Metallium Limited (MTM.XA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Yes. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us in this session. Good afternoon, good evening, good night to Michael, who is joining us from Australia quite late there. I really appreciate Michael, very good to have you.

Thanks very much for the opportunity.

Yes. So look, Michael is the CEO of Metallium and sort of company that is presenting a very novel solution to some of the problems that the world is facing right now on the critical mineral space. So it's a great addition to the agenda and looking forward to the conversation. We want to keep it quite casual. We have a lot of participants. And ideally, you can or you will submit your questions. That will really enhance the level of the discussion. Before we begin, let me just read some disclaimers. Please note that this webcast is for Morgan Stanley clients and appropriate Morgan Stanley employees only. This webcast is not for members of the press. And if you are a member of the press, please disconnect and reach out separately. For important disclosures, please go to Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. And if you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

All right. With that out of the way, Maybe, Michael, why don't you introduce yourself to get us going and maybe introduce a little bit of the history of the company, how it came about before we move -- I pass it on to Mark to get us going with other questions.

Sure. Yes. My name is Michael Walshe. I'm the CEO at Metallium. We are an ASX-listed company. We began our life about 4 years ago, originally as a mining-focused company. And then about 2 years ago, the opportunity to license this breakthrough technology called Flash Joule Heating came to our attention. And then since then, all of our focus has been on commercializing this metal recovery technology. It was born -- the technology was born in Rice University in Houston, Texas. So it's a very American-focused technology. It's also where our main operations are in Houston, Texas right now. And we're focused really across the periodic table of metals. And our key targets at the moment are rare earth elements and critical metals like gallium and germanium. So very topical metals in this, I suppose, geopolitical climate at the moment. And right now, we're getting our first commercial scale plant up and going in Houston, as I said. The core focus feedstock for the facility is printed circuit boards, which are very, very rich in gold and copper. And the problem that we're actually trying to solve is that most of the world's metals right now, as probably many people would be aware, are coming from China. And the reason that most of these metals were offshore to China over the last 40 years is because the traditional methods for processing and refining these metals is a very dirty process if you use traditional methods. We've got -- I suppose, we're bringing mineral processing and metal recovery into the 21st century. And our technique applies ultra-fast electrical heating plus some proprietary chemistry to effectively make metal processing much more efficient than using traditional methods. We don't use acids like sulfuric acid. Also, our footprints are much smaller than traditional competing technologies like hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy. So really, it's a breakthrough technology, and it couldn't be more topical for the geopolitical climate that we're in right now. The Trump administration really has like finally done something about the dominance that China has in critical metals. And our technology fits perfectly into that space. As I said, rare earths is one of our key focus feedstocks, and we've got really breakthrough potential for rare earths. And effectively, if you take a traditional rare earth flow sheet, which is the number of steps needed to achieve your metal recovery, we believe we can chop out probably more than 50% of the traditional steps and thus making the process more environmentally friendly and efficient. So yes, it's a very exciting stage for the company as we're getting our first commercial plant up and running in Texas.

Great. I guess maybe let's just double-click a little bit on the Flash Joule Heating technology itself. I mean just help a layman actually understand what it does, what it solves for that existing processes would otherwise do. And you mentioned feedstock focus, obviously, on printed circuit boards. Would just love to kind of get a sense of the scale of that market. And as a feedstock, what sort of runway does that give you? And then we'll dive in a little bit more on some of the target minerals at the output side of things.

