MP Materials Corp. (MP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

This is George Gianarikas, one of Canaccord Genuity's sustainability analysts. Welcome again to our 2025 Sustainability Summit. We're incredibly happy and excited to have Ryan Corbett, CFO of MP Materials here. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, George, for having me. Appreciate it.

Maybe to start off with maybe the semi obvious question. There's been so much discussion around international trade and rare earths. And I hear that President Trump mentioned rare earth several times recently in one sitting. So can you just talk about what all this stuff means for MP?

Sure. Yes. Certainly, I think our industry has gotten a lot more airtime in the last month, 1.5 months than we have probably in a decade, which I think speaks to, frankly, the crux of my response to your question, which is I think fundamentally, the changes that we are seeing in the marketplace and with our government and approach to trade, tariffs, incentives, subsidies, you name it, is almost universally positive for our business. As sort of the U.S. domestic champion in this space and one that is leveraging off of one of the best rare earth ore bodies in the world, we have a tremendous head start and are really well positioned to continue to grow in size, scale and importance to U.S. industry. I think the thing that really encapsulates the change here, our Founder and CEO, Jim, I think, said it best recently, I think, on our earnings call, where he said, just give us a level playing field, and we'll do the rest. And I think that, that is something that we are really starting to see, whether it's reciprocity and trade or really just a focus on ensuring that there is a full understanding and accounting of soup to nuts, the supply chain and what sort of critical industries must exist at scale in the United States and a real focus on empowering those companies that make things in the United States. And that is exactly what we do and what our mission has been from the [indiscernible] (00:02:28). So from that perspective, we're tremendously excited.

Is there -- I've got this question several times, so I want to ask you, like in terms of just Ukraine maybe supplying rare earth material or I'm not sure how high grade it is or not or Greenland. How much does that kind of -- how much do you think about that potential supply coming on to market, I don't know, in 2040 or something down the road?

Yes. Look, I think that the U.S. certainly is doing the right thing in ensuring we have a full view and ability to access resources globally, right? I think that frankly, to the extent there is leverageable material in any of these jurisdictions. This requires pretty significant process know-how and IP. And so we would expect to play a role and certainly benefit to the extent something happens in any of these geographies over time. And to the extent we're called on by this administration or any U.S. administration to take part, we absolutely will play our part. I think the reality of global deposits of rare earth is that the world has been relatively well picked over in terms of locating scaled economic supply of rare earth materials. And we have said for many, many years, particularly following the breakthroughs that we have had in our processing at Mountain Pass is that the lowest cost, lowest risk, quickest to market ability to grow rare of production is at Mount Pass. It is in our backyard. It is in the state of California and co-located with processing and mining. And that's the thing that often is not super well appreciated in our space is, frankly, looking at our materials segment, which produces the rare earth products, not the finished were earth magnets, but the commodity products. It's much more of a chemical process of a chemical processing plant than it is just a mine. And part of that is because the mine is so high grade that the infrastructure that's required to do that part of the equation for us is immaterial compared to the processing. But it sort of speaks to the distinct advantage that we have at MP Materials leveraging Mountain Pass. And certainly, we look all around the globe. We are -- while we are the American Champion, we're a global business. And so we stand ready to play a role in growing this market over time. It was interesting, there was actually an article this morning, Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times called Rare Earth diplomacy. And it was sort of talking about what's going on in Ukraine and all these sorts of things. And there was a point made that, oh, maybe they're not so important because if you look at the market size, it's only $15 billion a year. Like that is absolutely the wrong way to look at it. Acquainting importance to the current market value of the product, absolutely compared to copper and iron ore and all these other sort of base metals absolutely, our commodity is a much, much smaller market. I think it's massively underpriced as we can talk about. But the reality and the way we should be looking at this is what is the downstream GDP that this commodity enables and rare earths and rare-earth permanent magnets, despite continued innovation on different motor types and lower rare of content here and there, no matter what happens, just the laws of physics apply to all of us. And as that -- as electrification, as robotics, physical AI, electric vehicles, you name it, continue to grow in importance and become a larger part of the global economy, magnetics and rare-earth magnetics are going to play a bigger and bigger role. And so undoubtedly, the importance is massively increasing. And so frankly, I think leaning forward as we seem to be as a country right now, and making sure we play a role and have control over our destiny, it's what we've been talking about since our founding in 2017.

