Calix Limited (CXL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Now today, we're very fortunate to be joined by Dr. Phil Hodgson, the Managing Director and CEO of Calix. So Phil, thanks for joining us this morning.

Thanks very much for having me on, Harry.

Of course. Of course. Now our webinar is recorded as usual. So if you'd like to watch the recorded viewing after, it will be on our YouTube -- Sharewise YouTube channel as well. And we will have time for Q&A. [Operator Instructions] So Phil, over to you, if you'd like to share your screen, and you can kick us off with the presentation.

Fantastic. Thanks very much, Harry, and thanks all for joining this morning. Hopefully, my screen is coming through okay.

Yes.

Perfect. Excellent. So just in terms of Calix -- and this presentation is available on our ASX platform as well. So as I move through it reasonably quickly, you'll be able to have a look at it on the platform and read it in more detail. But who is Calix? We're an Australian technology company, been around since about 2005. We've built to over 100 employees now, and we're targeting all sorts of different areas in terms of developing our core technology, which I'll describe shortly. We've got quite a bit of patented invention around the core technology, 33 patents around our core technology and applications. And a lot of us have invested pretty heavily in this business. So over 12% of the stock is owned by management and staff. And so we're pretty heavily invested in succeeding with respect to this technology. So what is this technology? Certainly, there's a diagram there in the slide pack. But as usual, I'd like to sort of deviate from the diagram and give a quick overview of what our core technology is. It's a new way basically to heat stuff up. It's a new type of kiln or furnace. I usually demonstrate it with my little flat pack model here, which is a toilet roll. I'll just try and get it in the site, so it doesn't disappear into the background. So what it is, is a rather large steel tube. We heat this tube to over 1,000 degrees centigrade. The biggest ones of these are a little bigger than this, over 1.8 meters in diameter and over 30 meters high. In fact, we're never going to need to build bigger tubes. We're already at scale commercially. We just build more of them to go through -- to go for higher throughputs. So we heat this tube to over 1,000 degrees integrate. Whatever we're heating goes down the middle. It's going to be a fairly small particle size, anything smaller than what we call 1/3 of a micron -- 300 microns, sorry, 1/3 of 1 millimeter, a bit like dust or flour. So imagine holding a lump of flour on your hand and imagine dropping that down to the floor. Basically, that's all we're doing inside the tube. We're dropping whatever we're heading down the tube. It floats down through the tube over 20 to 30 seconds, and the red hot walls of the tube radiate heat into the particles. We can heat the tube however you like. We can heat it with fossil fuels. We can heat it with burning waste or biomass. We can heat it with renewable electron. So the technology is energy agnostic. And as the world decarbonizes, that's going to be an advantage to have a kiln that doesn't matter what sort of energy it needs. So why do we heat stuff up that way? What's important about heating it this way as opposed to other ways? Well, effectively, what we've done is we've separated how you heat from what you heat. And that's an advantage for industries like the cement and lime business. Cement and lime, collectively responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions. They heat up this. That's a lump of limestone, and that's nearly half by weight CO2. And so when the cement and lime industries heat up limestone, the CO2 comes out of the rock and joins all of the furnace gases that they've got, and the CO2 goes up in the atmosphere. So 8% of global CO2 for the cement and lime industries and over half of it is coming from a rock. So very difficult to avoid. Coming back to our kiln. The little particles of limestone are dropped down our kiln. As the CO2 comes out of those particles, they're not lost to the atmosphere or into a furnace. The CO2 comes at the top as a pretty pure stream at the top. And at the bottom comes the lime, and that goes off to make cement and lime, of course, used in all sorts of different industries like steel, pulp, paper, aluminum. And so the core technology represents a way to directly separate the CO2 that's coming out of limestone for the cement and lime industries. And of course, once you heat a tube with, say, renewal electrons, you can really start to get towards a very low-emission cement and lime. But it's not just cement and lime that we use the technology for. Imagine this lumber rock is actually red iron ore. And then imagine inside our same core technology, we introduce hydrogen in the bottom and put iron ore fines in the top. That iron ore gets converted to iron by the hydrogen and at the top becomes steam and at the bottom becomes iron ore. And so the technology is being developed for a green iron technology. And there's also a project that I'll talk about where imagine the rock is a greeny, purply color, spodumene, source of over half the world's lithium. We're developing a project with Pilbara Minerals that's looking at one of our calciners powered with electricity from renewable sources on their mine site. We take small spodumene flotation fines, lower-value fines and convert it on the mine site into what we call a beta spodumene. Like it blows it up like a bit of popcorn, and then we're extracting the lithium at the mine site. And so that lithium salt is a better way to transport lithium in the globe and spodumene where 95% of what spodumene is waste when it's traveled around the world. So just a quick overview of the different industries with the one core technology. Just in terms of our business, there's quite a bit of strong government support, and there has been for a while now in decarbonization. And despite the fact that -- and I know there will be a few questions on the U.S. and the direction of the U.S. and these sorts of things with respect to decarbonization and the way the world is heading there. But let's take Europe first. Europe is very strong. We're heading down decarbonization pathway. Recent bills passed in the EU sort of forcing oil and gas companies to start to provide 50 million tonnes of CO2 storage there by 2030. There's