Metallium Limited (MTM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thanks for your patience, everybody. It's with pleasure that I bring Michael to the presentation stand here. One thing that I think Michael has been fantastic at, since he joined the company almost a year ago, he was presenting our best foot forward in terms of the technology. This is really a better way how he's been able to really present the company in the best way and that's led us to getting really the market awareness that we've had today. Also on the ground, a lot of great advancements. So, thank you, Michael, for that, and we look forward to the presentation of Metallium.

Thanks, John. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I am just checking on the audios, it's okay. Welcome, everyone. It's a very important day for us as we now rebranded and refocused our attention to our industrial technology. And so MTM obviously began its life as a mining exploration company. And when we were brainstorming this new name, we really wanted to try and articulate the true platform nature of the technology and really it has shown really strong performance across almost a periodic table of elements. So we wanted something that represented that and also signified our transition to an industrial tech company. So the name Metallium is just a combination of metal plus ium. Most of these strategic metals like Gallium, Germanium, Neodymium, et cetera, they're all named in the Latin, ium. So that's the origin of the name and I hope it really signifies our new ambitions as an industrial tech company, and really should underline the fact that it really does have a platform potential. It's got really strong potential that we've shown in rare earth element processing, both treating concentrate, so we've treated monazite concentrate very successfully. And also recently, we've done some very interesting test work where we beneficiated MREC, so the mixed rare earth element carbonate material from meteoric resources. And we think we've got lots of more exciting rare earth developments underway as well. So it's got true platform potential. Equally on Gallium, Germanium, we -- late last year, we announced a -- started a very strong relationship with Indian Corp in New York. And these guys have this Gallium, Germanium and Indium TIM-rich material that's ultra-high in situ value. And we are currently the only technology that's available to separate those materials from one another and extract value. And the list goes on. We've also demonstrated lots of success in gold and precious metal recovery and antimony from e-waste. So it really does have a true platform nature. And just some high-level metrics. So we do now have at least 20 active partnerships, most of which we haven't been able to disclose yet publicly and some we have; Indium, Vedanta and Meteor Resources. We've got several more projects in the background, and we think that we have an exciting 12 months ahead of us as soon as we can start to announce these. Six -- so that's the new ambition for the number of states where we hope to set up operations. So we did previously tell the market that Texas was our initial home, and it is our main launch pad within Texas, but we now have ambitions to embark on at least 5 additional sites across the United States and deliberately targeting similar type of facilities where the site is pre-permitted and they're already active in waste handling. And we think that's going to allow us to really fast-track getting into production. 8, so that's the number of core patents that really protect this technology. And we've -- on top of the Rice IP that we've acquired over a year ago, we've been having our own patents that further strengthen the overall IP. So we're very well protected and truly from the team of Rice University, these guys are experts at commercializing technology and making sure that it's well protected globally. And we've got the global exclusive rights to this technology. And the final figure of $50 million. So we're very fortunate to have just completed an oversubscribed institutional to capital raise. And I think now we're more than fully funded to achieve our ambitions. And just to reflect on that raise so all the -- pretty much all the cash is going to be deployed for accelerating our plans, and that includes sourcing feedstocks. It includes getting options on these additional sites and also growing the team in the United States under Steve's guidance. So I should introduce -- yes, Steve, you can't -- probably can't see him on camera here, but he's our U.S. President. He's over here in Australia at the moment. He'll come up for questions at the end. So really, we're very, very fortunate that even in a volatile market with Gulf War underway, we have managed to successfully close this and we're very pleased. So just a very brief overview again. I did cover this in the last webinar, but Metallium, we're now fully focused now on industrial metal technology. And our -- obviously, our corporate head office is in Perth, but all the action and the operations are out of Houston, Texas under Steve's guidance. The Flash Metals USA is the subsidiary over there, and we'll soon eventually transition also that name to Metallium USA Inc. And what are we trying to do? We're trying to improve how metals are recovered from both waste streams and mineral ores. And we do really believe we have an innovative edge over any incumbent other techniques, including pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. Our initial feedstocks of focus are the semiconductor-rich wastes; Gallium and Germanium, Indium that we have already sourced from Indium Corp. And also the gold and copper-rich printed circuit board waste, and we do also have supply agreements underway there. What are we making? We're making gold chloride from printed circuit board waste as an example. So we're making metal fluorides as our first target. We are making these because they're very highly scalable products. They're already widely used in the markets, and that includes the