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

Good morning, and welcome to the first day of the JPMorgan Energy, Power, Renewables and Mining Conference. My name is Bill Peterson, U.S. Clean Tech and Metals and Mining Analyst, and we're really pleased to start off our sessions with MP Materials, and Jim Litinsky. We've been having -- hosting Jim for the last 2 years at the conference, and I think all the questions are always about supply and demand and what China is going to do. And it still is about what China is going to do, but it's a lot more than that now. So Jim, I don't know, maybe just going you can kick up...

By the way, Bill, it's good. I feel like in the prior years, we always had to at least explain what a rare earth magnet was. But I think given the state of the world, everybody knows what rare earth magnet is.

Rare earth, whatever it takes.

Maybe just a quick introduction of the company, the importance of what you do, and then we'll move along with a lot of questions. We are webcasting this. So if there's any questions, please wait for the microphone. But over to you, Jim.

Sure, the real quick introduction. MP, we're America's champion in rare earth magnetics. We have a mine in Mountain Pass, California. We mine rare earths, we refine them and then we send rare earths to -- refine rare earths to our Texas facility that we built to make them into rare earth magnets. So we essentially have completed the full supply chain, bringing it back to the United States of America. The facility in Texas in Fort Worth, which we call Independence. We have a foundational, very sizable contract with GM. So at that facility today in small scale, we're making auto-grade magnets. We're ramping that facility online. And end of year, we'll be -- we're actually already supplying precursor materials to GM, but end of this year, we'll be supplying them magnets. And then our expectation is that facility can expand, we can talk about that. And then we will just continue growing out this supply chain.

Great. So you've been speaking about the significant amount of interest from commercial companies and governments, especially considering the chokehold that China has had on permanent magnets. Given that tariffs have at least kind of temporarily abated, are you concerned that things may go back to normal and the hype of building U.S. magnet may subside? Or is that -- is the ship sailed at this point?

Well, there are two crises. There's sort of the short-term crisis that happened with Trade Liberation Day where the theoretical threat of the shutoff of rare earths that we've been sort of screaming from the rooftops for the last number of years actually happened and the Chinese implemented export controls. And I don't think people fully appreciate -- we were, Bill, as you know, weeks away from a full shutdown of our economy across the auto, aerospace and other supply chains. And this is not my words, these are freely admitted out of the administration. The key goal in the trade talks in London was to get rare earth magnets back online for American companies. And so they did that. They got a 6-month extension from the Chinese. And so they certainly alleviated the short-term crisis where we were on the precipice of a total shutdown of our economy. But out of that, what we also got is actually a much more acute long-term crisis. And by that, I mean that we are now in this world where, again, the theoretical of the Chinese control of the rare earth supply chain is now truly actual. It is a source of leverage. And to get rare earth magnets, if you're any company in the world, you need to get a license from the Chinese government. And so they are now handing out licenses to American companies for the next 6 months. And to get those licenses, you need to disclose a lot of information, specs on your product. They want pictures. They want contracts. It's a lot of detail. That might not be such an issue for an HVAC company or even an auto company. But when we think about our defense supply chain and we think about the future of warfare and physical AI and robotics and drones, the idea that our downstream great industrial base is going to need permission, licensing permission from the Chinese government to get rare earth magnets is obviously an enormous long-term crisis. And so to directly answer your question, the short term, like are we going to fall off a cliff, how do we get magnets tomorrow, that's over for the coming months. But in place of it now is a big time crisis where we've got to figure out this solution. And so I don't think -- I think certainly there were and we -- after a Liberation Day, we had anyone and everyone kind of wanted to talk to us, come see the mine, come see the magnet factory. And there are some players who -- now that the short-term crisis is gone, they'll noodle on it. And so some of those fall aside. But in its place now, there's a much more determined industrial base in specifically defense industrial base that knows that this is not a sustainable reality. And then I would actually direct you, I saw this the other night, about 5 days ago, Treasury Secretary Bessent, did a podcast, I think it's Miranda over the line, it's an Australian podcaster, and he said -- so I'm just going to reference his words. We will not leave 2028 without having solved this issue, specifically with respect to the rare earth magnet issue. So I think that there's strong commitment from the government, strong commitment from industrial players that this is not a sustainable long term.