I've asked you this question several times, I'll ask it again. You have one beautiful new magnet facility that you built in Fort Worth, Texas. The world needs -- or the West needs more Western magnets. So why aren't you pushing faster into building more magnet facilities?

I guess the way I'd start there is putting our progress in context. Obviously, when we went public in 2020, we talked to the magnetics opportunity effectively foreshadowing, hey, we'll come back to you all in 2025 and lay out a plan. Instead, in 2025, we will be generating revenue and positive EBITDA in a magnetics segment that is the first of its kind facility going all the way from oxide to metal, metal to alloy flake, alloy flake to [indiscernible] sintered permanent magnets, all in the United States, all in 1 facility. We always hesitate when we say the only anywhere, but we're pretty confident this is the only facility anywhere in the world doing all of that in a colocated manner. So we think we've gone pretty fast. I also think that when you put in context what we are doing at independents versus the potential scale of the opportunity, totally fair question, right? We are producing at scale, 1,000 tons in this facility with General Motors as our foundational customer. We do have the ability to scale up production capacity in this facility on the order of double within the same four walls of the facility. And then certainly, from a fully vertically integrated perspective, the amount of upstream product and midstream product will produce, we could be 10x the size. And it's something that we think about quite a bit. And frankly, what it's required is a market that is willing to understand the nuances of a very, very complicated industry. And one where we have not played on an equal playing field with global competitors, namely the dominant force of the space of China really ever in this space. And I think that, that's starting to change. And so as that starts to change and as we start to get the types of scaled customers that really makes sense for us in our sort of early iteration of this, we absolutely -- we are not demand constrained by any means. And so we will certainly start to lean into that. What we've been thoughtful about is, as a management team, we are significant owners of this business. We are returned-focused and extremely and try to be extremely disciplined in allocating capital. And so we're not going and doing a bunch of stuff on spec and hoping they will come. We're being very thoughtful about the early customers that we bring in, how we'll be able to grow with them and how we ensure we are successful. This is not an easy endeavor by any stretch of the imagination. Rare-earth permanent magnets are highly engineered, customized products and the processes to get from commodity oxide product, which is hard enough to produce, to a finished magnet with the right magnet technology or grain boundary diffusion, the right size and shape, the right coding, right material yield often could take decades. I think we've compressed that product development cycle really meaningfully. And I think the really exciting thing for our stakeholders right now is, in a lot of ways, I almost think about our Magnetics segment now and division is something that's almost been operating in stealth mode a little bit, right, where we haven't broken out the economics of it. We've been clear about the progress we've been making but for example, you mentioned we built this really world-class facility. The first time we had any external stakeholders other than our customers and the U.S. government, present in the facility was in January when we brought our coverage analysts to come see the progress we've made. We have over 100 people working on this endeavor, obviously, significantly levered to engineers, PhDs, materials research, et cetera, to make sure we do this with the right technology and do it the right way. And that will scale as we bring operating -- there's no less important to operate the machinery and get us into production. But we want to do this very thoughtfully. The initial customer that we started with in General Motors, I give them a lot of credit for leaning forward and seeing the importance of producing in country for country, right? That is what they have been thinking about, which is if we're going to be making X number of EVs or hybrids both plug-in hybrids, regular hybrids, you name it. In the United States, we need to make sure we've got the supply chain in the United States. And that in the United States doesn't mean in Mexico or Canada, right, which is we're seeing how difficult that may be. And so I give them a lot of credit for leaning forward and being willing to go on this journey with us. And our focus right now to really answer your question, is delivering for our foundational customer. If we don't do that, we've got nothing, right? And so that is our main focus. The framework of that deal also gives us the ability to have confidence in continuing to invest in this endeavor. And it also presented us a product set that is well matched to getting us into this business at scale. A small number of part numbers at very significant throughput and volume per part number. That's what you need to really get started and then we can start to look at robotics and all these other things where every single digit on a hand of an optimist may have a different size, shape, magnet with a different coating or finish or whatever. And once we're in scale production, we'll have the ability to address those opportunities also. So we're just trying to be methodical as we scale this capability. And so that, we believe, is the right approach. And certainly, we'll continue to keep you apprised as we do more.

There are a couple upstart U.S. magnet manufacturers trying to make hay, would you be willing to supply them with rare-earth material? Or is that -- do you want to kind of keep that captive to your efforts in the U.S.?