spectrum of metals that we're targeting, including rare earth elements. And we do already have a significant backing from industry-big hitters like Vedanta, who is the Rio Tinto of India. And that's about a red mud opportunity that could be quite enormous. I mentioned Indium and Meteoric. And just to explain the business model, again, we're building it around 2 main business units, urban mining and waste recycling and also mineral processing, which are the mining projects. Both of them will have 2 discrete different types of operating model. In the urban mining, that's going to be a build, own, operate where Metallium owns the plant outright, and we purchase feedstocks and own all of the economics. That's build, own, operate. Whereas the mineral project mining projects, that's more of a secondary focus for us really as we have so much opportunity to get into production on the waste, but the mining projects are equally as large in terms of their potential. And we now have an MOU with Meteoric Resources. That's for a very exciting proposition to upgrade their Mixed Rare Earth Carbonate products that they plan to make in Brazil. And we also have an MOU with Vedanta for red mud repurposing. Red mud is one of the biggest problems in the mining industry today in terms of the tailings that it produces. There's about 180 million tonnes of the stuff sitting in impoundments -- or sorry, 6 billion tonnes sitting in impoundments locally and about 180 million tonnes added every year. So it's a huge, huge problem. It's got residual metals, and we've demonstrated how they can be recovered. As I said, the primary focus really is on this high-value waste initially. So the Gallium, Germanium and Indium scrap that we have from Indium Corporation and also golden copper-rich e-waste. Focusing on these first allows us to get into production and get into cash flow as soon as possible. And on the e-waste, we're actually also looking at some co-product recovery options, essentially getting as much value from the e-waste as possible, and that including getting the fiberglass and also a syngas from the plastic waste, which is quite exciting and what it can do to the overall economics. And as mentioned, we're -- we've got our first site secured in Texas, and we hope to be commissioning that plant at the end of the year. And that's all going to plan, all going certainly, and we will hopefully soon be announcing more updates as we -- as the first equipment arrives on site. I covered the technology history before in the last webinar. But fundamentally, we've spent the last 18 months rapidly understanding the applications of this last year leading technology, which was developed under Dr. James Tour at Rice University, originally for graphene and now the metal applications is much, much larger in terms of potential scale. And we do hope to be in commercial production by early next year. We're essentially trying to make the industry more economic in terms of how these metals are recovered. Some metals are actually not feasible, such as that Gallium, Germanium waste that I explained earlier, but our technology is feasible to economically recover. And we're competing against hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy. And from a high level, these guys, they make a soup of metals. So the feedstock is essentially dissolved in the hydromet example and the soup of metals and unwanted metals end up altogether and then you have to spend CapEx and OpEx in an effort to separate. We have a much more elegant solution. The heating technology is essentially ultrafast heating using electrical energy plus some proprietary chemistry. So we're using catalysts and also carbon plus some reactive gases like fluorine to effectively vaporize the target metals within a feedstock like lithium or antimony, we take those off as metal chlorides. And by precise temperature control, precise chemistry control, we can achieve what the other technologies can't, separation at the feedstock stage, which makes it truly breakthrough. And we've obviously put out these before these flow sheets, but what we're trying to do on minerals and mining opportunities is dramatically reduce the number of steps and improve the overall economics of traditional refractory mineral processing, the problematic minerals like spodumene in the lithium example, monazite and bastnaesite for rare earths. I mentioned the high-value nature of the feedstocks. Now these prices are from April, but the in-situ value of the Gallium and Germanium material is nearly USD 800,000 a tonne. So it's highly, highly valuable. And currently, there's no means of economically separating the metals. So that's a very exciting feedstock for us. Equally is the gold-rich e-waste. We've put out very high recoveries of copper, gold and tin from material that's up to 500 grams per tonne and more of gold content. So orders of magnitude are more than a typical ore body. So equally, we're very excited about e-waste and its potential. And really, why are we focusing all our attention in the U.S.? Well, there's a huge renewed interest under the new Trump administration on onshore metals. And there's huge grant opportunities underway for both the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, which we're actively engaging with. And pretty much most of our target metals, including all the 4 magnet rare earths and Gallium and Germanium are on this ultra-critical point on their charts. So we're not reliant on grant funding in any way, shape or form, but we do have strong opportunity to get funding even within this calendar year. I mentioned KnightHawk in our last webinar, these are our key engineering partner. They've taken equity in the company, which is a great sign of confidence in what the technology can do. And they've been around since 1991, and they're world experts in process temperature, high-temperature engineering. So really ideal for what we're trying to achieve. And it's been a really hectic 18 months to achieve what we've essentially scale up over 1,000 times from the original humble beginnings