Yes. Maybe just playing the other side and you stopped selling concentrate, but now we do have a lower tariff regime, who knows how things evolve geopolitically. But if you're still stockpiling, how viable is the stockpile on site? How long do you think this can go on for? And -- last year, you had a pretty key initiative called Upstream 60K. How does the stockpiling impact that initiative? Do you slow that down? Or how should we think about it?

Sure. Well, we have a lot of optionality in our business. And again, for those who don't know, the three main aspects are when you mine the product, we concentrate it. So we'll take approximately a 6% rare earth grade and concentrate that up to 60% to 65%. We're the low-cost producer in the world of concentrate. We can sell that very profitably into China. We then refine. We're now refining more than half of our product. And so what Bill is referring to is the concentrate with the scale of the tariffs that the 145% tariffs, it obviously became silly to sell off our resource. And so we stopped selling con. Now that the window is open, we actually -- we took advantage of the window to sell a little bit of low-grade con. We're mainly otherwise stockpiling. We have plenty of space on site -- plenty of years of space to stockpile con to the extent that we want to. But this is really sort of a short-term working capital event. I mean we're now refining more than half on a run rate basis of our product. And as we fully ramp up refining, we'll certainly not be stockpiling con and then we'll work down those stockpiles over time. And so again, though, we really look at it as there's optionality in our business model. We can certainly sell off a concentrated product for profit. But that -- from the very beginning, the goal of the company was to restore this full supply chain, be a low-cost producer of refining and ultimately of magnetics. And so we're really focused on refining everything that we make and then ultimately turning those into magnets for -- to solve the issue.

One of the things you've been really pointing to even over the last few years, and I think it was sort of less understood by the market as your full vertical integration, which should really kind of come to fruition, as you pointed out, when you start shipping full-scale production. But I want to talk about where do we stand in the journey with the refining, I guess, what you've been called Stage II, how does the flow work? What can you support from a volume perspective on Stage II, presuming you want to improve your yield and throughput and so forth, so you can take on more of your existing Stage I, and then Stage III, obviously, where do we stand in that journey as of right now?

Sure. Well, as I said before, our goal is to refine everything that we produce, make magnets for everything that we produce over time. We certainly have gotten our cost structure to be the lowest in the world from everything that we can tell in concentrate. We have substantially lowered our cost structure in refining. We are ramping up refining. We took that business from nothing to now refining north of half of what we produce and concentrate, which -- when you see the scale of these sites, and Bill, I know you have, but for those -- the best way to think of a rare earth refinery, I mean, these are really like an oil refinery. I mean these are enormous multibillion-dollar chemical facilities. And so you don't just flip a switch and then say, "I want to refine, and refine everything overnight." It takes -- there's a ramp period. There are bottlenecks in the process. There's certain equipment that doesn't perform the way you want it to, and so you'll make changes, et cetera. So we're in that journey of bringing all that online fully ramped. And we've already seen a reduction in our cost structure, and we'll see that continue. We referenced on the last call. We actually had a nice chart showing where our current cost structure was and where we expect it to get to. We expect to get to the mid- to low 40s on an NdPr basis, which would put us as a low-cost producer to the world. We're not there yet, but we're making great progress on that front. And then on magnetics, the downstream business, the initial stated capacity of Independence is 1,000 metric tonnes of magnets. Just order of magnitude, the Chinese industry is a couple of hundred thousand. So this is a rounding error relative to the global market. There's certainly an enormous amount of demand that we could scale up to fill. The Independence facility, we've stated that our expectation is that we could triple the capacity or roughly triple the capacity of that facility. And obviously, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but industry and government is pushing us hard to accelerate that as much as possible. And then from there, though, I think we want to rinse repeat. We have -- there's not even in Chinese industry, just to put this in perspective because I think when we've been public now for almost 5 years, we had this sort of vertically integrated strategy. Certainly, in the beginning, there were many who criticized us, can these guys really bring a mine online. We obviously debunked those doubters. Can these guys refine? Can they build a magnet facility? In each step of the way we've debunked that. And so we'll continue executing all aspects of this business. But I think what's really important is that, again, even Chinese industry, there's no one company that has all this expertise in-house. The ability to mine, refine and make magnets is really an incredible thing to have in a national champion that is MP. And the last piece on that, that I don't think is maybe fully appreciated by the market and what is sort of a real advantage for us to have that vertical integration and why we felt very strongly about this strategy. In the magnet manufacturing process, and it depends on what kind of product you make, whether it's smartphone or an auto magnet or wind magnet, there are different amounts -- there are different sizes of the magnet. And when you finish that magnet, you typically cut off some of the material. And in the manufacturing process, you'll lose material. So there's this idea of swarf or product that you will recycle that you need to recycle. And there can be anywhere from 20% to 50% of the material that's going through your process that will fall off the line that needs to be recycled. And so the idea that an independent stand-alone company could have any success selling magnets in the United States of America when the Chinese currently sell magnets for not much beyond the price of raw materials, when you're losing 20% to 50% of your material that has to be sold back to China, it's just really difficult. And so when you hear these what I call subscale players that aren't vertically integrated, there's fancy business plans that sounds exciting, but the math is just really tough. And so what we have at MP is we have the ability because there are two places in the world to refine. You can refine in the Chinese sphere of influence, in China, Malaysia, or you can refine in the United States at our site. And having that refinery gives us the ability to have the full stream to really take advantage of bring that material back through. So it positions us actually to be a low-cost producer, an efficient producer of magnetics to work with customers as a one-stop shop. And I think the last point on that, the team that we've built at Independence is just outstanding. We have -- that business now has almost 130 people in it. We have 40 engineers, nearly 20 PhDs. We've really become the center of IP in magnetics and really the Western world. And so I think we're going to continue to make gains in that business. And I think we're really well positioned to significantly scale that business. Last point, given the way the world has changed, as I've said, people are really pushing us. Everyone wants us to move faster. But we've invested north of $1 billion in this business since we went public, and obviously, putting this entire capability in one national champion has been an extraordinary achievement. We still have a long way to go. But we're trying to be very thoughtful about how we accelerate the downstream to make sure that it is most attractive for our shareholders. And so to the extent that we're going to accelerate that business, it's going to require substantial capital and/or contractual commitments so that this is going to be transformational change for the value of our business. And last -- I guess one more last thing is those deals take time, but I'm very, very confident that we're going to -- you're going to see some exciting stuff from us.