funds -- more funds being allocated to assist with the transition to a decarbonized industrial base in the EU. So lots of activity in the EU, and the EU continue to lead. But the States itself, despite the fact that the current administration appears not to be supporting decarbonization per se, Congress just passed a bill continuing to support what's called the 45Q tax credit system, which is basically a decarbonization credit or a CO2 tax credit that was put in place by the original Trump administration and now endorsed again by Congress. Still to pass the Senate, but that particular bill, majority is supported by the current administration through Congress. So despite the fact that there's a lot of views that the current administration in the U.S. is not supportive of decarbonization, in fact, when you have a look at what's being supported in terms of bills like this through the Congress, there's quite a bit of support for capturing CO2, utilizing it for things like synthetic aviation fuels or e-methanols. And so the U.S. isn't -- can't be painted with just one brush or picture about what's happening there. And of course, in Australia, continued support for decarbonization. We've had a reelection of a government that's pushing heavily down a pathway to decarbonize the industry here and also make sure that there's investment in industry here and manufacturing in this company -- in this country. And I'll talk about that shortly. So just in terms of other things that the technology does because although the technology was originally set up to be a decarbonization technology, its importance is only increasing with respect to its energy flexibility. And this is because things such as data centers are adding enormous amount of energy requirement to grids in different countries. I think the U.S. has got to add something like 700 terawatt hours of generation capacity to pay for data centers that are springing up everywhere, but that creates issues because the grid itself is probably less stable than it has been in its history. We've got a large amount of renewables coming into the grid. We've got data centers which can trip out and suddenly take enormous amounts of power off the grid. And so this instability in the grid is one of those things that, in fact, our technology is quite suited to help solve. And that's because we don't mind how you heat our tube. We can heat the tube with traditional burning. We can heat it with electrons. And so the ability to switch between those and switch between them quickly is what we're calling the hybrid version of our technology. And so the ability to take 100, 150 megawatts of load off the grid to assist in load balancing is actually of value. One of the things that we saw recently, the Superpower Institute headed up by Rod Sims and Ross Garnaut and looking at industries, green industries, for Australia. They put out a big report just a couple of weeks ago on a green iron plan for Australia. And our own technology was actually featured in it as an example of flexible energy technology. And interestingly enough, somewhere between $100, $200 or more per tonne of green iron cost advantage associated with energy flexibility versus an inflexible, if you like, way to produce green iron. So energy flexibility is actually a big, big part of the value proposition of the technology. Just in terms of the business, I think I mentioned a few different things that we're looking at with the core technology with respect to the CO2 capture piece, and that's when we're processing that white rock limestone. So that we're developing, obviously, for the cement and lime industries. We're working with people like Heidelberg Materials, Mitsubishi -- Mississippi Lime Company, sorry, Titan, Cemex and also using lime to capture CO2 from the air with a group called Heirloom, which is a Bill Gates-backed company. Pretty big markets there, over 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in the cement and lime industry. DAC, or direct air capture, aiming to capture over 1 billion tonnes of CO2 by the mid-2030s. And so those are very big opportunities. Our business model there is to license and extract a royalty. And that royalty will be of the order of dollars per tonne. In fact, the Heirloom agreement that we have is USD 3 per tonne minimum. So you can imagine if you multiply one number by the other, you get to pretty big high gross margin potential markets for the tech. In sustainable processing, as we call it, these are the other minerals that we're looking at, such as lithium, iron, alumina. Those are very, very large markets as well. So particularly iron itself, a significant market, over $640 billion a year in terms of the iron market. Again, we're looking at a licensing and royalty approach. A percentage of that is what we're targeting with our core technology to make a green iron. And we're working with quite a few interesting players there as part of what's called the HILT CRC, the heavy industry, low emissions transition CRC, and with our lithium development. We're working with Pilbara Minerals, obviously, quite a famous Australian lithium company. Also, we have a magnesia business. So this is a business where we've got our own little mine. We're putting it through, again, our core technology to make a magnesium product for water treatment. We're actually selling stuff there. So we've already got revenues coming into the company from that particular part of our business. So they are the 3 different parts of our business with a few different applications under each of those business divisions. Let's have a quick look at each of those business divisions. First of all, with respect to what we call Leilac, which is Low Emissions Intensity Lime and Cement. So we love acronyms in Calix. And so the Leilac part of our business, it's focused particularly around limestone and that cement and lime direct air capture with Heirloom. That's a picture there of a plant we've built in the Heidelberg cement facility in Belgium. So that particular facility there, we built in 2019. It's a full-scale tube. And so to scale from here, we just need more tubes. And so that particular facility has been operating since 2019, doing R&D on the Heidelberg cement facility. Just a quick snapshot of who we're working with and where we're at. You can see there a lot of the development that we're doing is over in Europe with the cement and lime industry. And there, we've managed to obviously get Leilac -- what