International Battery Metals Ltd.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Tina and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the IBAT fourth quarter financial results 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. To ask a question, simply press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Brian Siegel, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2026 financial results conference call. I'm Brian Siegel with Hayden IR. With me today is our CEO, Joe Mills, who will provide a business update, and CFO, Michael Rutledge, will review our financial performance. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that except for historical information, the matters discussed in this presentation are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Words like believe, expect, and anticipate refer to our best estimates as of this call, and there can be no assurances that these will actually take place, so our actual or future results could materially differ from these statements. Further information on the company's risk factors is contained in the company's quarterly and annual reports filed on CDAR and with the Securities and Exchange Commission on EDGAR. Now I'll turn the call over to Joe.

Thank you, Brian. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We appreciate you joining us today to review our fourth quarter and fiscal year-end 2026 results. Before I get into the business update, I do want to take a step back and reflect on the past year. April marked my one-year anniversary at IBAT. When I took over as CEO, I had a pretty good sense of what we had in terms of the technology. But you know, you really never know until you get your hands on the steering wheel and get a chance to look under the hood. What I found and been very encouraged to learn is that we have a technology that is genuinely differentiated. It is a low cost and is also efficient. I've spent 40 plus years in the commodity business and to be successful in any commodity business, you have to be a low cost efficient operator to survive the commodity pricing cycles. I also believe our modular design is a true differentiator and provides us a competitive advantage. We spent a lot of time engaging with potential customers over the past year to prove our modular design is superior and that we are a true low cost and efficient operator in the DLE space. We've also focused on the full flow sheet solutions that our customers require, and that's everything from the pretreatment of the brine before it ever comes into our DLE process, as well as the carbonation process that follows our DLE process, where the lithium chloride eluate that we generate gets refined into lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide to be used in a battery. Those efforts are starting to bear fruit, so let me walk you through what we've accomplished and where we're headed. The most important thing we did this past year was put our technology to the test across real-world brine sources, not synthetic brine like we encountered in Utah in 2024, but naturally occurring oil field or reservoir brines from multiple operators across the Smackover Formation in Texas and Arkansas, as well as brines from the Middle East and Argentina. In total, we've tested close to a dozen different brines from multiple operators across multiple geological plays. The results have been very positive, 98% plus lithium recovery and better than 99% contaminant rejection. And in one extended resiliency endurance test, we ran a single collar for more than 1,200 cycles against our media with zero degradation. That test result was important because it informs us and our customers as to the resiliency and durability of our media and the potential lifespan of our media over the commercial life of a project. These are important data points for our customers to understand as it informs them what the economics of a DLE lithium project could look like. They can model their operating costs with real data. That's a big deal when you're trying to get a project to an FID. I hope you can appreciate this given that we were coming out of a long lithium winter where prices of lithium carbonate or LCE hit multi-decade lows just last August at $7,800 a metric ton. Since January of this year, we've seen a nice rally in LCE prices to the current $20,000 plus per metric ton. So that has given the DLE providers encouragement as resource owners decide on what DLE technology they believe will help them unlock the value in their resource. It also highlights the volatility in lithium prices and why being a low-cost and efficient technology is critical to the economics of a large-scale project. The testing results we conducted are also consistent with what we demonstrated in Utah, and that is exactly the point. Different brine chemistries, different geography, but yet the same performance. Our technology works across chemically diverse sources and produces a very clean lithium chloride eluate, and that's exactly what our customers want to see. Now let me talk about where we are commercially, because I know that's what everybody wants to hear. We continue to work on multiple projects, but we are in active discussions on two specific opportunities that are the most advanced in our pipeline. One is through our partner in the Middle East, and one is with an active independent operator in the smack over of the smack-over play of Texas and Arkansas. Both counterparties are evaluating the economics of their individual projects and next steps in their decision-making processes. I expect one or both to make a decision in the next few months, and we're hopeful we can be a finalist in their decision-making process. On the Middle East opportunity, I'll be straight with you. It's developed a little slower than we'd hoped. The Iran conflict created real uncertainty in the region, and it has slowed the decision-making by all participants. As the environment stabilizes with the recent ceasefire, we are optimistic that project will move