We think a diverse and strong downstream supply chain is critical. We've been very clear as publicly announced with our relationship with General Motors, we will be providing them raw materials in addition to rare-earth permanent magnets. And you can imagine, they're not taking the raw materials and do nothing with them. They're going to have them turn into magnets as well. And so I think that speaks to the fact that we're absolutely willing to engage with those all across the supply chain. If you think about who our biggest customers are in our Materials segment, there are other magnet makers. And so we're not the only industry that has sort of this coopetition framework, particularly in the commodity space. It's not so uncommon. But it's something where we are used to it, and we strongly believe in being thoughtful about this. And so to give you an example of, I think, why this works for us? We have been very clear that we are not going to use the price of the commodity to subsidize our own downstream efforts to unfairly in a way, compete against our own customers, where they're paying a different price. We're going to compete on security of supply. We're going to compete on technology. We're going to compete on the benefits of vertical integration apart from pricing. And so some of the things that we have found so exciting about being vertically integrated is recycling. If you think about magnet manufacturing, materials yields can be in the 60s and 70s percent. And so all of that material is effectively treated as a waste product, and you're seeing other upstarts trying to figure out how we're going to process this. We go to recycle or how do we make -- how do we attract value out of that? What that product really is, is an input into what we could use and reuse at scale at Mountain Pass in our upstream and midstream businesses. And so like -- not to be hyperbolic, I think we will be the largest recycler of rare earth products in the world at some point. We know because we have the full end-to-end supply chain and being able to decide where you reinsert the product and having scale capabilities, upstream, midstream, downstream, lets you be thoughtful about that. The other thing that we see is -- this is an industry that has, initially a lot of the technology. The founding of rare earth permanent magnet was actually amazingly General Motors and the United States Department of Defense.

Okay.

Yes. Japan ended up coming to dominate the space and then the Chinese followed their typical playbook and now are 90% of the market. There are a lot of things that are done a certain way just because they've always been done that way, specifications in products, right, where they're called neodymium iron boron magnets, right? There's an iron specification in the neodymium product that's super tight for certain customers. But then they're going to go take that neodymium metal, and they're going to mix it with iron 2 steps later, why does it need to be that tight. Can you play with it a little bit? Could you do -- could you think about different ways to do things, and we are perfectly positioned to do that because we have our hands and our capabilities at each step of the process. And so it will allow us over time, I think, to be a little bit more thoughtful about why are we solving for this problem if it's really not a problem downstream. It might be, might not be. And we'll get to test that out and benefit from that iteration.

So we have 2 minutes left. So a little bit of a speed dating here, Ryan. But I want to touch on something you said earlier. You said that the price of rare earths are radically underpriced. So in 120 seconds, why do you think the price of rare earth should be significantly higher?

Well, I think the fundamentals of supply demand and supply and demand will win out over time, right? And I think that there's been a tremendous amount of focus in the short and medium term on. In 2022 EV adoption and how we'd be at 100% penetration in 2030. And now we're sitting in 2025 and, oh, penetration is not going to increase. Both of those paradigms were wrong. It will probably be somewhere in the middle. And there's been a lot of focus on sort of under less uptake than was initially expected from electric vehicles. What we're starting to see though is, frankly, the amount of demand growth that's on the horizon from EVs with reasonable expectations, robotics, physical AI, HVAC as data centers become more important. All of these things -- all of this physical manifestation of what may be one of the most important trends in our economy here rely on magnets. And so I think demand speaks for itself. We lose 0 sleep about demand. Supply is continuing to get rationalized. And frankly, we're also starting to see a world where customers are beginning to differentiate between a product with guaranteed providence and security of supply versus not. And so if you think of that -- about that and then you also take into account the producers that are on the lowest end of the cost curve, including in China through this pricing cycle over the last couple of years are not making any money and they are in a position where they must meet domestic demand. Think about how penetrated EVs and new energy vehicles are in China, that demand in the near term is continuing to increase. And so there have to be some semblance of reinvestment economics here, even in China in order to power the required supply for their own market let alone the rest of the world. And so again, I just think the law of supply and demand will win out over time. And the important thing is in a commodity business, where do you sit on the cost curve to be able to benefit from that. And we are very confident that as we scale our production of separated products, we will be a low-cost producer to the world and be able to benefit from that.

The great place to stop. Thank you so much, Ryan. Incredibly topical company all over the news recently and best of luck, and we look forward to more magnets towards the end of the year or magnets at the end -- towards the end of the year.

Yes.