we call Leilac-1, that picture I showed you earlier, up and running. That's about 25,000 tonne a year CO2 separation capacity. We're getting a 4 multiple scale-up, which is 4 tubes. That -- the site works have just started at Ennigerloh, which is a German city and the Heidelberg facility there as well. And we've got a license agreement with Heidelberg. So we've got a global perpetual license, not exclusive, so we can license the technology to others. But obviously, Heidelberg is a fairly important partner for us in developing the technologies. We're starting to earn some revenues already from paid engineering studies, et cetera. And so really, we're targeting lowest cost capture of CO2 with cement and lime. The technology fits neatly into the existing cement process. So it's a retrofittable solution. And because we're just heating stuff up a different way, we're really targeting lowest energy use, higher sufficiency for separation of CO2. So that's the sort of value proposition there. Just with respect to the Heirloom partnership that we have, looking at direct air capture, there's a render, if you like, of a potential direct air capture facility with Heirloom. And that tower is, again, our core technology. With Heirloom, we've got, again, a global perpetual license. We're earning some revenue already from engineering studies. We've got to put no capital into this project. Heirloom are paying for that capital with the capital raises they've been achieving. So they raised over USD 150 million last November. And so with respect to Heirloom, the target there is to get, again, the lowest cost direct air capture if we can. Heirloom themselves are targeting over 1 billion tonnes of CO2 captured by 2035. So if they get there, great. If they get 1/100 of the way there, still a great business for us. Minimum royalty of USD 3 per tonne for every tonne of CO2. They're separate with our technology. So quite an interesting application of the Leilac technology with Heirloom. Quickly through to spodumene. This is the project we're doing with Pilbara Minerals. We're actually in construction on site there. We're targeting Q4 this year to have that project commissioned. And you can see in the background on this particular photo there, the pads going down for the site. And on the truck, you can see our core technology, our tube making its way up to the Pilbara, wrapped in a bit of protective coating there. But that will be -- that's going to be erected on site at the Pilbara Minerals site in the Pilbara. And as I mentioned, the idea there is to use on-site electricity generated. They've got 6 megawatts now of solar power at Pilbara. And the idea is to process spodumene on-site there to make lithium salt. If you can make lithium salt at the mine site, you cut down all of the transportation costs associated with transporting waste. Obviously, it's a lower carbon footprint salt as a result of that. And so once you can do that, you can do some interesting things with respect to unlocking cheaper logistics for even more remote mine sites, for example. And so that particular opportunity there, we've had some good support from the Australian government, $20 million from the Fed and $15 million from West Australian government. As I said, targeting commission in December quarter this year. And basically, with Pilbara, we're not just, I guess, tied together with Pilbara Minerals. Pilbara Minerals and us will market the technology to the global lithium industry. It's $7 billion we estimate at the moment, hard rock spodumene, and the business model there is a royalty model. So it will be a percentage of that depending upon the license agreements we strike with counterparties. And so we do have several other counterparties talking to us who are lithium hard rock miners. So interesting space, this one. And despite some depressing prices in lithium at the moment, ultimately, people are reasonably bullish about lithium over the medium to longer term. With respect to the iron and steel opportunity, we call it ZESTY, Zero Emission Steel TechnologY. That particular facility, you can see on the left-hand side in the picture. That's our 500 tonne per annum pilot plant at Bacchus Marsh in Victoria. 500 tonne per annum is not a bad size. I think the most famous green iron technology company in the world is a company called Boston Metals. Boston Metals just completed 1 tonne of green iron production and took them a month. So their particular facility is now at 12 tonnes per annum. So we're many multiple of that already. We've done extensive testing with multiple different iron ores here in Australia. We're working closely with ARENA, who supported the original studies that we did through our technology. And our target is to get a 30,000-tonne demonstration unit built as soon as we can. That particular demonstration unit is similar scale to the Leilac unit. It's a single tube, a 30,000 tonne per annum green iron. And from there, it's just multiple tubes to scale up. We're working with some pretty interesting people. As I say, good support from ARENA, through the HILT CRC, the likes of Fortescue, Grange, Liberty, Roy Hill. And so the studies that we did over many of the different iron ores that we tested in Australia, which were tested very successfully, were with these companies. Our key differentiator there, we really want to minimize hydrogen use in the production of green iron. Hydrogen, no doubt people have heard a lot about. Hydrogen is expensive, especially green hydrogen. But if we can minimize hydrogen use -- because remember, we're just introducing it into our tube. It's not being lost out into the furnace. And so we can minimize that hydrogen use. Hydrogen loves oxygen. It will suck the oxygen off iron ore to make iron. And so that's what happens inside our tube. We don't have to pelletize. We can use iron ore super-fines or ultra-fines. Typically, they're lower grade or lower value. No problem for us. We love to use those. Huge market size. And so we're really trying to -- the next stage is get our financing secured to start to get that demonstration unit built. So green iron, a very exciting opportunity for us. Just in terms of alumina, that's ZEAL, Zero Emissions ALumina. That's, again, the same core technology. We're working with the same set of partners through the HILT CRC, the heavy industry low emissions transition CRC. You can see the alumina players there. We're in a program called AlumiNEXT. And that's again using our core