Sure. The technology was developed about 10 years ago at Rice University in Houston, Texas, under the guys of Professor James Tour, and he was actually getting sponsorship from the Department of Defense at the time. They were originally looking to make graphene from plastic, and that's where this ultrafast electrical heating method Flash Joule Heating was invented with sponsorship from DARPA. And then a couple of years later, the Department of Defense came back to Professor Tour and were inquiring, can this method be used to extract rare earths out of unconventional sources like cold fly ash and red mud, the tailings left over when you process bauxite into alumina because both of these streams have quantities of rare earths and these metals like gallium. And that's when the Professor Tour was playing around with tweaking the heating and adding some chemistry. And that's when, I suppose, our version of the technology arose. And then since then, he's gone on to prove that it's got really efficient metal extraction capabilities for very complex waste streams like printed circuit boards, which is they're very rich in, say, gold and copper, orders of magnitude more than an ore body as an example, printed circuit board can be 200 grams per tonne of gold as an example. And since the evolution of about 3 or 4 years ago when he was looking at waste streams like printed circuit boards, since we've acquired the license to the technology, we've added lots of new applications in mineral processing, including rare earth elements, as I mentioned. We've tested it on both tailings streams. So the leftover material once you've done your primary metal recovery, there's tailings left over, and we've actually successfully recovered rare earth from tailings, also from concentrates, the stuff that most of these mines make as their first product. And we can do that more efficiently than traditional methods. So the proposition is we've got 2 business units that we're building the technology around. There's mineral processing, which is -- that covers the tailings, all the mining-based applications. And that's -- our vision is to sell equipment to mining companies and also get paid like processing as a service type of income. Then the other side of the business will be urban mining, where we're targeting metals from waste streams. And this includes -- we've successfully recovered gold, copper, tin, antimony from printed circuit boards and other types of electronic waste. We've also successfully recovered gallium, germanium and indium from refinery waste from the semiconductor industry, which is a very -- these -- all these metals are critical for both defense, artificial intelligence and just general electronics. And we've also successfully recovered the metals from spent lithium ion battery. So the black mass that left over when you shred a Tesla battery as an example. So it's got huge potential across several feedstocks. Our core focus right now is printed circuit boards. We've already got supply agreements with the likes of Glencore, one of the major metal traders in the world. And we've also got engagements with a company called Indium Corp., who's based in New York, and they're a specialty metal refiner. They've got waste streams very rich in gallium and germanium, and we've successfully recovered metals from those streams. We're also talking to a huge number of other parties, both in the defense space, the artificial intelligence space and also the broader electronics space. And as I said, the key focus is printed circuit boards, but we're also in discussion with several rare earth element companies right now about early-stage testing. But as I said, we've recovered metal from tailings, which is a very exciting opportunity because essentially, the tailings don't need to be mined. You don't have to discover like as you do in a new rare earth mine. There's a lot of tailings, not just in the U.S. but also globally. So tailings is a huge opportunity for us as well. So overall, a huge opportunity across the periodic table of the metals. And the key focus for us in the next couple of months is getting our first plant up and running in Texas. And the primary feedstocks are going to be printed circuit boards and also gallium germanium-rich waste streams.

Got you. So my understanding of this technology is that essentially, you utilize like electrical resistance, right, to generate an intense amount of heat. Arguably, electricity and the cost thereof here in the United States and globally is much more of a focus these days just given the draw that AI is bringing to bear on the grid. How do you guys think about that as a prospective constraint or governor on the economics and/or growth facet of this technology? And what is your access to that electrical power?

Well, yes, the actual overall energy consumption, we're aiming to be at least 50% less than incumbent technologies. And it might sound like we need a lot of energy to do what we're doing. But in actual fact, we're using the chlorine-based chemistry as our main reactant. And there's a special property of chlorine with metal chemistry in that if we try to say, vaporize a metal with just as a stand-alone metal on its own right in atmospheric pressure and temperature, it would take a lot of energy. Iron, as an example, iron won't vaporize until about 3,500 degrees Celsius. But if you do that under the presence of chlorine, that it dramatically drops the boiling point of the metal. So we make metal chlorides as our primary initial product. And iron, as an example, instead of 3,500 degrees will vaporize and form a chloride at about 350 degrees. So in actual fact, most of the energy that we need is only for the initial shock that we give the material. That initial shock actually liberates the metal from whatever bond is contained within. And it's really what sets us apart from most other techniques. Most techniques involve hitting the -- your, say, feedstock with effectively a chemical sledgehammer. You might dissolve your feedstock in sulfuric acid, like most mineral processing does sulfuric acid is the main acid used. And what -- when you do that to like an ore sample, you don't just take the metal that you're targeting, you take all the other wanted stuff that's in your material as well. What we do is we can selectively control what metal comes off at a particular temperature, and we effectively have a distillation process for metals, which is way more elegant than the traditional techniques of pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. So overall, we're aiming for a significant energy reduction and CapEx reduction because we can do what we do in a smaller footprint than these traditional techniques.

That's very interesting, Michael. Why don't we discuss a little bit about the time line to ramp up the facility in Texas. What is the expected CapEx? How do you see the cash outflows? How your balance sheet and your funding strategy to support those? And if you can complement that with any color on the permitting side and maybe economic or feasibility studies to support the investment.

