Lithium Argentina AG (LAR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Lithium Americas Corp. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to the Chairman of the Board, Mr. George Ireland. The floor is yours.

Thank you. Everybody, welcome to the Annual General and Special Meeting of the Shareholders of Lithium Americas Corporation. My name is George Ireland, and I'm the Chair of the Board of Directors. In accordance with the articles of the company, I will act as Chair of this meeting. As this meeting will be held virtually by live webcast, we should like to explain a few rules for the orderly conduct of the meeting. One, questions in respect of a motion can be submitted by any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder using the instant messaging service of the virtual interface. We thank everyone for attending and for your interest in our company. But participants who are not attending as registered guests will not be able to ask questions. Two, questions will generally appear shortly after they are submitted, but will only be addressed during the Q&A period at the end of the meeting, provided that questions regarding certain procedural matters are directly related to the motions before the meeting may be addressed during the meeting. Three, for the purpose of the meeting today, voting on all matters will be conducted [indiscernible] shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders will be asked to vote on all business items after each -- after the presentation of all business items. Four, when you are asked to vote, you'll receive a message on the virtual interface requesting you to register your votes. You will only have a certain amount of time to do so when the polls are open. We will now proceed with the formal motion -- portion of today's meeting. To expedite the formal part of the meeting, I will move and second all motions. I now ask the Annual General and Special Meeting of the Shareholders of the company come to order. I appoint Jenna Virk, Corporate Secretary, Director of Legal Affairs of the company, to act as secretary of the meeting. For the purpose of this meeting, I appoint Computershare Investor Services, Inc. through its representatives as scrutineers to process the votes of any polls taken at this meeting and to report thereon to myself in my capacity as Chairman of the meeting. The purpose of today's meeting are set out in the management information circular of the company dated April 29, 2021. The notice calling this meeting, the management information circular and the form of proxy were mailed to shareholders on or about May 5, 2021, along with the audited consolidated financial statements of the company for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, and related MD&A materials to shareholders of the company who requested such statements and related MDAs. Unless there are any objections, I will dispense with the reading of the notice of meeting. Copies of the management information circular and other meeting materials are available from the company's profile on the SEDAR website. Our transfer agent, Computershare Investor Services has attested to the proper mailing of the notice calling this meeting. There have been filed a proof of service of such mailing provided by the company's transfer agent. I direct that a copy of such proof of service be annexed to the meeting -- to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule. I have been advised that there are voting shares representing greater than 5% of all outstanding voting shares of the company present, and therefore a quorum of shareholders of the company's present and the meeting is properly called and duly constituted for the transaction of business. I have received the scrutineer's report, and I direct that their formal report be annexed to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule. As the first item of business on the agenda for today's meeting, I now present to the meeting the audited consolidated financial statements of the company as at and for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, together with the auditor's report to the shareholders thereon. Copies of such documents have been mailed to the shareholders who requested such statements and filed on SEDAR and EDGAR. I do not propose to read them at this meeting. The next item of business is the approval of a resolution to fix the number of directors of the company at 9. I move and second a motion to set the number of directors of the company at 9. Unless there are any questions, I will move on to the next item of business. The next item of business is the election of directors. The company previously adopted an advanced notice policy for the nomination of directors by shareholders in certain circumstances. The company did not receive any director nominations for this meeting that met the prescribed requirements and were delivered within the time frame -- time period prescribed by the advanced notice policy. Accordingly, the only persons eligible to be nominated for election to the Board of Directors at this meeting are the persons nominated by the management. As set out in the management information circular, management has nominated 9 individuals for election by the shareholders who will each hold office until the conclusion of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders unless such person ceases to be a director before them. The nominees standing for director are Jonathan Evans, John Kanellitsas, Franco Mignacco, Xiaoshen Wang, Fabiana Chubbs, Dr. Yuan Gao, Kelvin Dushnisky and Jinhee Magie. Each of the persons nominated has confirmed that they are willing to serve as a director. Since there are no other nominations, I move and second the motion to elect the directors. Unless there are any questions, I'll move on to the next item of business. The next item of business is the appointment of the company's auditors for the ensuing year and to authorize the directors of the company to fix the remuneration of the auditors. I move and second that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP be appointed auditors of the meeting until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders and the Board of Directors of the company be authorized to fix their remuneration. As mentioned today, voting will be conducted by electronic ballot, and I will take a moment to ask that the ballot be opened to the registered voters and proxy holders. The proxy and the polls are now open. At this point, all registered shareholders and proxy holders who have properly logged in with their control numbers or username and wish to vote will be able to see it on their screen, all motions being brought forward for voting purposes at this meeting. Please register your votes by accessing the voting page and selecting for against buttons next to the motion to set the direct number of directors at 9. Please register your votes by selecting for withhold buttons next to the name of each prospective director and next to the resolution with respect to the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the company's auditors. We will provide registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders approximately 1 more minute to complete the electronic ballots. [Voting]

Once the electronic balloting closes, the voting page will disappear, and your votes will automatically be submitted. Based on the number of votes received prior to the proxy cutoff time on June 8, 2021, I will ask that the scrutineer compile the report regarding the results of voting on all matters and send them to the Chair of the Board and the Corporate Secretary. The results will be announced and published on SEDAR and by press release. I'd also direct that the results of the poll be included with the minutes of this meeting. The formal items of business as set out in the notice of meeting have now been dealt with. I move and second the meeting now terminate. As there are no further business to come before the meeting, I declare the formal meeting -- formal part of this meeting closed, and I would now like to turn the meeting over to Jonathan Evans, the Chief Executive Officer and President of Lithium Americas Corp. For a question-and-answer period.