technology to take what's called aluminum hydrate, which is the stuff that is extracted from bauxite, and process that through heating it up into alumina. And that particular piece of work that we did some good successful initial work with respect to the HILT CRC research project, and we're underway with respect to feasibility. So to look at how a demonstration plant could fit into a full-scale alumina refinery. And again, same business model. We'll be looking at a royalty on a pretty big market, $45 billion market per annum. So that's alumina. Just very quickly, the boring part of our business. Well, I don't think it's boring. This is where we take magnesia. We make a magnesium hydroxide from that, and we sell that into water treatment as an alkali. That particular business there is really growing very nicely for us in terms of revenue. Good gross margins. We're into the low 40s at the first half of the year. And that's how we've paid for lunch while we've developed all these other applications as well. We're in the States as well. We've got 4 manufacturing facilities there. You can see a photo of a few of us outside the latest facility we've just opened in Lufkin, Texas. That particular facility there is 1 of 6 in the States, sorry. So Lufkin and Ripon with 2 we've just added over the course of the last 12 months to 4 that were already there in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. Very useful product in the U.S. for water treatment, especially for food processing, and obviously, municipal wastewater. We've got a couple of facilities here in Australia as well. We've got a little mine, as I mentioned, where we mine the raw magnesium or what's called magnesite product. And so not a bad market to target in wastewater treatment. $100 million is our estimated U.S. market there. And so that little business there, while it's not the billions and it sort of sits in Leilac and green iron and that sort of stuff, it's still a nice little earner for us, enables us to move forward. And so with respect to the sort of financials that we have here, we've got a pretty strong balance sheet. So obviously, we're coming up to the full year. And so I can't talk about the full year results. But certainly, at the half year, had a good strong balance sheet. We're well supported at a raise in September. The idea of the raise was to make sure that we had at least 80 months runway at that time to effect what we call our capital strategy. I mentioned a few different projects that still require some capital to get up and running. Those particular projects are highlighted in this sort of blue slide. And so with respect to that 4-tube module I was talking about in Leilac, we need to secure some funding for that. The ZESTY project, which is the demonstrator, we need to secure some funding for that. Both of those funding strategies are really around getting capital into the subsidiaries. We've already done that with Leilac. So in 2021, we had an impact fund called Carbon Direct invest EUR 15 million for 7% of carbon of Leilac. And so if you do the math, that's about a EUR 215 million post-money valuation at that time for Leilac. And so we're looking to raise a bit more money within the Leilac group to move ahead and help contribute to the Leilac-2 project. EU has thrown in 16 million. Heidelberg is throwing in some money, but we need to put in some money as well. And also with 2respect to the iron -- green iron project, we're looking at some good grant funding support. There's a few different programs in the Australian government to help support these sorts of things. And also, we're looking at some capital to bring into a subsidiary that we'll call ZESTY. And similarly to Leilac, we're looking at that capital coming in to give, I guess, the market a bit of look-through valuation as well as obviously to allow that project to progress. A few different projects on this slide, but all of the different sort of parts of the business I've talked about, we are looking at generating -- starting to generate some income with respect to license fees after we start to get these projects up and running. In the meantime, we are earning some engineering fees on a lot of them. And of course, we've secured some grant funding very successfully for the early phases of a lot of these projects as well. And of course, the magnesia part of our business continues to grow and really helps with the cash position across the business. So the only little setback, Department of Energy funding. We had 3 projects progressing really nicely. In fact, 4. There's a couple with Heirloom. There were 2 others with Mississippi Lime and with Titan. They're just under review in the States at the moment. We updated the market just last week. The 90-day time period at which the U.S. government said that they'd take to review those projects has passed. And at the moment, we're a little unclear whether those DOE reviews will establish those -- reestablish those grants and support for those projects. As I say, it could go either way. I think the U.S. administration is a little bit unpredictable, but certainly, they're continuing to support the 45Q. And so there's -- we hold that hope that these projects -- some or all of these projects will proceed. But I think the end of summer is when Secretary Wright said that they'd start to finish and wrap up those reviews from the Department of Energy for those projects. So fingers crossed, we'll be able to restart those projects again. But other than those projects, lots happening in the business. Just in terms of recognition for the tech, and I'll finish up here and hopefully leave a bit of time for questions. Certainly, our green iron technology has been well recognized. I was at Baku in Azerbaijan late last year, and we received the Net-Zero Industries Award. Mr. Bowen was there, along with his counterpart from Austria. And so out of 60 countries, our technology was chosen, our green oil technology for this particular award. It's quite prestigious obviously. We've won award from the HILT CRC for the work that we did with Fortescue and Grange, Roy Hill, Liberty on green iron. And recently, in Houston, Texas, we won the Decarb Connect Next Gen award, again, for the application in iron and lime and cement and also the ability to heat flexibly. So quite a bit of recognition coming in for the technology globally. So look, I might finish up there and open up for questions. Should I stop sharing and come on full screen?

