MP Materials Corp.

Hello, and welcome to the MP Materials third quarter 2024 earnings call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question and answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Martin Sheehan, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Sheehan, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the MP Materials third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me today from MP 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, and tons means metric tons. Finally, the earnings release and the slide presentation are available on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jim. Jim? Thanks, Martin.

Hello, everyone. It's been an incredibly exciting week in America. And regardless of how you voted, we are all on the same team now. So let's get started on slide four. Put simply, I am extremely proud of the MP team's execution this quarter. We achieved a new upstream production record of 13,742 metric tons of contained REO. That is nearly 15% or over 1,700 metric tons higher than our previous best quarter. Let me repeat that. We produced 15% more REO this quarter than our previous best quarter ever. Michael will get into more details shortly, but we believe this signifies material progress towards the significant step function change in potential we have recently discussed for our upstream business. Upstream 60K optimizations drove improved recoveries, and alongside those higher recoveries, we maintained solid productivity with consistency in reliability and uptimes. As we have previously stated, our path towards upstream 60K will be lumpy, but these results clearly underscore the world-class technical capabilities of our team, the vast potential of our upstream operations, and our confidence in achieving upstream 60K. Needless to say, record production this quarter translated into strong concentrate sales volumes, despite pushing much more volume through the midstream circuits. Speaking of the midstream, and as significantly, we achieved record production of 478 metric tons of NDPR oxide in the quarter. This represents a 76% increase from the second quarter, well above our guidance for 50% sequential growth. I would remind you all that we completed an extended planned maintenance outage in October. We are also beginning to commission additional upstream 60K projects throughout the quarter. Given these planned disruptions, we expect Q4 NDPR oxide production to be roughly flat with Q3's 478 tons. We then expect a more significant acceleration in midstream production in Q1 of next year. The strong Q4 production allowed us to nearly triple our sales volume sequentially, highlighting strong momentum in the sell-through of our oxide and metal production. I would like to point out that we have seen a recent, notable uptick in customer inquiries for samples and potential orders. Assuming we meet our production targets and NDPR pricing holds at current levels, we expect to generate positive midstream gross margins as we exit Q1. Naturally, this comes with all the usual caveats of a complex ramp up, but we are very pleased to have line of sight to profitability in our refining operations, complementing the continued strong profitability of our upstream. We also received positive news in late October when the Treasury Department issued the final rules for the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit, which grants a 10% credit on costs related to producing critical minerals, including NDPR oxide. Initially, the proposed rules excluded extraction costs and both direct and indirect material costs, limitations that would have reduced the policy's impact for companies like MP. However, the final rules now allow vertically integrated US minor refiners such as MP to include these extraction and material costs. This change is particularly significant for rare earth producers as chemical reagents make up a substantial portion of our overall cost structure. Moving on to our downstream magnetics business, we have begun commissioning our electrolysis cells for metal production in Fort Worth. By the way, we refer to the Fort Worth Magnet Facility internally as Independence, named for the road that it sits on and the mission that we strive to facilitate. Our team there is now about 100 people, and we are on track to deliver metal by year end. We will start externally using the official name, Independence, going forward. In addition, we also expect first production of on-spec magnets in our integrated prototyping facility at Independence by year end. This will allow us to begin the customer qualification process, another critical milestone on the path towards commercial magnet production by the end of next year. So in summary, this was just a tremendous quarter of execution across our business. We have a lot of work to do, but I am particularly proud of our team's resilience this year. I am further encouraged by the significant momentum we are building as we head into 2025. With that, I'll turn it over to Ryan to review our KPIs and financial performance. Ryan?