Euro Managanese Inc

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Euromanganese Inc. third quarter 2022 conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue from the phone line, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Webcast participants are welcome to submit questions through the form on screen. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Matthew James, President and CEO of Euromanganese.

Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Well, welcome everyone to our third quarterly conference call. I'm joined here by my CFO, Martina Plohova, and also our commercial director of communications and investor relations, Louise Burgess. So without further ado, I'd like to carry on with our conference call. So in the conference call, we're going to touch on an overview of our value proposition. The quarterly highlights, including our financial position and feasibility study results that we've announced this quarter, where we stand on project finance, and also our lifecycle assessment results, and look forward to our next steps, and particularly the 2022 catalysts for the rest of this year. So it's been a very good quarter for the company. We really are poised to be a leader in high purity manganese. We have a very strategic position located in the heart of the EU, which is the world's fastest gray EV battery market. Obviously, a low carbon economy and shifting to that is paramount to our value proposition in terms of producing materials for the EV battery market in Europe. We still are well-funded. We're well-backed by EU institutions. As you'll see from our lifecycle assessment, I feel that we are achieving our aim to have best-in-class environmental and social performance from our project. And we're building our team with even more skill sets as we move into a very important engineering procurement construction management phase. And I do say this is the first step in building a multi-asset manganese platform. And in our release on Friday, we touched on the fact that we are starting to explore what opportunities may lie in North America for the company. So just, again, homing in on those Q3 highlights. I will talk more about the feasibility study. It has robust base case economics, which have validated the project. And shown in our pricing sensitivity analysis, there's real upside potential. We'll also be touching on our life cycle assessment and its results, and that validates the environmental credentials of the project as well. Just covering off the other highlights of the quarter, which we're not going to go into a lot more detail, is during the quarter we appointed Stiefel Nicholas Europe as the project finance advisor to help with us in terms of structuring and securing the project finance for the project. demonstration plant which left China in late June has now arrived in Europe. One part of the shipment has been unloaded at Hamburg and the other consignment of the shipment is scheduled to be unloaded later this month. There has been some industrial action at Hamburg port which has slowed down the unloading of the demonstration plant And it should take about 10 days to get to site. So we are expecting arrival of all the modules at site in late August, early July. The site buildings have been completely refurbished, ready for the acceptance of that demonstration plan, two main buildings. And I believe there is a link from our announcement which shows those change in those buildings from before and after shots. We joined the Global Battery Alliance, and we are the first high-purity manganese company to join the Global Battery Alliance. So we have a seat at the table in terms of discussing the global battery passport and other lobbying that the Global Battery Alliance do on behalf of its members. Now that the feasibility study is finished, we're starting the preparation of our engineering procurement and construction management tender documentation. And we intend to go out to tender around September this year and be ready to appoint that EPTM contractor early in the new year. I'm going to hand over to Martina to talk us through the financial highlights and position of the company.

Thank you, Matt. I will briefly comment on our cash position and the use of these funds in the coming 12 months. Please note that all figures that I will be mentioning are in Canadian dollars. We started the quarter with $32.1 million in cash, and we spent $3.1 million on advancing the feasibility study, which was completed in late July, and the final report is being prepared and will be released in early September. The operating expenditures also covered the advancement of the environmental impact assessment and corporate office costs. A half a million was spent at site, as Matt mentioned, improving the two buildings that will host the demonstration plant, and the work is now close to complete. Another half a million we spent on land acquisition by making first installment on a land package, which is adjacent to the tailings area. It will provide additional room and flexibility for the Chvalichice Residue Storage Facility. We closed the quarter with $28 million in cash, and that balance will help us fund the completion of the EIA to cover other permitting costs for the project, as well as to install, commission, and operate the demonstration plant for one year. We will also use these funds to complete or advance certain critical land acquisitions for the commercial plant area and the tailings area and to complete the EPCM tender process. These funds will also cover our corporate costs for the next 12 months. I will now turn it back to Matt.