Probably want to -- I do want to talk a little bit about heavies, but maybe picking up that last point because I think they're probably related anyway. What could funding look like to I mean support an expansion, something like a heavy separation or an expansion of Independence or somehow procuring more heavies to be able to even expand it. What does government support look like or maybe an offtake agreement through a customer relationship, just...

Yes, absolutely. And that's always -- there are those out there -- there's always people who want to take shots at our model, and we love that, that's what makes the market. That's great. But the question around heavy is there's historically been -- MP doesn't have any heavies. No, that's not true. We have heavies.

Smaller amount, but you...

We have a smaller amount we have. Well, the analogy I always like to give, we have -- if you look at our ore body, it's 60,000 parts per million. You'll get these for lack of a better description, I'll call them like penny stock type sites that are saying, "Oh, we have a higher percentage of heavies than MP," but they don't tell you is they have 600 parts per million. So what would you rather have? 10% of 600 parts per million or 1% or 2% of 60,000 parts per million? Doesn't -- you don't need a calculator to do that math. So we always laugh at that. But there's no question that if we're going to significantly scale our magnetics business beyond Independence that we need more heavies, that's for sure. What people also might not know is we have a heavies project underway. We are building heavy separation at Mountain Pass as we speak today. We're bringing that online next year that will obviously feed our Independence facility. But we're building that with the capability to take third-party feedstock from around the world. And so if you are a site and -- we want to see significant development around the world in rare earth sites. But if you are a site and you make and you -- whether it's a clay or anywhere in the world that you have an ore body. If you're going to make a mix worth oxide or concentrate, whatever you're going to make, you need to have it refined and your choices are China or us. And so I think we're going to have some really good opportunities to scale up our heavy separation business with third-party feedstocks from around the world. And again, we're building that business out to have that capability. And that ore refinery is a big advantage there. But there's no question we want to get more material.

When I think about your ability to take on that project with the heaviest, I think you mentioned in brief that recycling is a key component there as well. And what kind of core competency do you have in this? And how much is the work you've done on the lights pretty fungible or at least the know-how or transferability to your heaviest program?

Sure. It's very similar. I mean, ultimately, you're -- when you're separating you're going down through a series of tanks and we're -- we have an incredible team out there. Obviously, we've brought refining online at scale in lights. There's no material difference in -- between lights and heavies from a sort of a technological understanding standpoint. We obviously have a pretty extensive lab where we've been at this for quite some time. And so -- and that project is underway as we speak, the equipment is on site, we're installing it. And so we're very confident we'll bring Dy and Tb online next year with the two main magnetic heavies to feed our magnetics business and that's just sort of the standard blocking and tackling of our refining business.