Yes. Up to you. Up to you. You can stop to share, if that works well. Thank you, Phil. I think, yes, it sounds like a very exciting time for Calix. I did like the use of the little flat pack prop to help explain the core technology, and obviously, the range of opportunity across industries from green iron to magnesia. So that was fantastic.

Whilst we get some Q&A questions come through, I've certainly got some questions of my own, first of which is on the competitive landscape. So I want to know what makes your technology better than what's already in the market. We know it's a sector with existing technologies in carbon capture, mineral processing. Now could you elaborate on what specifically differentiates your core calcination technology such as Leilac from conventional methods or competing decarbonization technologies in terms of efficiency, cost, scalability and performance as well?

Absolutely. No. Look, certainly, if I take each of the applications in turn. So let's take the lime and cement opportunity for example. Other technologies are aiming to capture the CO2 coming from a cement plant sort of at the end of pipe, let's call it that. And so what that involves is taking these hot gases that are pretty dirty, cooling them down, cleaning them up, putting them through a chemical plant, extracting the CO2. You can imagine complex process-wise, costly. And it takes quite a bit of energy as well. And so effectively, you're building a chemical plant next to a cement plant, whereas our technology, it just replaces a small part of the overall cement process right in the middle, what's called the preheater calciner tower, the big, tall part of the cement plant. We just have our tower there instead of a typical cement plant tower. Theoretically, the energy we need is the energy that's currently there. So we are targeting the best available technology efficiency for a cement plant today that doesn't capture CO2. And so that is the first key advantage. We're not building this whopping great big chemical plant on the back end of a cement plant. The second is the fact that we've got this energy flexibility that we're targeting, the ability to use both electrons as well as by conventional fuels or waste fuels that a cement plant typically uses. That energy flexibility is of value, even outside of CO2 capture. So again, the ability to suck down electrons if the grid operator rings and says, we're overloaded. You can sign what's called effectively sort of contracts for load balancing. And those auxiliary services contracts could be worth millions of euros a year. So we're -- part of our project consortium we have in Europe is ENGIE. ENGIE's there and it's for that very reason, that energy flexibility. So the 2 main reasons with Leilac. With the iron opportunity, it's very much about minimizing that hydrogen use and being able to process fines. Most other technologies, you've got to pelletize these things before you put them in a kiln. Otherwise, they get blown out of the kiln. We love small particles. And so minimizing the hydrogen use and being able to use fines, and again, that energy flexibility as highlighted in the Superpower Institute report is the key differentiator. And of course, if we come to, say, spodumene, the ability to use electrons at a mine site. Energy is one of -- apart from labor, I think energy is one of the most expensive commodities in a mine site. Typically, it's going to be shipped in as LPG or LNG. And so most mines are really looking at how they can utilize renewable energy sources near the mine site. And Australia has got abundant sort of solar potential near mine sites. That's the key differentiator of the technology for the applications such as spodumene.

Perfect. Fantastic. And we had a little snapshot of the projects in one of those last slides. Now which project will be the first to come to fruition? And when do you expect that to happen?

Yes. First one is the project with Pilbara Minerals. So that one there, we're looking at the December quarter to commission. And so we're targeting 3,000 tonnes per annum of lithium phosphate salt production there. We've got to commission it first. And one other little thing sort of would be nice, and that's the lithium price itself. When we first started this project, I think lithium was at sort of USD 80,000 a tonne. I think it's dipped below about USD 8,000 a tonne, so a 90% drop in lithium value. And obviously, with respect to that particular facility, we'll start it up. We'll commission it. Will we turn it on and go full bore? Probably not until the lithium price recovers a little bit. But that particular one there, as we know, lithium is in a fairly volatile space. It's going to move around fairly rapidly. As soon as the market sort of moves into sort of demand all again, then obviously, that plant there could be a good little earner for us. So commissioning, that's the first cab off the rank, but running at full steam, we obviously want the market to recover a little bit before we do that.

