Loop Energy Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. My name is Joanna and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Loop Energy Q1 2022 earnings conference call. 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 during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Bill Zeng, Investor Relations. Bill, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Q1 2022 results conference call. Joining me today is our President and CEO, Ben Nyland, and our CFO, Damian Towns. Our Q1 2022 news release, MD&A, and financial statements can be accessed from the Investor Relations page on our website, at www.loopenergy.com. I would like to remind our listeners that our comments and answers to your questions today may contain forward-looking information. Forward-looking information by its nature is subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause stated outcome to differ materially from the actual outcome. Certain material factors or assumptions were applied in drawing the conclusions or making the forecasts or projections which are included in the forward-looking information. Listeners are warned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Please refer to our 2021 Annual Information Form dated March 23, 2022 for more information. During today's call, there could also be references to product backlog. Product backlog is a non-IFRS financial measure intended to provide additional information and should not be considered a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. In addition, this measure does not have a standardized meaning under IFRS and therefore may not be comparable to a similar measure presented by other companies. Please see our Q1 MD&A for the definition of and further information about product backlog. I would also like to caution our listeners that any projections provided today regarding Loop's future financial performance are effective as of today's date. It is our policy not to comment on or update this guidance between quarters. I would now like to turn the call over to Loop's President and CEO, Mr. Ben Nyland, for his comments, followed by Q&A period.

Thank you, Bill. Good morning. And on behalf of the team at Loop Energy, welcome to our Q1 2022 conference call. I'm delighted to report our strongest quarter to date and share some thoughts and highlights as we continue to lay the foundation for our future growth. During the call today, Damien and I will focus on key themes and we'll look to expand on these during the course of our prepared remarks. Just as a quick summary, our go-to-market strategy is proving out very well. This has been our most successful quarter to date, with 24 purchase orders achieved, representing 40% of our 2022 target in just the first quarter. A big part of this, Teva, a customer we announced a few weeks ago, has become our second customer to enter our scale-up phase, with a long-term supply agreement pending. These orders also represent great diversification of our geography, of our customer base, and we're seeing strong traction with both our 30 kilowatt and our 50 kilowatt product offerings. We continue to deliver and build on our foundation. We've been attracting key personnel around the world for our North American, European, and Chinese operations. Capacity build-out is on track in North America and China. and we continue to make progress towards our cost-out goals, which will come from scale and engineering advances. We continue to build our financial strength, including the recent announcement of almost $10 million of funding from the Canadian government. Our technology continues to prove out in the field, where we've seen even better than anticipated fuel efficiency in our fleet in China, and our work validating the benefits of e-flow in electrolyzers is going extremely well. Macro themes in general continue to support the move towards hydrogen. In addition to climate change, energy security has become a major driver for countries, especially in Europe. And 28 major economies now include hydrogen strategies in their national policies. All of this is manifesting for Loop in the form of a very strong customer pull from first mover and disruptor entities. To dig more into our go-to-market strategy in our first quarter and the purchase orders, In our year-end conference call, we announced a strong start to the year, and I'm delighted to confirm we generated purchase orders for 24 units in the first quarter of 2022. Not only is this more purchase orders than the entirety of 2021, but it represents a six-fold increase on purchase orders from the fourth quarter of 2021. I'd like to highlight two recently announced examples of success of our 110-100 customer adoption cycle. Mobility and Innovation's minibus, and Teva's 7.5 ton commercial truck. In both of these companies, we collaborated and worked very closely with the customers during the sales cycle to understand both their product needs and their go-to-market strategies. Both customers engaged in a collaborative process with our sales and customer service teams because they have plans to scale, and we're looking for a fuel cell solution that they could be confident would scale with them and deliver value their customers are looking for. M&I's minibus is the first vehicle certified in Europe with a loop fuel cell system. At the vehicle launch event in March of 22, there was tremendous interest. The bus is designed for the smaller streets in many of Europe's older cities and provides an excellent option as those cities move towards zero emissions. It's engineered with fuel efficiency in mind, going 400 kilometers on a single fill of its 10.5 kilogram hydrogen tank. Market reception to this bus has been very positive, and M&I has already provided Loop with follow-on fuel cell orders for additional vehicles. We're looking forward to M&I transitioning from the pilot phase to the scale-up phase in our customer adoption cycle later this year. Teva ran a very disciplined vendor selection process involving multiple fuel cell providers, which they down-selected to four final candidates. Teva invested in building demonstration vehicles for each of the four providers to validate the systems and product claims. Loop's integration process into the demonstration vehicle took only a day and a half of engineering time. Our understanding is that this integration and subsequent testing was substantially smoother and faster than our competitors. It's a testament to our product design as well as the strength of our customer support processes and teams. As disclosed in our press release, we are currently negotiating a long-term supply agreement with Teva and are looking forward to a successful relationship over the coming years. We've been very deliberate in our go-to-market strategy with a focus on building relationships with companies that we believe will be disruptors and first movers as the industry grows, while also establishing relationships with legacy players who may represent longer-term growth opportunities. Teva is an excellent example. of one of the first movers in Disruptors. They have a stated goal that before the decade is out, they intend to have more than 100,000 TEVA vehicles in service, which would eliminate over 100 million liters of diesel consumption per annum. We're delighted to be partnering with them to help them achieve their goals. In addition to these great successes with our current product line, we are also seeing strong early interest in our 120-kilowatt product that we plan to roll out in the second half of 2022. Initial testing is showing increases in performance beyond even our current generation of products, and so we expect this next generation to continue to establish Loop as a leader in the fuel cell market for commercial mobility. I'd like to now turn the call over to Damien.