at Rice University. So these guys have been an amazing partner for us, and we're also building the U.S. team under Steve's guidance. And we've got -- now that we've got this new capital bank, we will also be growing that team even more quite soon. The Texas Technology campus, I did speak about this on the last webinar, but it really underpins us getting into production very quickly. And it's a pre-permitted industrial site. It was a formally active hazardous waste incinerator. So it's all the permits we could need and it allows us to achieve that aggressive schedule that we originally put out there. And it's an ideal location. It's off a major interstate highway. It's very proximal to major chemical and oil refining, Chevron, Exxon and Dow Chemical are all on our doorstep. So all the labor and reagents and anything we would need is literally on our doorstep. And now this -- our new project scale, so we do have even bigger ambitions than just being confined to Texas for the time being. So we've earmarked at least 5 additional sites, Louisiana, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia as our plans for equivalent sites, equivalent operating model where we try to get pre-existing permitted sites and at sites where they're already handling waste. And we think that that's really what's going to set us apart on anyone may be trying to compete with us. We're trying to be proximal to major e-waste aggregators where the waste is already being collected. And there's also, within these states, there's a deliberate strategy behind them. There should be strong federal support for doing the business like metal refining in these areas. So we've got a very exciting year ahead. And right now, this is provisional only, but we do hope to auction these sites in the coming months. And by option, I don't mean purchase outright, I mean just rent and get options to rent. So we're not outlet any major capital. Back to the industry leaders, back in time, I mentioned that Indium dynamic plastic recycling. So we've got feedstock now secured from both mining mineral projects; red mud, Indium, the Gallium, Germanium and the e-waste from dynamic and plastic. And we've got several more underway with different vendors and different potential partners. And we do hope to go binding with both supply and optics in the very near term. And we think that's going to be a very big catalyzing moment for us. The most recent addition to this list is Meteoric Resources. That's a really exciting opportunity. And we've been told that if we can actually get this to work, we could be nominated for the Nobel Prize in chemistry because it's been a long-held difficulty that most rare earth projects, they -- all the rare earths stick together, and there's only 4 ones that are really valuable in general terms. And the bulk of them are the low-value [indiscernible], which are worth less than $1 a tonne right now. So it's been the holy grail for a long time to be able to pull those, separate those 2 at the mine phase or the early stage of the flow sheet before it goes into solvent extraction. Because when they go into solvent extraction, a lot of the OpEx and the CapEx goes into just removing those two. So it's a real -- if we can get this to work at scale, it's going to be a game changer. So very excited about that one. Also mentioned about the pipeline. We've got at least 10 additional partnerships that we're currently working on across mining, recycling, different metal opportunities, antimony, et cetera. So lots and lots of news flow to come over the coming weeks and months. And on the grant funding, as I said, we're not reliant on any of these grants from the DoD or the DOE, but we do believe we've got a very strong opportunity to get some substantial checks. And finally, we do hope to soon appoint some U.S. Advisory Board members that are linked into the whole defense and chemicals and industrial space in the U.S., some heavy-duty names, which we hope will accelerate our plans, not just for the grant funding, but also just growing the business in the United States. So I'd say exciting news coming there. And I'll underline again, we won't be short of news flow. There's a huge amount of test data that we have to get through. We've had a huge amount of inbound interest from mining companies and other different type of feedstock suppliers and who are interested in testing our technology. So we won't be short of news flow at all. And as I said, we've just completed this $50 million placement and the bulk of that is growing. The bulk of that money is going to be deployed in growing the team and getting to our ambitions of in production quickly. As mentioned, the U.S. Advisory Board, we hope to have those all aligned in this coming quarter. And we -- as mentioned several times before, we will be commissioning in December of this year. So we'll be pumping motors and turning equipment on in December and doing wet commissioning probably January, February on feedstock. So very, very exciting time ahead. And that's pretty much it for the general presentation. I'll just underline again, we do have this really unique proprietary technology. It's got no real direct rival. We've got a real unique motor on the business in both the mineral processing space and also the waste space. There's no real competitor out there that can do the broad spectrum of metals that we're targeting. We've got a real edge and lead on anyone who might try to copy the technology. It is truly disruptive, and we've demonstrated that now in several different announcements where we get very high recoveries versus traditional techniques. We've secured feedstock. So really the economics for the first plant are already underpinned, which is very key. And as I mentioned, we hope to go binding on these agreements quite soon. And as mentioned, yes, we now have the enough cash in the bank to really realize our ambitions. So it's a very exciting time ahead, and we thank all shareholders for riding the journey there to now. I might just finish, there we might do some questions.

