Sigma Lithium Corporation

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Sigma Lithium 2025 first quarter earnings conference call. We would like to inform you that this event is being recorded and all participants will be in listen-only mode during the company's presentation. There will be a replay for this call on the company's website. After the prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A section for participants. At that time, further instructions will be provided. I would now like to turn the conference over to Irina Aksenova, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us for Sigma Lithium's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Speaking on today's calls will be Ana Cabral, our co-chairperson and chief executive officer. I will also be stepping in for Rogerio to cover the financial highlights for the quarter. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and webcast live. Today's presentation includes forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. These statements reflect our current expectations but involve risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For further information, please refer to the cautionary statements in our presentation and our public filings with Canadian and US regulators. All of these materials are available on our website. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Ana Cabral. Ana, please go ahead.

Good morning. I'm very pleased to present you with our first quarter of 2025 results. Over the last two years, we've transformed Sigma from an emerging producer to a leading global lithium company. Our core strategic advantage is our resilience to lithium price cycles. Our competitive advantage is a direct result of operational efficiency that drives the way we run our business, because we focus on the elements that we can control, mainly continuously lowering our production costs. We would like here then to outline our competitive advantages to start this presentation. First, we're strategically well positioned. We industrialize lithium oxide concentrate, which has higher margins than refining. Our plant and our mine are located in Brazil, is an established industrial and mining jurisdiction with strong rule of law. Second, we are resilient to lithium market price cycles. We are a low-cost producer on an all-in, sustaining cost basis. Third, we achieved operational efficiency at scale on all fronts. We have perfected GMS technology to an unprecedented 70% recovery levels at plant that mimics flotation. We have also achieved over 700 days with zero accidents with lost time. Four, we have been rewarded with 100 million US dollars in a heavily subsidized government debt from our development bank. 16 years of term at 2.5% fixed costs in US dollars. because we delivered shared prosperity to one of the poorest regions in the country. As a result, we also earned a social license that determines that basically we receive environmental permits repeatedly achieved on schedule. I want to highlight also that 100% of our production is uncommitted, which brings the potential to receive prepayments from signing off take agreements with clients. This is a very standard financing practice in the mining industry and is an untapped funding source that's readily available to us from clients seeking resilient suppliers at this very moment in the lithium price cycle. On this page, in this quarter, we want to highlight that we increased the overall resilience of our business. Our key accomplishments were, first, we delivered production volumes on target at 68,300 tons. This demonstrates the operational efficiency of the green tech industrial plant. Secondly, we delivered all in sustaining costs outperforming our targets by 6%. We are now at $622 a ton. This is the quantification of our resilience. And these costs are amongst the lowest in the industry. They're lower than African spodumene operations, either ethically produced like us or not. So we beat the competition. Thirdly, we generated positive cash flow from operations, which translates into this operational resilience because we make money per ton of lithium concentrate produced. Therefore, we are easily able to repay some of the more expensive shorter-term duration trade financing debt. On this page, we have charts that demonstrate numerically the points I just made earlier. We outperformed 2025 targets across the board. When we compare our results versus a year ago, the numbers just showcase how Sigma progressed exponentially. Our EBITDA in the first quarter this year increased three and a half times from last year, 223%. Our sales were up just 17%. So the magnitude of the EBITDA increase versus sales provides just how cost-efficient we became. Comparing results on a quarter-over-quarter, we demonstrate this continuous positive trajectory of our profitability. Our EBITDA has increased 3% while our sales decreased. So this is resilience quantified. Here, we demonstrate the operational performance slightly beating the quarterly production guidance for 2025. And again, it demonstrates that after the structural upgrades, our green tech plant achieved continuous cadence at an increased level of performance. This page also highlights a crucial point I made earlier. It quantifies indirectly the amount of prepayment SIGMA can receive from clients by signing offtake agreements to supply lithium. This is an untapped funding source and is readily available in a current market environment. Because lithium demand is robust, so we have clients seeking to secure certainty of supply, but only from producers with low oiling costs, which can withstand the low point of the lithium price cycle. Our production is 100% uncommitted, so we could comfortably sign up to three offtake agreements at current market prices and still have 30,000 tons of production remaining to just validate the market pricing of these offtakes, which is a very sound financing strategy. Here, we demonstrate our low costs across the board at Plantgate, at CIF, and our Olin sustaining costs. This culminates with a 20% annual decrease of our Olin sustaining costs across the last year. These low costs underscore the resilience of our business. A year ago, we already were one of the lowest cost producers globally of lithium oxide concentrate. And over the last year, we continue to improve and further lower our costs across the board and reach this 20% decrease from last year, first quarter. On this page, we have the lithium cost curve. So here we demonstrate our leading position in the global lithium industry. SIGMA actually delivered what we call the Holy Trinity of lithium production, large scale, low costs, traceable, and ethically produced lithium materials. This page is from Benchmark Minerals, it's sourced from Benchmark, and it shows the global cost curve of producers of lithium oxide concentrate from mining. Here we demonstrate our leading position in the global lithium industry. Sigma delivered the holy trinity of lithium production. We deliver at large scale, we deliver low costs, and we deliver ethically and traceable lithium materials. It underscores our cost efficiency because we are lower cost than the African miners shown in pink, just to our right on the page. The only company in our industry that has lower costs than Sigma is Greenbush's Taliesin, but they have five times our scale. So it's achievable to get there. Here is a breakdown of what our all-in sustaining costs, which this quarter reached $622 per ton. It shows how we outperformed the 2025 targets by 6%. First, our operational efficiency this quarter enabled us to lower the maintenance capex of our plant. Our SG&A will reach targets irrespectively as we increase production volumes. We have also been actively decreasing financing expenses by using part of our cash generation to repay expensive short-term financing debt, as we just discussed earlier. We're very proud of this page because it shows how we achieved over 700 consecutive days without accidents with lost time. It means a lot to us because we're sending our employees safely back home to their families every day. Our team is very proud of this because it demonstrates how we rose to the challenge of the battery materials industry of delivering at the same time low-cost products without putting our people at risk and using shortcuts on health and safety. we have one of the best safety records amongst all ICMM companies in the global metals and mining industry. We have reached this level of safety excellence as a result of robust processes, a culture of ownership amongst our team, because they think about protecting themselves, but also protecting their colleagues all the time. Here, we talk about our green tech production plant. We mastered the dense media technology for producing lithium oxide. We have been recurringly achieving unprecedented recovery levels for this technology. It's over 70% of plant level, and the global recoveries have been consistently well into the 60%. This recovery achieved in our green tech plant is a result from the constant implementation of innovation and improvements. And it culminated with us implementing in the fourth quarter the recycling circuit for the lithium tailings, where we reprocess the lithium oxide in the tailings and convert it into high-grade product. So it increases the mass of our product. So we achieve higher production volumes through recycling the dry stack tailings. So now I'm going to head over to my colleague and partner, Irina Aksenova. She's the Vice President of Investor Relations at Sigma, and she's going to go through our financial performance this quarter in detail.