Sure. Yes. So the key focus for us right now is commissioning of our first plant in Texas. We aim to begin commissioning in late December and effectively starting the dry commission where we'll be bumping motors, making sure everything hooks together nicely. We've given ourselves all of Q1 next year, so January, February, March for that commissioning process, just to be conservative. And then hopefully, by the Q2, that's when we aim to start ramping up towards our Stage 1 nameplate capacity for printed circuit boards of 8,000 tonnes per annum, which is our Stage 1 nameplate target. And then by -- we hope that by Q3, we're at that run rate of 8,000 tonnes per annum for printed circuit board feedstock. Alongside that, we're going to be commissioning our gallium germanium line as well, probably be just being conservative, maybe pushed out by maybe 6 weeks from when we start our printed circuit board line. And right now, we've got a very healthy balance sheet. We've got about $50 million in the bank, and we did a placement a couple of months ago, very oversubscribed successful placement to institutions only. And we haven't published any studies publicly, but our own internal studies suggest that we've got a very economic and commercial proposition we -- even if we were just only focused on printed circuit board waste streams. And the fact that we're not only focused on printed circuit boards gives us a real moat around the business. And like right now, in terms of feedstock supply, printed circuit boards are freely available. It's a very liquid market. We've got very good partners in the likes of Glencore and also Dynamic Lifecycle, which is an aggregator and recycler of printed circuit boards in the U.S. And so we've already got feedstock secured. And the -- that's why we're really focused on e-waste as our first primary feedstock because we can more easily control our own destiny rather than dealing with mining companies, which they move at their own pace. So that's the mineral processing side of the business dealing with mining companies. But in saying that, probably both opportunities are equally as compelling, both the urban mining, getting metals out of waste and also the mineral processing, they're probably equally compelling in terms of potential market size. They're very large overall addressable markets. And in particular, for e-waste right now, the amount of waste being generated is growing exponentially, and it's primarily driven by artificial intelligence and the lifespan of these servers in data centers keeps going down because the technology keeps rapidly evolving and people and companies they are ultra-competitive and if they're not using the latest NVIDIA chip as an example, then their competitors get an edge. So we've heard anecdotally that the lifespan of servers has gone from like 4 years down to 1 year and now even up to 6 months. The servers become obsolete because of the competition within the AI space. So there's a huge -- it's like a dirty secret of the AI industry, like they use a lot of energy and they also generate a lot of waste. And that's why we're -- our key focus is electronic waste. And Texas is a great place to do what we're doing. It's very favorable for permitting and also energy costs and the access to all the reagents and skills that we need to prosecute these plants. But we've also got sites earmarked in Virginia and Massachusetts. Virginia has -- I think has got the highest concentration of data centers in the world. So there's going to be a lot of e-waste available in Virginia, and that's where we've got early options on these additional sites. And once we've got the Texas plant bulletproof and we know that the design is ready to replicate, then that's when we will pull the trigger on these additional sites.

Great. And maybe just to complement this, as you look ahead to scale, what would you say are the main technical inflation points or milestones between where you are now and where you want to go that you would highlight?

Yes. So right now, we've been piloting our technology for several months. And we feel that there's really like a one-to-one scale up in terms of the reactor that we're using from where we are now versus where we need to be to get to this 8,000 tonnes per annum Stage 1 run rate. So the scale-up risk from where we are now to there is very low. Then by the Q3 the following year -- sorry, Q3 next year, we hope to be at that Stage 1, 8,000 tonnes run rate. And we're giving ourselves another 12 months to get to that Stage 2, which is double that capacity, which is 16,000 tonnes per annum of inbound printed circuit board waste. Then that's using our -- what we're calling our rev 1 design, which is technically it's a semi-batch type design for our reactor. Now we also have a rev 2 design that's on the drawing boards that we aim to start prototyping next year, and that's really for the mineral processing large tonnage applications for like tailings processing and rare earths and lithium, which we've had success in. So we'll be prototyping Stage 2, which is a fully continuous design probably maybe starting in Q2 next year. But with Stage 2, it means that we can effectively scale up to the scales needed to really make a dent in these mineral processing markets like red mud tailings and just general tailings treatment in the mineral space because red mud, as an example, there's about 180 million tonnes per annum of red mud generated globally. It's an issue in not just in Australia, but also in the U.S. and Brazil and Europe, the tailings left over from red mud is huge volumes. I think it's like 2 tonnes of tailings generated per tonne of alumina processed. So it's a huge problem for the industry. Currently, they just put it in these big tailings dams. It's deemed a hazardous waste, but it's got huge quantities of contained metal value. And I think I mentioned previously that the DARPA, the Department of Defense originally was sponsoring Rice University to look at metal recovery from red mud tailings. And we've shown that we can effectively remove the main issue of red mud not being able to be treated, we can remove the iron component of red mud, which the iron locks all the other metals like titanium, rare earths, gallium. And once you remove that iron, all these metals become available. So tailings is a huge opportunity for us, and that's what we would really need rev 2 design to make a real dent in that huge, huge market. So we'll continue to scale the technology as we go. But right now, our scale is sufficient to make a huge impact in printed circuit board and urban mining, electronic waste. And rev 2 will be prototyping middle of next year for the minerals market.

