American Battery Technology Company (ABAT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. I'm Tiffiany Moehring, and I'm the Director of Communications and Marketing at the American Battery Technology Company. I would like to welcome everyone to our Fiscal Full Year 2026 Earnings Call. On behalf of the entire team at American Battery Technology Company, I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to join the call today. Following this presentation, a recording of this call, along with our press release, will be available on our website. This presentation includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding the factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in our annual filings. On today's call, our CEO and CTO, Ryan Melsert, joined by Alex Flores, our CFO, will provide remarks regarding our 2 lines of business, which include our lithium-ion battery recycling business and our primary claystone to lithium hydroxide business. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Ryan.

Great. Thank you, Tiffiany, and thank you, everybody, for joining. We here at the American Battery Technology Company are working to introduce the closed-loop supply chain seen on the right here. Many of the sectors already exist and are mature. However, within the U.S., we have very little production of the critical minerals that are needed to support this domestic closed loop. In order to do that, we have implemented 3 different technology sets. We have developed and are deploying our technology for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries to help to close this loop. And in addition to closing the loop, we also need to fill this loop the first time. So we also have our own mineral resource development with our lithium mine, and we've developed our own internal technologies for the processing of this lithium-bearing claystone into a battery-grade lithium hydroxide product. So through these 3 units, we are working to enable this closed-loop infrastructure within the United States. Over the past year, we have significantly ramped our operations at our first battery recycling facility, and we're proud to state that we have substantially increased revenue compared to the past year, an over 400% increase up to $21.7 million over the past year. While revenue increased substantially, we had only a moderate increase in our cost of goods sold, increasing about 67% from the previous year. This really is from achieving economies of scale in our recycling facility and implementing many different operational efficiencies throughout our first plant. On a cash basis, even though we substantially increased throughput, we actually decreased cash spend in operations for this plant by about 16%. Because of these increases in throughput and revenue and implementations of operational efficiencies, we were able to turn an annual profit or adjusted profit for the first time. With the removal of these noncash expenses, we have an adjusted gross profit of about $1.7 million over this past year compared to a $6.2 million loss over the previous year. Again, this really is the manifestation of much higher capacity factor at our first recycling plant and the implementation of operational efficiencies. Because of these improvements, we've been able to increase our cash balance up to about $49.5 million as of the end of June and increased our total asset base up to about $133 million. We're also proud that over the past year, we've had our fiscal discipline and have 0 long-term outstanding debt for the company. So all these pieces together show that we have the strongest financial results we've had in any year as an operating company and are in a strong position to keep growing as we move forward. We're excited to work with many partners. One of our closest partners is the U.S. Department of Energy. We were fortunate enough to have a visit and tour by some of the DOE leadership just a few weeks ago. We have multiple projects, both on the battery recycling and on the claystone to lithium refining side that are supported by the Department of Energy. The leadership was able to come and see our operating battery recycling plant and also see our integrated demonstration facility for how we convert our Nevada-based claystone material into our battery-grade lithium hydroxide. It was great to be able to show these individuals the progress we've made over the past few years as we have moved from R&D level efforts up to bench scale systems to pilot plants and now operating commercial scale facilities. Within the recycling plant itself, we continue to scale this first facility with a design rate of about 20,000 tonnes per year. We've moved into having our highest annual revenue really by that increased throughput, additional manufacturing of byproducts, and improved pricing for the products that we sell. The feed for a recycling plant comes from a wide variety of sources. Quite a bit of it now comes from grid-scale battery energy storage systems that are used to support domestic data centers and artificial intelligence training models, but also a large amount from electric vehicles, from battery cell manufacturing, and from the consumer electronics market. We have achieved our first ever positive gross margin because of this increase in economy of scale and the implementation of operational efficiencies. And again, we were selected over the year for one of the largest lithium-ion battery cleanup projects in the country's history, working to process a lot of these grid-scale batteries that have been through incidences and need to be recycled in a responsible manner. We also work closely with some partners in the collection area. The Battery Network, which is formerly Call2Recycle, is one of the nation's leading consumer battery collection companies. We did form a partnership with them, working to collect batteries throughout the country, recycle them in our facility, and really demonstrate this closed-loop supply chain to our partners. We're also continuing to develop our second recycling plant based in the Southeast U.S. that is designed to process about 100,000 tonnes per year of these batteries and are continuing to work with the Department of Energy on the $150 million grant that supports