MP Materials Corp.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for attending today's MP Materials fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results. My name is Tia, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Martin Sheehan, head of investor relations with MP Materials. You may proceed.

Thank you, operator, and good day, everyone. Welcome to the NP Materials fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. With me today from NP Materials are Jim Lutensky, founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, Michael Rosenthal, founder and chief operating officer, and Ryan Corbett, chief financial officer. As a reminder, today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations that are subject to various assumptions and caveats. Factors that may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation, earnings release, and in our SEC filings. In addition, we have included some non-GAAP financial measures in this presentation. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today's earnings release and the appendix to today's slide presentation. Any reference in our discussion today to EBITDA means adjusted EBITDA. Finally, the earnings release and slide presentation are available on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jim. Jim?

Thanks, Martin, and thank you all for joining us today. Let me start with an overview of today's call. I will begin with the highlights of the year. Ryan will then review our financials and KPIs. Michael will then provide an update on our Stage 2 optimization at Mountain Pass. I'll return with a brief update on our Stage 3 magnetics business and some closing comments, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. So let's get started on slide four. Since founding MP in 2017 and in our two plus years as a public company, we have been unwavering in our mission to restore the full railroad supply chain to the United States. And we made substantial progress on our mission in 2022 and so far in the early part of this year. Operationally, the team executed. We produced and shipped record volumes again in 2022. Mining and ore delivery outperformed our updated mine plan. Maintenance teams stayed focused and relentless, which was reflected in outstanding uptimes. The stage one operations and engineering teams continue to drive improvements in mineral recoveries while also increasing our feed rate into the mill. Execution at this level requires lots of unsung heroes working in tandem, taking on challenges, anticipating future ones, and ultimately, thinking like owners so to the entire mp team we stayed safe and we had another excellent year great job and thank you for 2022 the price of ndpr oxide and therefore our concentrate product improved nicely versus the prior year the combination of better realized pricing and the record volumes produced by the team resulted in a 59 increase in revenue and a 77% increase in adjusted EBITDA. The Stage 1 business generated $353 million in normalized Stage 1 free cash flow. That is a 67% cash flow margin just for the Stage 1 business. The Stage 1 business, therefore, generated more cash flow than our entire capital expenditures for the year, most of which consisted of our significant downstream investments towards Stage 2 refining and Stage 3 magnetics. We believe these transformational moves to achieve our downstream mission will improve our profitability, reduce the volatility of our business, and significantly expand our long-term enterprise value. Our ability to pursue such an important and exciting opportunity while self-generating the resources needed to do so is amazing. More importantly, it means we continue to maintain our fortress balance sheet with over $1.2 billion in gross cash and roughly 492 million of net cash at year end. In a rising cost of capital and bifurcating economic environment, platforms with a high return on capital opportunity set and a capital structure like MPs are scarce. But as I always say, we must execute. And I am proud of what the team has achieved recently. We started commissioning our stage two assets late in the third quarter and began producing roasted concentrate in the fourth quarter These were critical first steps in the complex stage two commissioning process. We also advanced the heavy rare separations project at mountain pass with continued progress on the front end engineering design and long lead procurement. To remind you, the heaviest project is the one where we were honored to receive a $35 million grant from the department of defense, which was announced live by the president of the United States himself last February. Next, Our stage three magnetics efforts are accelerating. Recall that at the end of 2021, we reached an agreement to supply General Motors with NDPR alloy and magnets to support their entire Ultium EV platform. We signed the GM definitive supply agreement and also broke ground on our initial magnetics facility in Fort Worth early in 2022. We have made rapid progress and our goal remains to begin delivering alloy to GM late this year, followed by magnets in 2025. And finally, earlier this week, we announced a distribution agreement with Sumitomo Corporation. Japan is the largest producer of neomagnets outside of China, and thus the largest market for refined NDPR products outside of China. Sumitomo will serve as our exclusive distributor of NDPR oxide in Japan, and we will collaborate with them on the supply of rare earth metals and other products. We believe this agreement is an important and beneficial development as we now position for stage two sales. There were many other success stories of the company throughout 2022, including the extension of our positive environmental and safety record, the creation of over 120 new jobs in California, Nevada, and Texas in support of our mission, and the publishing of our inaugural ESG report. All in, we have been busy. I will have more on Stage 3 and Market View shortly, but first, let me turn the call over to Ryan to run through our financials for the year and quarter. Ryan?