Yes, very understandable. Now you said so yourself, you had some really good success with securing grant funding. Would you have -- would you say your technology is reliant on public subsidy to be economic? Or what's the breakdown of the revenue streams for Calix?

Yes. No, look, that's a good question because I think a lot of the pushback -- and I know we'll get questions about the share price and decarbonization in general. Of course, we will. But certainly, decarbonization was sort of a big tailwind. And so for us in, say, 2020, 2021 and 2022, I think the world at that point in time, there was sort of -- there is no alternative. Decarbonization is going to happen. It's going to happen fairly quickly. We've got a lot to do by 2030. I think the wind's come out of that quite a bit. And despite, I guess, in the markets more than anything else because of EU policy, they're still very much pressing down a decarbonization pathway. In fact, most other countries outside of the U.S. is still heading down the decarbonization pathway. But what we've done is we've decided to really make sure that the other aspects of our technology are better understood because there is an economic case that we're targeting to make for the technology outside of a carbon price. And again, I've talked about that energy flexibility, the ability to use an industrial process to help load balance the grid. That is worth something. Now will it make an entire project fully economic? It will be different for different grids and different grid stabilities. But that's a particular value proposition that's money in the pocket for a customer. So our aim is to make the technology as economic as possible outside of decarbonization. And then the decarbonization, I guess, advantages of the technology come as a free kick, if you like. They come as icing on top. So it's -- to answer your question in a nutshell, it's a little bit horses for courses depending upon grids and their stability, cost of energy and those sorts of things. But our aim is to make this technology economically viable with or without a price on carbon.

Yes. Okay. Fantastic. Now you did mention the share price, and I will touch on it quickly. Now given the strength of your technology and the caliber of your partnerships and the global tailwinds on decarbonization and battery materials, how do you explain the current disconnect between Calix' market valuation, and say, the long-term potential? And what do you think the market is missing or sort of underestimating right now?

Yes. Look, I think I mentioned before that decarbonization was very much flavor of the month back in 2021 and 2022. And of course, the share price was reflective of that. We had huge potential, as I've sort of covered out. It's a very big industry. So I can't think of a single technology that could decarbonize 20% of global CO2 other than ours. So it's a high-potential technology. And of course, when the markets got a lot of head of steam up around things like that, then obviously, that's reflected in the share price. Certainly, as I mentioned, things like inflationary pressures, certainly the new administration in the U.S. and perceptions about that with respect to decarbonization have moved against those sentiments. And when it comes to markets, it's very much about sentiment, as you can imagine. So the markets have looked much more in a shorter-term view of how much cash is the company generating, less about the growth or potential growth opportunities for the company and more about what does it look like for the next 6 or 12 months. So that's understandably what a lot of investors are looking at with respect to the tag. Now our strategy, as I mentioned before, has been to look at raising into the subsidiary level in the company. We did that in 2021 very successfully. We still believe that's a great strategy for us because certainly, where our share price is currently, it's not efficient to raise all the capital we need into the head stock. And the core purpose of the head company is to continue to develop new applications. And so getting capital into these subsidiaries so that they can move off and commercialize -- and some of that capital, by the way, can't come into a public company. So a lot of impact funds and high net worth won't invest in a public company. So we open ourselves up to much wider pools of capital by doing this strategy. And so I think the market is looking at us to go, well, when are they going to pull one of those off? When are they going to get the next raise into the subsidiary? And so I think it's the market sort of looking at that and going, is that going to be possible given the current headwinds or perceived headwinds around decarbonization? And so I feel that, that is probably where the market's sentiments are at, Harry. And obviously, what we've got to do is demonstrate that we can do that, demonstrate that we can finance via that strategy. And so that's the catalyst, I think, the market is looking and waiting for to, I guess, look at the value of the stock in a new light.

Yes. Of course. Of course. And just linking that to a question we had prior to the beginning of the webinar, do you think accessing these pools of capital, that's what gives you the confidence that you can raise cap for projects such as ZESTY and the demonstration plant there as well?

Yes. Look, I believe so. And the reason I believe that we can do it is we've seen -- although it's slowed, we've seen other capital raises get away for similar technology -- not similar technology, similar applications. Let me put it that way. So greener iron and steel or greener cement. Boston Metals, I think last year, they raised something like USD 300 million. That was the company I mentioned when I talked about ZESTY. Our partner Heirloom raised USD 150 million back in November last year. A green cement company based out of Texas raised about USD 80 million just in February. So these raises are happening. We do know that they take longer than in the past. Investment committees are much more cautious. But what's interesting is our feel -- and we're obviously in touch with a lot of these impact funds quite regularly. There's a lot of cash waiting to be deployed. It's -- they're just waiting for the right opportunities. And so there, a lot of cash waiting to be deployed, but more cautious cash. So it just takes longer to do these types of transactions. And so the other things that give us our optimism, I guess, Harry, is we've seen these deals done. We know they take a bit longer. But we know -- and obviously, we're confident with respect to the value proposition of our technology. So all of those factors combined is giving us the optimism that we have around executing.

