International Battery Metals Ltd. (IBAT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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. [Operator Instructions] 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, who 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 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 SEDAR and with the Securities and Exchange Commission on EDGAR. Now I'll turn the call over to Joe.

Thank you, Brian, and 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 1-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 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 it 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 flowsheet 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 have 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 oilfield 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 column for more than 1,200 cycles against our media with 0 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 Smackover 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 Smackover Play, 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 Smackover 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 salars or as an alternative to the expensive commissioning of a traditional salar. 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 transport it easily. The current design we're contemplating is approximately 1/2 of our current MDLE plant design per column such that we can efficiently deploy it anywhere in the world. We are having discussions with multiple operators about the 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 fund raise 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 4 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 contracts in place and then, 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 carbonate 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 Fastmarkets Conference next week, continuing conversations with counterparties from the U.S., the Middle East and in Argentina on our MDLE plant and/or new plants. 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.

Thank you, Joe. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are for the fourth fiscal quarter and year-end ending March 31, 2026, to the same quarter and year-end in 2025. As we discussed in the past, IBAT is still effectively in the pre-revenue stage of development. However, during our most recent fiscal quarter, we did recognize $63,000 of service revenue related to testing brines for resource owners. And for the current year, we recognized $164,000 of service revenue related to testing brines. Operating expenses decreased to approximately $0.5 million in the current quarter compared to approximately $1 million in the prior year due to lower overall maintenance and upkeep of the MDLE plant. For the full year, operating expenses increased -- decreased to $2.1 million in fiscal year 2026 from approximately $3.5 million in the prior year. Expenses were higher in fiscal 2025 due to the mobilization and resulting demobilization of the existing plant to the U.S. Magnesium site in Utah. Our SG&A used in the day-to-day operations consists primarily of compensation expense, both cash and stock-based, professional and legal fees, engineering costs and office costs. SG&A expenses for the fourth quarter were approximately $2.2 million compared to approximately $2.3 million last year. SG&A expenses for the year were approximately $8.5 million compared to approximately $9 million last year. The primary cause of the decrease were lower noncash stock compensation and lower legal fees year-over-year. This year, changes in our warrant liability, net of noncash cost of modifying certain warrants caused a gain of approximately $16.5 million, which is a noncash item that is mark-to-market each quarter based on the change in our stock price. This compares to a $13.2 million gain recognized in the prior fiscal year. For the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, we experienced a loss of $1.4 million compared to a gain of $5.3 million in fiscal 2025 for the warrant liability due to issuances of warrants in the fourth quarter in 2026. Fluctuations such as this will continue until all of the warrants that have previously been issued either expire or are exercised. Net loss for the fiscal fourth quarter was $5.3 million compared to net income of $300,000 last year, with the major driver in the quarter-over-quarter reduction being the noncash warrant liability fluctuation. Net loss per share was minus $0.02 in the fiscal fourth quarter compared to $0 in the same quarter last year. For the full year ended March 31, 2026, net income was $100,000 compared to a loss of $3.5 million last year, with the major driver in the year-over-year reduction being the $3.3 million change in the noncash warrant liability year-over-year. EPS for the year was $0.00 versus a loss of $0.01 last year. Turning to our balance sheet. At March 31, 2026, we had approximately $9.2 million of cash on hand compared to approximately $10.7 million at March 31, 2025. Working capital at March 31, 2026, was $9.2 million, and we had no debt. During our fourth quarter, we successfully completed a private placement for the sale of approximately 26.4 million units, each unit consisting of 1 share of common stock and 1 warrant for [ $2.0 ] million in gross proceeds. Subsequent to year-end, on April 29 of this year, we closed an additional private placement for the sale of approximately 34.3 million units, each unit consisting of 1 share of common stock and 1 warrant for $2.8 million in gross proceeds. Both of these fundings were in connection with the private placement agreement entered into in February 2025 with EV Metals. With the cash on hand at March 31, 2026, and the proceeds from the private placement entered into in April, we believe the company has sufficient operating cash to continue through at least the next 12 months. Overall, we have a very strong balance sheet that will allow us to fund our current ongoing daily operations. In the event of signing a contract with a customer that Joe previously mentioned, we will need to raise additional funds, either as equity or debt to fund the construction of a new plant or upgrade our existing plant. At this point, I would like to turn the call back to Joe.

Thank you, Michael. So look, as we continue to push and move IBAT forward, we remain committed on becoming one of the first true DLE players to operate at a full commercial scale. I want to assure each of you the sense of urgency is and will remain very high with the Board of Directors and the entire management team to aggressively move this company forward by bringing on new customers. We believe strongly in the modularity, the efficiency and the low-cost nature of our technology, and that will benefit us as we move to a commercial stage in this company's life cycle. We will continue to push the technological edge as we cannot rest on our past achievements, the competition in the DLE space is absolutely fierce. We believe we have something very unique here at IBAT, and I'm excited about the potential and the journey ahead of us. We sincerely do appreciate your continued support, your continued interest in IBAT and our story. So with that, we're now going to open up the call to questions from the audience. So we'll take those live. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] We have no audio questions at this time. I'll now turn the call back over to Brian for questions over the webcast.

Yes. So there's one question so far. What has changed that enables management to be comfortable sharing updates on the commercial opportunities now? And is there some sort of commitment actually in place?

Yes. Thank you. No, great question. Yes, look, we're trying to be -- we certainly have heard from many about transparency, and so we're trying to be more transparent with you. We don't have any commitments yet, so to be clear, obviously, we've not provided you names because we still are under NDAs. But we are trying to be transparent around the pipeline of opportunities. There's only so many hours in the day. We have 12 people here, which includes accountants and everybody. So we have to prioritize our time and efforts, right, because that's what you expect us to do. So we are clearly prioritizing what we think are the highest opportunities and these two, in particular, we've spent a lot of time. Let me assure you, these are not things that you do in days or hours. They take weeks or months of detailed engineering work, answering questions, conducting the testing. Each test can take us weeks to conduct to provide the technical information that our customers require. So these have been ongoing for quite a bit of time but I felt like it's important to be transparent with you. We at least have two that are ongoing. We have spent a lot of time on both of these projects, months, not days or weeks, but months of working with these counterparties. And so we're hopeful and optimistic that they could lead to. But candidly, they could go with somebody else. I mean that's always the risk and so we are putting our best foot forward. We put forward commercial terms that we hope are compelling. So yes, I mean, that's where we are. They could both go away tomorrow, in which case, we move on to the next one. But no commitments yet, but we're hopeful we'll have something soon that we'll be able to share with each of you. But thank you for that question. Anything else Brian?

No, that's it we can close it up.

Okay. Very good. Well, listen, I want to thank again everybody on this call. And I mean it when I say this, I'm excited. I know for many of you, it's been a long journey. You've been with this company a long time and for that, I thank you. I appreciate your support. I truly do. I just have to emphasize to you that we are working tirelessly to move this company to the next level, which is a commercial level. I think we're close. I really do. I know I've been saying that for a while. These things take time, but we are excited about where we are. We continue to -- we're proud of our technology, and I hope you've heard that from our conversations. I think our customer base is really starting to see -- it's one of the key things that we do is produce a really clean eluate, a lithium chloride, and that is critical to be a low-cost operator in this space. So with that, thank you. We look forward to hopefully more conversations. We're excited about Fastmarkets next week. We'll see what comes with it. So thank you for your time.

Thank you again for joining us today. This does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.