MP Materials Corp.

Hello and welcome to the MP Materials fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you'll 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 NP Materials fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me today from NP Materials are Jim Latinsky, 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 to EBITDA means adjusted EBITDA, and tons means metric tons. 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. Hello, everyone. Let's get started on slide four. MP had a terrific year of execution in 2024 across our materials and magnetics divisions. We set a new record by producing 45,455 metric tons of REO during the year, 9% higher than in 2023. I want to remind you that production progress is rarely linear. We are continuously implementing new equipment and processes as we advance upstream 60K. This should lead to further improvements over the next year, but along the way, there may be occasional instability and downtime as we implement these enhancements. That said, we are extremely pleased to maintain strong concentrate product profitability as we expand production and optimize the upstream business. Moving on to midstream operations, we produced 1,294 metric tons of NDPR oxide in 2024, well above last year's total of 200 tons. In Q1, we are targeting over 20% sequential growth in production. Similar to our upstream business, we expect to make a lot of progress in the coming quarters. This means rapid but methodical growth in production, while we also make process improvements and capture efficiencies. We remain confident that we will reach gross margin profitability in our midstream operations in the very near term. As we scale, we continue to see growing ex-China demand for our separated products. In 2024, we signed new agreements with the Department of Defense for both NDPR and Lanthanum. We also added a top five global automaker for a substantial direct volume commitment of NDPR. This means we now supply three of the five largest non-China automakers in the world. Moving on to our magnetics division, we achieved two critical milestones in the fourth quarter. First, we started producing NDPR metal at independence, the first time rare earth metal has been commercially produced in the United States in at least a generation. This achievement resulted in a second $50 million customer prepayment in late December, bringing our total prepayments to 100 million for the year. We expect to attain an additional $50 million prepayment in the next few months, along with additional tax credits, which Ryan will cover in a moment. The second significant milestone we achieved was initiating trial production of automotive grade magnets in the new product introduction facility at Independence. This factory within a factory enables us to rapidly manufacture and validate magnets on the same, albeit smaller, equipment we will use to manufacture at scale beginning in late 2025. This represents a major step towards scaling production for GM by year end. Moreover, MP now makes magnets at independence that meet the rigorous performance requirements necessary for EV drive motor applications, which are essentially the most demanding specs by far. Therefore, successfully producing high quality magnets for that kind of application demonstrates that MP possesses the intellectual, execution, and production capabilities to be a solution provider for a wide range of critical applications. As the world races to secure the building blocks of physical AI, such as robots, drones, or even eVTOL, the United States of America now has a champion, an MP, that can provide a domestic supply chain solution for rare earth magnets. Lastly, during the year, we continue to judiciously manage our balance sheet, pushing out the vast majority of our debt maturities to 2030 while retiring a little over 90% of our 2026 notes at a discount. These transactions allowed us to buy back 8.6% of our outstanding shares at an average price of 1476. With that, let me now turn it over to Ryan to go through our financials and KPIs. Ryan?