Yes. Yes. Okay. Now I'm going to shift more to questions from our attendees. Now Charles asked, could this technology represent an alternative to green hydrogen in the production of cement and lime? Now obviously, acknowledging how long these green hydrogen plants taking to come online. And what are the secondary markets for the generated CO2?

Yes. So just in terms of the first part of the question, certainly, we're not looking necessarily to burn hydrogen on the outside of our tube to heat the cement and lime. It's very expensive. And so the hydrogen, we'll only going to be using for making a green iron. So that's where the iron ore comes, in the top, and hydrogen in the bottom. So yes, hydrogen, we're probably not going to go near hydrogen for production of cement and lime. Cement, I think one of the heaviest and cheapest products on the planet. That combination sort of says it's in commodity space. So that's why they're going to be very careful about costs. But just in terms of uses of the CO2 from the core tech. So we've got a project in South Australia. Again, given the time limit, I didn't cover this fully during the session. But that particular project there has $15 million in government support. We're working in South Australia with a company called Vast Solar and also a German company called Mabanaft, who are a big energy and fuel retail and distributor. And the aim there is to take the CO2 that we produce from making lime and combining it with a green hydrogen to make e-methanol. Now e-methanol is one of the alternatives that the world's shipping industry is looking at to power ships. So shipping is one of those very difficult industries to decarbonize because you've got huge vessels requiring very large amounts of power, traveling the world at 16, 17, 20 knots. And so the fuel is -- hoisting sales is great, but to get stuff around quickly, you've got to use a fuel. So e-methanol, Maersk has specified all of their ships will be dual fuel, standard marine fuel, e-methanol. So the use in e-methanol is very interesting. E-methanol could also be further processed to make synthetic aviation fuel. And so again, you get on to an industry that's very hard to decarbonize. To lift a 200-tonne plane into the air and fly half around the world, the concentration in a fuel is really -- batteries may be there and electric flight may be there for short term or short takeoff and landing-type situations, but a long-haul heavy plane needs a fuel. So synthetic aviation fuel is the other big area of potential use for CO2, again, combined with hydrogen to make a fuel. Lots of other sort of more minor uses for CO2, but the International Energy Agency has sort of estimated that maybe 15% of CO2 from the cement and lime industry will ever find a use. 85% will need to be sequestered. So there's just so much that, that industry produces that finding a use for every molecule is going to be very difficult. So sequestration is an important part of the solution there as well. So that's shoving it back underground again in depleted oil and gas wells and these sorts of things.

Okay. Yes. Fantastic. And Charles just wanted to add on, what do you think the appetite for Leilac technology in Australia is, say, compared to Europe or even the U.S.?

Yes. No, look, I think interestingly, I think it was 2 governments ago. We got a couple of grants that subsequently were abolished by the next government coming in. One was for a plant -- a lime plant with Adbri. The other is for looking at alignment cement application with Boral. So there was appetite in Australia to have a look at some of this stuff with some government support. Our initial trip to Europe when we first developed the technology in 2014, met up with Heidelberg and those guys. There wasn't a lot of interest in Australia, I've got to say, in 2014. But that's changed. And although at the moment, both of those companies are going through some changes, I mean, Boral go through a pretty significant cost-cutting and refocusing exercise. Similar with Adbri who had just been purchased by an overseas company called [ Tarmac ]. But both of those companies remain interested in the tech. But there's only a few cement plants in Australia. There's several thousand globally. So we're focusing our market, Europe, States, Canada and Asia -- Asia Pac. 50% of the world's cement is in China. So -- I think China is 50% of everything in the moment, but it's -- so our focus -- that's why we've got the majority of our employees and our developers overseas, because that's where the bigger opportunities are at the moment.

Perfect. Now last question for me, and it is from an attendee, sorry. It's with the fall from grace of lithium, and you did touch on that, the fundamental operating principles of Calix appear to have been sort of undermined. What changes are management implementing to reverse the ongoing slide in the share price and the view of lithium and your lithium projects?