So maybe before I pass it on back to Mark, one question that we got from the audience, and I will remind everyone that is participating, if you have any questions, please submit them through the system. So the question is, can you please provide a sense of the current market? For example, an average e-waste recycling facility produces what amount of dollar volume of usable material per year? And in that context, how does that compare in the processing volume that you will have in one of these Flash Joule facilities that you intend to build?

Yes, sure. Maybe I'll speak more broadly in general terms because we -- technically, we haven't put out any of our studies yet. But if we just take how the economic model will work. So the waste will be purchased based on its metal content. And generally, the industry standard is to pay approximately 20% of the contained metal value in the feedstock. So we will purchase the feedstock for 20% of its in-situ value. Then we will be aiming to get over 90% recovery of those metals. So the spread between what we're purchasing and selling, the gross margin spread is quite large. It's 80%. And then if we assume some payability discounts and some recovery discounts, some operational cost discounts, we're still aiming for about a margin of about 40%, which is very, very compelling. So effectively meaning that of the contained metal value, we're aiming to capture 40% of that to our bottom line, if that makes sense. And this is the -- that's the urban mining model for our waste side of the business, where we will be purchasing these feedstocks generally on the open market, and we will be recovering the metal value and then we will retain all that economic value. For the mineral processing side of the business, we aim to have a different type of model. So processing as a service would be one way to view it or a tolling-based arrangement plus a licensing fee. So for example, with the rare earth element mining company, we will sell them equipment. So we will get paid for that capital expenditure. We will provide ongoing services, but we also aim to get paid per tonne of material processed. So that's having a licensing fee per tonne of material processed and an additional stream such as a royalty on the metal value recovered. So having 2 potential streams in addition to getting paid for the equipment. So that's the vision. So 2 different business models and how we operate, but equally compelling in their own right.

Got you. I guess just a follow-up to that, Michael, if you don't mind. As you kind of think about your partnerships with some of these prospective clients, how should we think about your business mix going forward between partnership tolling and royalty agreements versus you managing and operating your own sites? And what sort of a mix are you guys anticipating looking forward?

We've had a huge amount of inbound interest in the technology, including from some of the Mag 7 companies, would you believe? And really, it's not clear to us which is going to be the core focus because there's so many opportunities at our disposal right now. But the ambition is that we would ideally like to bring in some of these much bigger players such as some of the defense people or even the likes of the Mag 7 as strategic partners. That's our ambition. Not saying it's going to be possible, but we're certainly going to try that once we've proven to these people that the technology works for their feedstock. And as I said, right now, the core focus is build, own, operate in e-waste. We've already got our own site in Houston, Texas, and we're in control of our own destiny because we can purchase these -- the printed circuit boards on the open market right now. It's more challenging for the mining-based applications because miners are, generally speaking, quite conservative in terms of new technology take-up. But in saying that, there's -- we've shown to several companies now that this technology has real merit. And we can't promise for certain, but we believe we're very close to some contracts with some of these different players, both on the tailings side of the business and also just general mineral processing for concentrates. But really, as I said, we are in our own control of destiny for the e-waste, and we will have Texas up and running on e-waste 8,000 tonnes per annum. And we hope to obviously scale that as we go and replicate that across the U.S. initially. And then we obviously have global ambitions as well. There's a huge amount of e-waste in Southeast Asia and Japan, Korea. We've already had early engagement there. But we want to walk before we run. So we will get our technology bulletproof in Texas and then replicate as required. And I suppose it's all about finding the right partner who's willing to contribute capital as well as feedstock. So we're not necessarily aiming to finance all of these plants using our own balance sheet. We would like to bring in like big name strategic partners as an ambition.