Maybe taking a step back, heavies are generally speaking, used for more higher-end applications, high-temperature applications. And I think really, the vast majority or a lot of magnet applications really don't need that. And we've seen the industry just evolve and use less heavies in general. But how important is it for you for your business? And I guess, as I said before, you are setting your refining, recycling is an important part. Ultimately, how much could you expand the downstream? Or how much do you really need it, just given that maybe lights are frankly more important?

Yes, it's a great question. So for those who don't know that when you have a neo NdFeB magnet, right, the primary earth is NdPr. That's the main light. Then there are little doses of these heavies Dy and Tb that allow the magnet to withstand higher temperatures to maintain their magnetism in higher temperatures. So in an auto application or maybe a drone or a satellite, you may need to withstand much higher temperatures. In other applications, it's actually less necessary. The important -- so the important thing, and we think about this with respect to our business all the time, in auto, there is a constant push, and when you hear of people engineering out rare earth, they're typically talking about engineering out the heaviest, getting the percentage of heavies reduced. And we've done some extraordinary work on that front. I think you'll hear from us on that front in the coming year or 2 as we bring Independence online and getting heavy content down for auto magnets. Auto magnets are really kind of the hardest magnet to make. The really exciting growth use case as we think about over the next 3 to 5 years, the physical AI, humanoid robotics, what you really need in a humanoid robot is high torque density. You need to have a lot of power for a small space in your magnet, but you don't necessarily have ultra-high temperatures. And so -- obviously, that industry doesn't really exist yet outside of a lab in sort of some trial. But when we talk about a world that Jensen Huang or Elon Musk talking about hundreds of millions or billions of robots, it's highly likely that the -- if not the vast majority, a significant percentage of those will be neo magnets that won't necessarily require any heavies because you just don't have the temperature needs. And so I think that business, we'll be able to position for that growth without thinking necessarily as much about heavies as if instead, if we were to solely focus on auto, we might be thinking more about heavies. And so I think that there's going to be enormous opportunity for us to grow our magnetics business without sort of commensurate growth in the heavies, if that makes sense.

Well, maybe just picking up on that. What is the kind of comparative -- and Ryan spoke to yesterday, what is the comparative growth rates would you think on lights versus heavies? Meaning, is this question around heavies is just overstated?

Well, I guess it depends on your assumptions of what are the growth industries. So if you think that humanoid robotics, like a lot of AI leaders say is going to be the largest industry in the world. If we believe that's coming online over the next 3 to 5 years, the scale of that demand is so enormous relative to the -- frankly, the NdPr and the magnet capacity today. I actually think that the NdPr demand is going to explode relative to heavies. Now if you said to me, I'm not a believer in physical AI. I think that's going to be a decade or two out. And my expectation is auto is going to be sort of a bigger use case of growth near term. Then I would say, certainly, the heavies are going to grow commensurate with neo. But in all scenarios, the demand backdrop for NdPr looks very bright. And frankly, the demand backdrop for heavies as well. I mean the demand backdrop for rare earth magnetics is exciting. It's high. But I wouldn't -- if you're a believer in sort of the physical AI use cases, I wouldn't overly get hung up on heavies because I think you're going to see most of that industry shift to probably non-heavy usage.

I'm going to pause for questions in a moment. But before that, I want to talk about M&A and what role that could play in the environment maybe to address the growth, maybe to address heavies? And I guess, moreover, there are deals like there's opportunity for partnerships that we think about. Also you announced partnership with Maaden. So how to expand your existing footprint? What's the best way to do it? And how does M&A play a role?

Yes. Well, I mean, the short answer is we're opportunistic, right? I mean we're trying to grow our business as thoughtfully as we possibly can. Obviously, we consider a lot of things. There are lots of ways to get access to material. So if the question is around heavies, you don't necessarily need to buy a company. You can do offtake. You may want to buy a company. I'm, in general, very skeptical of sort of allocating a lot of capital to new builds. I mean I'm here because I cleaned up somebody else's mess, right? The predecessor invested billions of dollars. They failed. Now here I am unexpectedly. It's been quite...

We can talk about that in 30, 40 minutes, just...