Yes. So I guess there's a couple of questions in there, and I'll certainly tackle the lithium one first. Certainly, the lithium, I want to say fall from grace, I mean, I think at $80,000 a tonne was a bit overpriced. And certainly, there was a lot of hype about where electric vehicles are heading and lack of lithium production and all these sorts of things. So I think what the world has seen is that production can be brought onstream pretty quickly. And certainly in some areas where there's less red tape, lithium production can happen quite quickly. But despite the fact that lithium is now -- it's back down to sort of lower or low-ish historical levels. And so there necessarily is going to be a correction at some point in time. And obviously, it's up to whichever pundit who's going to make the call as to exactly when. But one thing that I think people aren't factoring into the lithium story, if people have a look at CATL, a big Chinese battery company floated on Hong Kong a few months ago. Part of their view was more bullish than, say, UBS in terms of lithium supply-demand balance in terms of demand starting to really pick up again. Where the view came from is things like baseload energy storage systems, which, again, I mentioned the amount of energy that the U.S. has to add with data centers. But lithium and especially in the form of lithium iron phosphate is a very effective and reasonably cheap baseload energy storage solution. And so I think if you sort of have a look at the CATLs of the world, they're much more bullish about lithium demand. So lithium is one of those things that, yes, it's -- certainly, we're not going to run the plant at a loss. Lithium needs to get back to historic averages. We're not saying it's going to be high. Historic averages for that plant to mean and make sense. It is a small plant. It's a demonstration unit, but it can be commercial at standard sort of chemical margins. And obviously, as and when times improve, then obviously, we'll be looking to see what additional capacity might be logical. But just in terms of the share price and back to that is perhaps there's a bit of a linkage to lithium because we've had a multiple combination of inflation. The market is sort of taking a view of growth stocks, an administration in the U.S. that appears to rule the world. But in fact, only 5% of the world's cement or steel is even made in the U.S. But anyway, because of the size of -- or I guess the impression people have around the U.S.'s position in the world, people are thinking, all right, that's the end of decarbonization or certainly a pause for a while. All of these factors have sort of come together. And I think that's probably the key thing that's, as I mentioned before, the market sentiment around cash versus growth has influenced the share price. What are we doing about it? So certainly, as we've started to see these, I guess, let's call them, headwinds really come through, deals taking longer to raise equity, we've taken the opportunity to really trim back what we're doing and focus on a few key projects. And in fact, even with the announcement last week where those Department of Energy supported projects were effectively past their 90-day review date and the Secretary Wright came out and said that they probably won't get to them to the end of summer, we've decided to just cut our costs for the moment. And so last Friday, we announced that we'd be trimming back our engineering and projects team so that, again, we've got a leaner organization. Core technology and the core engineers are still there. We can grow again reasonably quickly from this space as and when and if those projects do continue to move ahead. And so since late last year when we already announced we were trimming down and moving out a few different things and bringing a lot more focus to the business, we've taken well over $6 million annualizing costs out of the business from January. And obviously, we'll be reporting at the half year on what this new round of cost cutting will do with respect to the business. And so we're really on a path to make sure that we continue with an excellent cash runway to give the best opportunity for these capital raises to take place into the subs. And so that's our strategy. And so while we continue to be reasonably confident and optimistic that we can get these capitals away at a point in time and that we've got the cash runway well past that point in time, we'll continue to pursue the strategy.

Great. Great. Now Phil, I am conscious of your time. There is one more question that came through. Sorry, Richard. How will Trump -- sorry, when do you see the future of magnesia sales? And how will Trump's tariffs affect this?

Yes. One thing I certainly didn't foresee when the new administration started to sort of take shape and then ultimately came in was the tariff -- quite the extent of the tariff war, if you like, or noise and certainly whacking a tariff on Canada or Mexico but then taking it off and then putting it on and taking it off. It was certainly an interesting few weeks at the start of this administration. It's all settled down now. There is a free trade agreement between America and Canada and Mexico, and magnesia falls under that free trade agreement. So that agreement is in place until the mid-2030s. There is a review in 2026, but essentially, those sorts of things that are critical for America that do come from countries like Canada and Mexico, and certainly, magnesia is one of them. Guess where America gets most of its magnesia that it imports from. It's not from Canada. It's China. So if it starts to cut out Canada, they're going to turn more to China. Magnesia is used in not just water treatment the way we use it, but it's used in agriculture. It's an essential agreement in agriculture and livestock. And so America can't afford to cut off sources of magnesia because it doesn't -- it can't produce enough itself. So while we sit under a free trade agreement, that's a pretty good situation to be in. I'm not under any illusion that these things aren't up for review at certain points in time, but I'm also encouraged by where the trade balance is at the moment across those different countries that America has to buy the magnesia from. So cautiously comfortable.

Yes. Absolutely. Who knows what's going to happen tomorrow at this rate? All right. Phil, that's awesome. Thank you very much again for your time today. And I think myself and our attendees got a lot out of today. A very lengthy, detailed webinar. So very excited to see the growth of Calix, and we will have to have another webinar in the future and have an update.

Fantastic. No. Thanks very much for hosting me on the show, Harry. Appreciate it.

Of course. Thank you.