Got you. Maybe let's drill down a little bit more then on the Texas plant. I mean, just if you could provide us an update there on the construction of that facility. And then as a follow-up to that, what are the capital requirements for this facility and the 8,000 per tonne nameplate capacity you guys are targeting?

Yes. So the site we jumped on when we saw available, it's a previously active hazardous waste incinerator site that was owned by Waste Management, Inc., the world's biggest waste company. And the key attraction of this site was -- well, it was numerous, but the key point was that it has its permits for handling hazardous waste already with the site, which was very attractive to us because getting a permit to just handle waste can be a key delay point for a greenfield site. And in addition to that, it's got all the infrastructure and concrete we need to prosecute our Stage 1 and Stage 2 ambitions. We've got 10 acres currently at our disposal, and it's also got expansion potential up to 40 additional acres. So it's a huge, huge site. It's also very close to the Port of Houston and a major chemical complex near Dow and Chevron, where they're doing their business. So all the raw materials we could need in terms of reagents like chlorine is right on our doorstep. So it was very attractive. And right now, the site is being upgraded. It hasn't been used for a few years. So we've had to do some repairs and upgrades, and we're also currently constructing some new buildings where we're doing our waste receiving and those type of things. But yes, it's a hive of activity at the moment. We're setting up our lab there. We're also moving all of our testing facilities out to this site as well. So yes, a lot of action going on at the site right now. And as I said, we're aiming to start commissioning -- dry commissioning by late December. And the 8,000 tonnes per annum run rate, we've got sufficient capital right now. Look, we haven't published any, I suppose, formal economic study and CapEx. But all I can say is we've got enough cash in the bank to get us to that 8,000 tonnes per annum run rate right now.

Perfect. Maybe another follow-up question here from the web, but could you explain perhaps the benefits of the relationship with Ucore and its RapidSX technology as well?

Sure. Yes. Look, rare earth elements is -- the value chain for rare earths is extremely complex. But all I can say is that the majority of the world's rare earth processing is now done in China. I think most people would probably be aware of that. Most of the techniques for rare earth, both recovery from ores and then the downstream separation from one another was actually invented in a combination between the U.S. and France. So it's a real shame that all of that IP was offshored since the late 1970s to China. And effectively, China was more willing to do the dirty processing required to extract these metals. And I think there's a famous quote by Deng Xiaoping. He realized the strategic advantage when they found this Bayan Obo mine, a huge -- it's an iron ore mine, but it has huge rare earth reserves. He realized that, that was their strategic advantage. And he's credited with the quote that the Middle East has oil and China shall have rare earths. And since that period, I think, late 1970s, early 1980s, China has really convinced all of these Western companies to have their downstream processing in China. And really, there's now very little engineering expertise left in the West that knows how to separate these rare earths from one another. Rare earths are very chemically similar. And the issue is that when they're so chemically similar, it's very hard to separate them from one another. In nature, all 17 of them exist in some shape or form in an ore body together. And what you have to do is you have to concentrate them up into a sufficient form that makes them easier to extract and then you do -- using traditional techniques, you do the downstream separation in what's called solvent extraction. And that typically can involve like a football stadium sized plant that will have 1,000 individual steps because you're only getting a small upgrade from each tank to the next. And there's a lot of up-and-coming rare earth development stage companies that can't justify the capital expenditure to use that traditional flow sheet, in particular, for the back-end separation of solvent extraction. The upfront part is called cracking and leaching, where traditional techniques use a rotary kiln and sulfuric acid. Now what we effectively do with our flash heating, we do the cracking and leaching in almost like a one-stop pot where we would traditionally take multiple stages of rotary kilns and complex leaching steps. We effectively do the impurity removal and cracking and leaching in our Flash Joule Heating. And the material that we make from that process is a mixed rare earth chloride, which is directly compatible with existing solvent extraction plants because they already use chloride-based chemistry. Now if you put our technology in combination with Ucore, it gives an up-and-coming rare earth development stage company a total U.S.-based and non-Chinese-based option to get all the way to a separated rare earth product at the back end. That separated rare earth product is the same material that the likes of Lynas is currently making. Lynas is one of the 2 Western world companies producing rare earth products, the second one being MP Materials in the U.S. So it gives an up-and-coming developer who can't justify going all the way downstream. These up-and-coming developers, they typically tend to aim to produce a midstream product called mixed rare earth carbonate. All of the developers, you'll see, if you look into the fine print, that's what they're aiming to produce as a product. We've shown that we can take that midstream product super concentrated and get it into a form that's suitable for the back-end separation. And if you put our technology with Ucore, it gives you that end-to-end non-Chinese pathway. Because at the moment, these developers, the only viable offtaker for that earmark is a Chinese toll processor who have these solvent extraction plants. So very long-winded answer, but ultimately, these complex feedstocks, which are rare earths, we provide a much simpler and fully U.S. solution to the problem. And in particular, we've got a collaboration with a Brazilian-based company called Meteoric Resources. They've got a huge deposit of ionic clay-based rare earths. And we've shown that we can take their midstream product and effectively almost double the concentration of the rare earths in a single step and the material then is directly compatible to feed into a Ucore system, which then does the back-end separation. Hopefully, that wasn't too confusing, but...