Thanks, Michael. And congratulations. I think you've done a great job and both you and Steve are combining really well and accelerating the business. There's just some questions that came through the website and maybe after these open up to the floor as well. First question, in relation to grants, you partially already answered, but how many U.S. government grant applications have been submitted and which departments are we talking about? Maybe, Steven can take.

Yes. Thank you, John. We have 3 active grant obligations going at this point in time. The smallest one is for USD 1 million with the Department of Defense, DLA for implementing a Gallium metal refinery in the U.S., onshore Gallium refining. Then we have a proposal working its way through that's going to go into the Department of Defense as well next week, basically for -- in the range of $32 million designed to help the Department of Defense, identify which portions of their electronic scrap and highly sensitive electronic equipment has high levels of Germanium, Gallium, Indium and rare earths in them and then to build 1 or 2 plants for the DoD to harvest those metals at DoD basis. And then the third major one that we're in the middle of discussing is with the Department of Energy, where they are looking to accelerate our deployment of critical metal refineries into 5 locations in the U.S. and that the scale of that one is more in the range of $100 million to $125 million. It's a bit early days in the DOE discussion, but we're expecting to have a follow-up conversation with them in about 2 weeks.

Thanks, Steve. The second question is in relation to the Texas plant capacity. How many crucibles are planned for the initial field? And how many more can be added later?

I'll just say that the internal number of crucibles is not a lot fixed in at this point. But broadly speaking, we're going to easily achieve the initial target of 1 tonne per day capacity. We believe we can quite easily get that for one line -- one FJH line can easily do, we believe, 5 tonnes per day type capacity. So the number of crucibles internal within the black box, we won't be disclosing that publicly. But it's safe to say we're aiming for at least 5 tonnes per day for a Flash Joule Heating line and that line, it's a very modest CapEx and footprint. But broadly speaking, the site that we secured in Texas, we think just in the existing infrastructure and building, we can easily get to like 10,000 tonnes per annum type of incoming feedstock capacity without modifying the building at all. And then the site has got at least 30 additional acres that we could get for expansion. So we could grow that much, much beyond 10,000 tonnes per annum. And that's the type of quantum, 10,000 tonnes per annum that we would be roughly aiming for at each of the sites, at least in the early stages.

Next one in relation to construction time line. I think you probably already answered this. With equipment arriving in November, is it realistic to be in processing in January or February next year?