Thanks, George. [Operator Instructions] There being no questions, I will now close the question-and-answer period. The last item on today's agenda is a corporate presentation. I'm going to start on Page 3 of our presentation. I remind folks that they're interested to please read our safe harbor statements. But to save time, I will get started on an overview of the company. A lot has happened over the last year since the last time we met. The company's balance sheet is certainly much improved. We are coming into this year now with over $500 million of cash and our Caucharí-Olaroz project is fully funded from available debt facilities. Our partnership with Ganfeng Lithium is strong, and our project continues. We're on track for mid-2022 production with over 81% of our $640 million CapEx budget committed at this point. We've also announced and commenced development planning with Ganfeng Lithium on a second-stage expansion. We're looking at least 20,000 tonnes of lithium carbon equivalent on an annualized basis at Caucharí-Olaroz. As that develops, we will brief you further as our planning starts to take off and continue on that. Switching to the north, our asset 100% owned in the U.S., Thacker Pass, as to folks that aren't familiar, it's the largest known lithium resource in the U.S. We were granted our Record of Decision from the U.S. Department of the Interior earlier this year to construct and operate. And our team continues to grow. We've bolstered our staff both in Argentina, but also in Thacker Pass. We significantly up-staffed to start to prepare the project to get into the construction phase sometime early next year. From a market standpoint, the market has really taken off over the last 6 to 7 months. This is something we've been saying for a while, that the industry is underserved. COVID helped retard some of this over the last year. But coming out of the Christmas holidays, things have really started to take off, and they show no sign of abating and we don't expect them to abate. But we fully expect that supply will be chasing demand for the coming years ahead. Lots of automotive manufacturers and others have started to express concern over a potential shortage of supply in the coming years as the industry starts to really accelerate. This has been bolstered now by policy in place, which was actually announced quite in detail by the U.S. government over the last couple of days, which follows similar announcements and policy modeling in the European Union, and other countries like Australia and China as well. From an asset standpoint, our company is very well positioned, both the Caucharí-Olaroz project and Thacker Pass. Caucharí-Olaroz is among the lowest-cost, broad-based resources in the world in terms of operating costs. And Thacker Pass, when in full operation, will be also one of the leading assets in the world in terms of operating costs. Moving to Page 6. A little bit more detail on Caucharí-Olaroz itself. From a geography standpoint, it's in far northwestern Argentina in Jujuy province. It's the largest battery-grade lithium carbonate operation under construction in over 2 decades. And we're excited to bring this asset online mid next year to a very needy industry. We have partnered with Ganfeng over the last several years and leveraged their expertise in combination with ours to build a flow sheet to deliver the quality products that are going to be required in the industry going forward. From an equity standpoint, Ganfeng Lithium moved their equity contribution to 51% last year. And from an offtake standpoint, they have 76% of the offtake. At this point, nearly all of our offtake is accounted for between Ganfeng, between their equity interest and offtake agreement they have with us, along with Bangchak. Our Stage 1 as designed is for 40,000 tonnes. We're advancing quite well even in the midst of COVID over the last year. Very proud of the team and the actions that we've taken to have to implement very strict protocols and controls to allow us to be able to continue construction activities in a really challenging environment. At this point, all the major equipment and the majority of the bulk materials are all on site. We have regularly over 1,000 workers on site, and so we've ramped up construction and have really started to focus now on the simple works and putting together the chemical plant and the final touches on some of the infrastructure to support this operation. And I mentioned before about Stage 2, and we announced that a couple of weeks ago. This asset is quite large. It's one of the largest in Latin America, one of the largest brine assets in the world with over 19 million tonnes in its resource and reserve. It has the opportunity to expand for many decades to come, and that's not a point lost on both shareholders of this. Given the advanced stage that we're at, given the market conditions, which are going to be quite attractive for many, many years ahead in an industry that is really at a loss for assets to come online to serve their demand, it makes a lot of sense now to start that planning exercise so we can take advantage of the infrastructure that we'll have in place. As we finish the first phase of this project, we'll be well positioned to roll into the second phase without demobilizing all the assets and the contractors and so forth that we have pressed in on the first stage. For the second stage, we -- the offtake will mimic our equity arrangement in that LAC's 49% share will be -- it's actually all of ours and what will be uncommitted, and we'll be able to put into the marketplace ourselves. On Page 7, you can see some pictures, which demonstrate the advanced progress of this project. It's hard to comprehend and scale how large some of these buildings are in comparison