That was great, Michael. Thank you for all the details. And maybe talking about the technology, just to make sure that the audience and we understand some of the details. So do you license the technology? Or do you own the technology? And if you only license the technology, can others potentially get access to it?

Yes. So we have a global exclusive license for a minimum of 20 years. So all metal-based applications of the technology we have. So no one else can license any metal-based application. Since we've licensed the technology over 2 years ago, we've been adding our own patents on top of the additional -- the original patents that were provided by the university. So the IP is continually being strengthened. And all of our patents are related to scale up and the reactor designs that we're using. But the key point is that the trade secrets will not be put in any patent. So it will be very, very hard for anyone to replicate what we're doing because a lot of the secret sauce of what we're doing is effectively trade secrets, and we're not going to be writing any of that down in a patent. But we are -- for most of our feedstocks that we're bringing in and introducing to the technology, we're adding our own subpatent for each feedstock. So the IP is just going to keep strengthening. And each time we add an additional patent, that 20 years time frame starts from scratch again. So effectively, it's a perpetual exclusive global license.

Well, look, we have about 10 minutes, 9 minutes left. So let me ask another question from the audience and then before I pass it on to Mark. Are there any -- I mean, you mentioned something about government, but are there any grants -- government grants either in the U.S. or potentially in Europe that the company is applying for? Are there any that are actively being in progress?

Yes, sure. Yes, we're very active right now with the federal government in the U.S. I believe we're now up to about 17 individual grants that we're applying for or in the process of applying for across both the Department of Water and the Department of Energy. We've already actually received our first grant, which is a major milestone for us. It was technically called an SBIR grant and it was for gallium recovery from waste. So now that we're in the system, it should be much easier for us to get additional grants. And we're applying -- some of them are very, very substantial in terms of quantum. And we -- the government shutdown, unfortunately, has kind of delayed the whole process by a few weeks. But now that that's resolved, we will hopefully be getting more regular updates. But yes, there's a huge amount of interest in critical metals. And the Trump administration is really the first to be actually doing something about deleveraging from China and the quantum of the money available is very compelling. And we haven't -- we don't need any grants to prosecute what we're doing, but I think we've got a very strong probability of getting some of these. Some of them are specifically for like tailings -- metal recovery from tailings from rare earth. So it was like it was written for us. So we're very excited about that particular one. That's with the Department of Energy. And there are several across the various agencies of the Department of War, including the Defense Logistics Agency and DARPA that we're actively applying for. And again, as I said, the technology was originally sponsored by DARPA back in its early beginnings. So again, we've come from that pedigree. So we believe we've got a good chance of getting some funding.

Great. Thank you, Michael. I guess let's look ahead now beyond just the Texas facility. And as you look to expand prospectively into Virginia and Massachusetts, I mean, what are the steps to get there? What do you need to get those facilities off the ground? And what should we be thinking about from a time line perspective?

