slide five for a review of our strategy. To be the preferred global recycling partner with a leading domestic supply position in North America and Europe, with strong commercial connectivity to Asia. We continue to align our network expansion plans with the highest growing demand centers, mirroring customer timing. We remain highly disciplined on capital allocation, with our investment in each project underpinned by multi-year and diverse commercial contracting. And we maintain a strong project pipeline, providing us with the flexibility to shift with market and customer demand. Turning to slide six for a look at our total addressable market, or 10, for lithium-ion batteries available for recycling in our focus regions, as well as Lifecycle's progress in capturing this growth. As mentioned earlier, we continue to add to our portfolio of customers across the entire battery supply chain, including battery, EV, energy storage OEMs, as well as traditional recyclers. As we've noted on previous calls, we are battery chemistry and form factor agnostic. This advantage, combined with growing operational capacity in North America, has enabled us to meet customer demand for recycling needs, which has driven both volume and mix of supply. Specifically, as illustrated on the left, in fiscal 2022, we saw an increase in recycling needs for energy storage batteries for material and EV battery packs from recalls. Depicted on the right are the TAM trends for our current focus regions for 2025 and 2030, which reflect accelerating growth potential for manufacturing scrap and end-of-life EV batteries. In summary, we are very well positioned to capitalize on these strong market fundamentals. I'd now like to hand it off to Debbie for a discussion of our financial results.