to other assets that are currently operating. I would encourage shareholders and other interested parties to go to our website and look at some of the videos. We post them very frequently with flyovers, and you'll get a really good chance to see how impressive this operation has come together and such -- what scale it's actually had to serve a market, which is exploding in terms of growth. Moving to Page 8 to Thacker Pass. As I mentioned before, this is 100% owned by Lithium Americas. And at this point, we have not committed any of the offtake rights, and that's a decision that we've made ourselves. Our permitting is completed from a federal standpoint, given the record decision that was issued on January 15 of this year. We're still collecting some state permits mainly around air and water and few other areas, which we expect to have in the third quarter of this year. It's a very well-suited project. If you can compare elevations between the 2 projects, we're about 5,000 feet in Thacker Pass versus about 15,000 feet in Argentina. And it's a much different lithium deposit in terms of its lithium being contained in the sedimentary clay versus a brine. So that requires a different extraction method, which we've perfected and optimized with a large-scale pilot testing facility that we built in Reno, Nevada, nearly 2 years ago, which is producing lithium sulfate at scale, which we're using to finalize the engineering, which we expect to have completed later this year to also complete our feasibility study. Infrastructure in this area is quite good. Winnemucca is a northern mining hub. Nevada is among one of the best jurisdictions in the world to develop projects like this, given it has a long history in resource development. I think Nevada is the third highest gold-producing region in the world. We have access to rail in Winnemucca. We have a paved highway, which runs to the site. We have [ overhead ] transmission line. We have fiberoptic. So it's lend itself quite easily to development and actually to growth in the future. We're not a mining company. We consider ourselves a chemical and materials company. The mining operation from the mine planning that's occurred already all the way through reclamation will be handled by a division of North American Coal called Sawtooth Mining. North American Coal has over 100-year history of soft coal mining, so lignite, phosphates, limestone. They've been recognized and awarded several times by both state and federal regulatory agencies, not only for their safety but also for their reclamation efforts. We are quite excited that they've partnered with us and contracted with us to provide mining services and to be a partner in that part of the operation, all the way through the life of the mine. As I mentioned, the feasibility study is underway and we're making excellent progress through our efforts. Our targeted output, it's now moved to 30,000 to 35,000 tonnes of lithium carbon equivalent annually, and that's for Phase 1. The initial permit that we've been awarded by the government allows us to produce up to 60,000 tonnes of a potential material, and that permit covers both carbonate hydroxide, lithium chloride, actually even lithium metal. As part of our feasibility study -- or final feasibility study that we're doing now, we're also putting an option in for lithium hydroxide conversion co-located on site with the potential to produce up to 20,000 tonnes of material. From a financing standpoint, we have a lot of options here given the cash position of the company. And we have the ability to potentially do things like that or other options of that in the future. And it puts us in a very strong position from partnership discussions in terms of different potential models that can be put together given the financial strength of the company. And that's one of the main reasons that we have not committed the offtake rights as we'd like to leave our strategic options open, given the very positive nature of the engagements that we've had with a variety of very well-known names throughout the lithium supply chain. As a company, we're continued and will continue to stay focused on execution. So there's lots of excitement in the industry, but our focus is completing both of the projects that we have at hand, given their huge potential and given the industry's demand that is not going to be abating anytime over the next decade. We're on track for production in Caucharí mid next year, and we're on track for construction to begin as early as the first half of 2022 for Thacker Pass as well. We continue throughout the year with a very strong balance sheet. So we're in a much stronger position to be able to advance these projects and also the plan for future expansions. We have an opportunity to really make a difference in terms of the policy that's been announced by the U.S. government in terms of the lithium battery supply chain. That's a huge focus of the Biden administration. It actually was a focus of the prior 2 administrations as well. But the policy now has really become a whole government policy wrapped around all aspects of the supply chain to include lithium extraction or lithium processing. And as the last point I'll mention is -- and not to forget our planning, which has commenced on phase 2 for Caucharí. Both assets offer the opportunity for a tremendous amount of growth in the coming decades. These are merely the first 2 stages of those growths. Caucharí-Olaroz can go well beyond the initial 40,000 tonnes given its size, and Thacker Pass as well has the ability to go well beyond the 60,000 tonnes, all co-located in an excellent jurisdiction in the U.S. And that's all I have to present at this time.

And this concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect your lines.