Yes. The site that we have leased in Texas is an existing building purpose-built as a very large industrial and recycling site. So it's really ready for equipment in terms of infrastructure. We've recently added some additional power capacity, electricity capacity. And so installing the equipment starting in December and then commissioning during the first quarter is well within the cards.

Next question in relation to feedstock. Focus of the initial plant is -- what do you see for the processing of e-waste versus the Gallium opportunity?

So it all will really be guided on the binding nature of the feedstock supply agreements, which we are close on both the Gallium and Germanium material and also on the electronic waste. The amount of e-waste available is obviously much, much larger than Gallium and Germanium, but the economics on both are equally as compelling. So right now, the vision is to have one line processing gold-rich e-waste and a second line dedicated to Gallium and Germanium. And we think that before the end of the year, before we actually turn the plant on, we will have binding agreements for both the Gallium material and the e-waste. So just saying it again, 2 lines, one dedicated to e-waste, one dedicated to Gallium and Germanium. That's the ambition.

Couple of questions, I think you've already answered, but moving on to government support. Maybe just a question -- some color on the time frame required to -- the question was about why haven't we been secured major DoD funding as yet. Is that because we need to be more advanced in what we're doing? Or is it just a time frame or who we talk to? What do you say is that?

Yes, there's a couple of things going on there. Normally, it takes 12 to 18 months on the shortest time frame to get a government grant of any size. The ones that we're involved in now appear to have an accelerated schedule compared to that based on some of the executive orders that have been put out in January and February regarding critical metals. So we're fortunate in that there's a very strong focus on our area that we're applying for. And at the same time, they are government grants. So there's budget years that end in October and certain funds get rolled over and certain funds don't. So we're going to push through hard on all fronts, and we are hearing some promising information back. But again, more to come in the next 90 days.

I'll just say that I think we get the suspicion that under Trump and Musk, there's a fear within these departments that they're going to lose their particular grant of their job. So they want to be seen to be deployed mining. So that's why we hope it's going to be a lot quicker than the typical 12-month time.

Yes. Yes. There's a strong focus on moving things forward. And our ability to deploy refining capacity, metal refining capacity over the next 12 to 18 months is very, very attractive to the U.S. government because a lot of the other projects they're looking at take 36 and 48 months. So our rapid deployment profile is very keen interest to the U.S. government.

And that's part of the reason why we've chosen this particular 5-site strategy. And those sites are actually deliberate in nature as well.

And Michael did mention, but of the 5 sites, the Texas one is already permitted and two of the other additional sites, we also have verbal agreement on that. They're prepermitted as well. So in pretty short order, we'll have all 5 of them in a pre-permitted category.

And the last one from my list. As in relation to future plans for a NASDAQ listing, whether when that may happen or maybe you can just give us some color on the opportunities to get listed in the U.S. apart from the NASDAQ.

Yes. I'll say we're definitely reviewing that. And at the moment, we're assuming to transition from the OTCQB to QX. And what that will allow us to do is effectively brokers within the U.S. can then nominate and recommend our stock, which on the QB, that's not possible.

So we're currently on the OTCQB, and we're going to graduate up to the OTC.

So once we've been above USD 0.25 on the QB for, I think it's 25 days, then we automatically will qualify, and we're -- I think we're almost there.

So we're going to be moving up to the OTCQX.

Then we've also got I suppose, investigations underway as to the merits of a NASDAQ listing, and we are soon to explore an ADR, so basically getting a bank over there to have the stock that is purchasable by U.S. investors. That's kind of intermediate between full NASDAQ listing and the like. And it's what [indiscernible], one of our peer companies has chosen to do. So -- but the main message is we're not going to disadvantage any of the existing ASX shareholders. We wouldn't remove any liquidity from the ASX. So we are looking at all options, whatever is in the best interest of all shareholders. We're definitely not going to disadvantage anyone if we did ever transition to the NASDAQ.

Any other questions from the floor? Well, thank you, Michael and Steve. Thank you, everybody. That concludes the presentation. Happy to stay around for informal chat. But that's all.