5N Plus Inc.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience and welcome to the telephone conference of the results of the third trimester 2023 of 5N+. Currently, the participants' lines are in listening mode only. After the presentation, there will be a period of questions and answers. To ask a question, press star and 1 on your telephone keyboard. If you need assistance, press star 0. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. And welcome to the 5M Plus Inc. 3rd Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. At this time, note that all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star, then the one on your telephone keypad. If you require immediate assistance for the operator, please press star zero. Je vais maintenant céder la parole à Richard Perron, chef de la direction financière. And I would like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Richard Perron, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Bonjour à tous, à toutes et à tous. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our Q3 2023 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. We will begin with a short presentation, followed by a question period with financial analysts. Joining me this morning is Gervais Jacques, our President and CEO. We issued our financial results yesterday and posted a short presentation on the investor section of our website. I would like to draw your attention to slide two of this presentation. Information in this presentation and remarks made by the speakers today will contain statements about expected future events and financial results that are forward-looking and therefore subject to risk and uncertainties. A detailed discussion of the risk factors that may affect future results is contained in our management's discussion analysis of 2022, dated February 21st, 2023, available on our website in our public filings. In the analysis of our quarterly results, you will note that we use and discuss certain non-IFRS measures, which definitions may differ from those used by other companies. For further information, please refer to our management discussion analysis. I would now turn the conference over to Gervais.

Thank you, Richard, and welcome, everyone. We are from Lubeck, Germany today. Yesterday, we announced Q3 results from the quarter ended September 30th, 2023. Our solid performance here today continues to support our growth strategy and commercial excellence program. We have successfully evolved to focus on higher value added products for growth industries and this is reflected in our results. We have strong long-term customer relationships, and we are leveraging our position as a leading global supplier of ultra-high-purity semiconductor materials based outside of China. Our year-to-date results put us on track to achieve a strong annual performance and realize our adjusted EBITDA guidance for fiscal year 2023. We are also well positioned as we head into 2024, despite global microeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. In performance materials, revenue for the quarter and year to date was lower than the same period last year, but only because of our strategic exit from the low end margin extractive and catalytic products in the second half of 2022. Importantly, due to our higher value-added and higher margin products, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted gross margin have continued to improve significantly. In our specialty semiconductors segment, while the timing of incremental contributions from Azure resulted in softer adjusted EBITDA, we were pleased that revenue was up 9.8 million this quarter and 20.8 million year-to-date, compared to the corresponding periods last year. The backlog from this segment remains extremely strong, maxed out at 365 days as per our definition. You may have seen some examples of our long-term customer relationship this past quarter. Our space solar cell technology is on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission, with other solar cells powering the propulsion module, the lander, and the rover, as announced late this summer. Back on Earth. Raygen opened its energy storage power plant in Australia in September, powered by Azure's triple junction solar cells, which we developed in close partnership with Raygen over the last few years. As the plant is the world's largest and highest efficiency next-generation long-duration solar energy storage project, we are making a significant contribution to the clean energy transition. These strong customer relationships are the central focus of our commercial excellence program. We build them through our value-headed product development, our innovation and customization, our value optimization pricing strategy, and our co-investment initiatives. These pillars bolster our industry-leading position and will serve us well over the coming years. To match our innovative corporate mindset, recently we revamped our corporate logo and website with a more contemporary appearance. Over the past several years, we have moved away from the commodity metals business to a more value-added company focused on advanced materials for critical growth markets. With this refresh, we feel our brand image now better reflects the company we have become. To meet the increasing demand from our customer, our previously announced plans to expand our production for Azure and our renewable energy applications are both on schedule. As previously disclosed, we are extending Azure's output capacity by 30% by the end of 2024, as well as increasing production capacity for renewable energy application by 35% in 2023 and 100% in 2024 compared to 2022 to meet contracted demand. We also continue to secure additional complex feeds. and secondary streams for the recovery of critical minerals, following our recent expansion of reciting and refining capacity in Montreal. Our strong customer relationships and long-term contracts, as evidenced by our increasing backlog, support our expectation that demand will remain strong in both the terrestrial renewable energy and space solar power markets under specialty semiconductors and in the health and pharmaceutical sector under performance materials. As we continue our commitment to execute on our commercial excellence program and value-added product mix to achieve growth, we look forward to further solidifying our market-leading position and partner of choice. Richard, I will turn the call back to you to provide a deeper dive into our financial results before we take questions from analysts.