the construction and rollout of the second plant. We also are continuing with a $10 million grant we have from the Department of Energy. This is really used to commercialize our next-generation recycling technologies. There are 3 of these technologies we have previously proven out at the laboratory and bench scale. And through this support from DOE, we're working to now build commercial scale implementations to integrate into our recycling facility. And as we continue to expand our recycling plant, it really does have a lot of synergies with our claystone to lithium hydroxide processing facility to help scale both of these technologies to address our domestic needs. In our claystone lithium business, we've had many achievements over the past year. The highlights are really working to publish our pre-feasibility study last fall. This really demonstrated the technical and financial performance of this system. We showed we have about 21.3 million tonnes of lithium hydroxide that can be made just from the resources on this site, and that includes about 2.7 million tonnes that are further classified as proven or probable reserves. We're continuing to develop and roll out our 30,000 tonne per year mine and refinery at our property just west of Tonopah, Nevada. We worked closely with the Department of Energy last fall, along with hundreds of other projects. One of our Department of Energy grants was canceled. We did work closely with DOE and appealed that decision. And over several months of work with them, we were able to reverse that termination and have our grant fully reinstated. So as of now, we were working under the same project with the same funding and the same milestones to continue to have the DOE support the construction of that first processing train. Our full Tonopah project is on government-managed land through the Department of Interior and Bureau of Land Management. So through BLM and through the Department of Energy as a supporting agency, we are going through the NEPA process, which includes large amounts of baseline studies in addition to having our plan of operations submitted to really show how we plan on developing this property. We are fortunate enough last fall to have completed the baseline studies and just a few weeks ago to have received certification from the BLM that they have now accepted our plan of operations. This approaches the end of the pre-NEPA phase of this process and allows us to move into the full NEPA process for the remaining steps to have our permits to begin site work and construction at this property. We were excited last spring that we were selected by President Trump's National Energy Dominance Council and the FAST-41 Permitting Council to be a priority project within the country. This really was chosen for a handful of projects really looking to scale manufacturing facilities to produce critical minerals within the U.S. It really does result in streamlined federal permitting, really working to combine the efforts of the multiple agencies that are needed as we work through this process. We did build and operate an integrated demonstration facility that shows how this technology works. We continue to work with that plant to produce large-scale batches of this battery-grade lithium hydroxide product that we've been delivering to customers for evaluation as we work through their qualification processes. So the Tonopah Flats Lithium project is one of the largest lithium resources identified in the U.S., and it's something we are working to scale to really address our domestic needs. Summarizing our financial results from the past year. Again, we had a substantial increase in revenue, over a 400% increase compared to fiscal year '25, while our cost of goods sold only increased by about 67%, so showing substantial impact of economies of scale plus the impacts of implementing operational efficiencies. Our cost of goods sold on a cash basis was further improved. And while last year, we had many review periods working with the federal government, we have even more government contracts in place now and look forward to continuing to work with them as we draw down from those over the next few years. On a cash basis, we continue to invest in our first recycling plant, increasing the amount of equipment that we have as we implement more automated processes. And our operational activities actually used less cash over the past year. Even though we had more than fourfold the throughput, we decreased the cash spend on our operating activities as we again implemented those operational efficiencies. We were able to bring in large amounts of funds through financing activities, and the result is a substantially increased cash balance of about $49.5 million that has allowed us to collect interest over the past year and be ready to expand our facilities as needed. At the same time, we have extinguished all of our long-term debt that was outstanding as of fiscal '25. And as of the end of fiscal '26, we have no outstanding long-term debt. There are several updates that have happened in the industry over the past few months. One of them is the Department of Commerce issued a directive that effectively bans the export of black mass unless there is an exception or adjustment obtained from the Department of Commerce. We've been working closely with Commerce over the past few weeks. We have submitted an exception request. They have replied with several follow-up questions and requests for additional information. However, at this time, there's no formal response as to the status of our exception request. So as of now, we continue to sell the byproducts out of our recycling facility and for the short term, are storing our black mass product at our facility until there is a conclusion with this directive. We're working with the Department of Commerce very closely and with support from the Department of Energy and many other federal agencies as this process is being reviewed. So with that, we thank everyone for joining this review of our fiscal year '26 financials and look forward to having our formal Annual Shareholder Meeting in November to talk through more details of the past year and our steps ahead for the coming year. So thank you, everybody, for joining today.