Yes. So as mentioned the key target for us right now is getting Texas up and running and making sure that the current version of the design is bulletproof. And once we've confirmed that, we effectively have a product that we can just replicate rapidly. So once we're comfortable and hopefully, we're at that point by maybe Q3 next year, that's when we will potentially look to pull the pin on these additional sites and at least we'll be adding that additional capacity in Texas. And really, it will depend on feedstock and also the partners that we get. So as I said, we certainly aren't aiming to use our own balance sheet for some of these additional sites if we can get the a big strategic partner to help with the rollout. So we are targeting the data center type companies who are very prevalent in Virginia as an example. And there's lots of similar type of companies in Massachusetts. So it will be feedstock dependent and partner dependent. We won't be necessarily pulling the pin using our own balance sheet. So -- but there's lots of really interesting conversations going on right now with lots of these players. And I think there's a real need in the U.S. right now for e-waste technology. I think the -- what we've heard is that Trump and a lot of the big tech companies to the White House several weeks ago to effectively demand that they do more of their e-waste recycling in country because there's a lot of metal value. And most of the e-waste printed circuit boards waste in the U.S. is currently sent to Asian smelters, mainly China, some small amounts to Canada and Europe. Trump was to get that metal and make the process in country. And that's why we've had some inbound from some of these companies, which is very exciting.

And have you guys progressed far enough along to already have some site selection in mind for either of the 2 regions? I mean, just given how well Texas fit just given it already had some of the existing permits you guys need from a hazardous waste perspective, how should we think about a development time line for either of those 2 facilities if and when you do pull the pin?

Yes, sure. We've actually already got the 2 sites earmarked. And it's come -- our main man in the U.S. is Steve Ragiel. He's had about 40 years in the waste game, and he's very connected in that whole waste space. And it's through his connections that we've managed to get effectively very similar sites to Houston, where we are currently active. And these are existing sites that already process waste. So the main bottleneck really would be generally getting a permit to handle waste and be able to receive waste and both of these sites already have that. So that was a key attraction. They've already got infrastructure as well. So we won't have to pour our own concrete as an example. So that's the deliberate target strategy in getting these existing brownfield sites and us not having to start a greenfield site from scratch. And it's -- again, yes, it's through Steve's very deep network in the U.S. and the waste space. So yes, the sites are already optioned, and we're effectively ready to go once we've got the right partners and we're ready to roll out the technology effectively as a modular type unit, probably Q3 next year.

Perfect. I guess we only have a couple of minutes left, but maybe if you could just give us an update on your capital market status and you've been added to some indices, and it would seem perhaps also investigating maybe a U.S. ADR listing. Just an update on that. And then any closing remarks you might have for the audience for catalyst investors should be on the lookout for near term?

Sure, yes. So yes, we've had quite a successful 12 months on the ASX. And a few weeks ago, we were added to one of the indices here called the All Ordinaries, which is quite a milestone for us. And yes, we've -- and it's mainly now -- most of our biggest investors are now U.S.-based. And every time we go and talk to these investors, there's a strong push for us to actually get on the NASDAQ. So even though we -- look, we've got really good liquidity on the ASX, we're a very liquid stock compared to peers of our similar market cap. But we do -- we've got the NASDAQ process underway right now. So we're aiming to have a Level 2 ADR on the NASDAQ hopefully by Q2 next year. And we're just going through the paperwork right now and getting all of that set up. It's not a hard process, but it just takes time. But we -- yes, that is now in process. And with the Stage 2 ADR, we effectively will have shares that are transferred from the ASX to a bank, the Bank of New York, and those guys effectively will create a new security, the ADR that then trades on the NASDAQ above -- I think above $5 is a minimum target. So that's -- we hope to have that NASDAQ listing, and we hope to be ringing the bell probably best case scenario would be April next year, but that's very exciting. And it's come -- it's our U.S. investors who are recommending that we do this because I suppose there's not much exposure that U.S. investors can get to a lot of these thematics like gallium, germanium, rare earths. There's only really a handful of listed equities in the U.S. that cover what we do. And we've got such a broad range across the periodic table and like we technically cover AI, defense, critical metals, rare earths. So it gives U.S. investor quite a really interesting exposure. So we're very excited about the NASDAQ listing next year. But we're obviously not going to jeopardize our liquidity on the ASX either because it's -- we've got great shareholders here and it's very liquid.

That makes sense. Well, thank you very much, Michael. Definitely a quite interesting story. All the best in the coming quarters and months, quarters as you ramp up and develop the company. We'll keep the dialogue open and really appreciate you participating in the event.

Really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks very much, Carlos and Mark.

Thank you very much