forward. It is a competitive process, and we have some of the largest DLE players from around the world competing on this important project, so we are deep in that mix. On the SMAP overplay, the drilling activity in Arkansas and East Texas has finally picked up. Operators are producing larger volumes of lithium-rich brine from test wells, and we've been right there with them testing that brine and demonstrating what our technology can do with it. Our test results give us a very credible technical story to bring to that conversation, and the operators we're working with have responded to that. The DLE space remains very competitive, and we're pushing our technology hard to maintain what I believe is the most compelling technology and process combination out there. Our customers demand the best, and we are pushing to show we have the best lowest cost, and most efficient offering. I want to emphasize that while these two opportunities are closer to a decision, we are not sitting still waiting on these two. We continue to actively pursue other opportunities across the smack over in Argentina and the Middle East. Along those lines, we're starting to see more activity from Argentina, in particular, given the robustness of the lithium business in that country. Argentina produces close to 7% to 8% of the lithium supply in the world, and DLE technology is now being seriously evaluated as a way to enhance the economics of existing solars or as an alternative to the expensive commissioning of a traditional solar. The low-price environment stalled many FIDs in Argentina over the past few years, but we are seeing renewed activity in the country, and we're assisting our Argentinian partner in evaluating several opportunities. In summary, I remain optimistic that we will finally land a home for our existing DLE plant sometime this year, and that will be the catalyst for us to then be thinking about the next modular DLE plant to be built for the second customer. Importantly, I mentioned last time a project we are currently evaluating is the construction of a small-scale pilot that we can transport quickly to test sites to demonstrate our technology live or on location. Our current MDLE plant is very large. It is, in essence, a full commercial facility, and to move it costs quite a bit of money. So we're currently engineering a smaller-scale pilot that can be lifted using just forklifts and transported easily. The current design we're contemplating is approximately one-half of our current MD Elite plant design per column, such that we can efficiently deploy it anywhere in the world. We are having discussions with multiple operators about this small-scale design to gauge interest before we seek internal approval to proceed with construction. This would be a new offering from IBAT to our customers to help them gauge the efficiency of our technology and media while on location. This will help them evaluate the actual lithium chloride eluate we can produce from their specific site, which also helps them with offtake provider discussions on the quality of the lithium chloride as a feedstock to a carbonation facility. There'll be more to come on this over the next few months. We will have to fundraise to construct the small-scale pilot, but it won't be a large sum of money. We're also continuing to work in the lab on the next generation of our current media to improve the kinetics and lithium recovery efficiency to continue to improve the low-cost nature of our technology. Beyond the commercial pipeline, let me touch on a few other things we have gotten done this year that I'm proud of. We continue to strengthen the balance sheet. We closed a fourth follow-on investment under our existing private placement with EV Metals in April, raising an additional $2.8 million. That's four consecutive investments from our largest investor. We appreciate the continued support and commitment that EV Metals has shown us. We also achieved effectiveness of our S-1 registration statement and became a U.S. registered company. That was an important milestone in aligning IBAT with U.S. capital market standards, and it keeps the door open to institutional capital at the right time. We do continue to evaluate an uplisting to a larger U.S. exchange once we have a commercial contract in place and our stock price and trading volume have improved. We're building toward that in the right order. We recently added another top-tier process and chemical engineer to the team. I'm proud of the talent we've assembled here. We are only 12 total employees, which is a very small team, but it's a good one. Decades of experience across the lithium business and the energy space. We will continue to add key personnel where it makes sense at the right time. I'll close with the market because it underlies everything we do. Lithium carbon equivalent, LCE, is now above $20,000 a metric ton. A year ago, it was sitting at near multi-decade lows at around $7,800 per metric ton. That recovery has changed the conversations. Resource owners who went quiet during the downturn are back at the table. Engineering studies that went stale are being dusted off. And FIDs that were on hold are now starting to move again. We're seeing that directly in the volume and the quality of the inbound interest in our technologies. Look, lithium is a cyclical business. We know that better than anyone. The tailwind right now is real, and we intend to take full advantage of it. We're looking forward to – we'll be at the Fast Markets Conference next week, continuing conversations with counterparts from the U.S., the Middle East, and in Argentina on our MDLE plan and or new plans. We have a full slate of meetings set up with resource owners who are anxious to begin serious work on their projects. These are the conversations that will hopefully lead to contracts, and we go into that event in a very strong position and ready to do business. With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Michael now, who will walk you through the financials.