So I think we're in -- I think being a national champion that has capability across the stream, puts us in a very unique position to partner. You mentioned Maaden. I mean, think about this, and this is sort of publicly stated, but from the Saudi perspective, they sit at the crossroads of sort of a geopolitically competitive world between the U.S. and China. They certainly saw the value of, wow, if we could bring online a fully integrated rare earth mine refinery and magnetics facility, that would be pretty extraordinary for our position. And so there are others like them as well. And so I think there are a lot of people out there trying to figure this out. But again, I go back to there is no company in the world, including the Chinese that has all this expertise in-house that can holistically work with a nation, a country, a company to provide this full solution. So I think it opens up a lot of opportunity for us. But again, I think as you've seen with us, we're going to do this thoughtfully and we're not in a rush. I think there are lots of ways to go about this. I would rather -- putting together like if you look at our GM deal or you look at how we built this business, doing something of consequence that's lasting and profitable takes a lot of time, and you want to get this stuff right. And so rather than kind of throw our hat in the ring towards everything, we want to make sure that we're focused. And obviously, we have a lot to focus on, but we want to execute this stuff, right? So when you see stuff out of us, I'd like to think that we're doing stuff that's really built to last and that's going to be, again, transformative for our value. And so that's what we're really focused on.

I want to pause and see if there's any questions from the audience. Just wait a second. There's one up here in the front.

Just a question again on the heavies. If you wanted to source them outside of your own, the small piece that you have at your mine, where would you source them? Is it primarily out of China still? Or are there other sources where you would find the Dy and Tb?

Oh, sure. Well, there are sites around the world, no question. I mean, they're everywhere. They're -- rare earths are not rare as the expression goes, right? It's just getting them to be economic is the big question. There are sites around South America, Africa, all over Asia. Right now, the lion's share of heavies in the world come actually not from China, but from Myanmar, just over the border. And then obviously, they go into China. But there are -- obviously, I'm not going to share our exact playbook with how we see. But to directly answer your question, they're all over the world, and then it's just a question of the economics of the project that you're looking at.

Got it. So if you wanted to expand the I guess, the magnetics piece, you have no concerns about sourcing the heavies.

Well, I have concerns about all aspects of expanding. But concern about availability is not a concern subject to making sure that the investments make sense, right? So we want to expand that business thoughtfully. And again, I go back to our position by having a refinery allows us to be in a very unique position vis-a-vis others investing. And so this is something you probably heard me say at this conference over the last few years, but we essentially bought MP, what became MP, Mountain Pass at pennies on the dollar. And so we want to be thoughtful about as we look at projects around the world, making sure that we're taking advantage of our position and not risking too much capital. And so ultimately, it's just a trade-off of capital. But I mean we know there are lots of sites around the world where these exist. So it's really just a question of the pace of investment and how we want to do it, not like are they there?

I should have said, Craig Gilbert, Linden Advisors. We own the converts.

Yes. Okay. Which one is the 30s or the 26s? Yes, the 30s, yes. Congrats, you've done well.

One of the things that we've talked to you about, and I think you've mentioned -- I'd be curious to get your thoughts now given the geopolitical situation is around bifurcated pricing. You just sort of hit it, things need to make sense for you to proceed with projects and it has to make sense. So how should we think about that?

Yes. That is a great question. And I think that is going to come down -- to some extent, that's going to come down to government because the -- what has happened in the last 2 months is very different. As we've been at this, we've now been public for 5 years, as you know. But this idea of export controls has totally changed the landscape. Again, I'll reference again for emphasis just because it's a public thing that I can easily cite, go watch that Bessent podcast. There's a few minutes where he talks about the trade deal in London, the inability to have rare earth magnets. And the commitment from this administration to solve this issue before they leave office. And so there are lots of ways to solve this issue, but all roads lead to recognizing that the existential issue of this industry is Chinese mercantilism, right? I mean that's the existential issue. If prices were multiples of where they are today, I think you would see a lot more investment. But ultimately, people want to know that the market is there. And so I do think you're going to see government and industry work towards this issue. And I'll say stay tuned on that. I think it's -- I think there's a lot of ways that, that could ultimately be resolved. I'm confident that the intent is there. We're working maniacally towards figuring all of that out. And that's really the challenge of the industry is how do we get proper free market economics into an industry that is critical for our national security and frankly, for trillions of downstream investment. Last thought on that, I mean, it really is amazing -- I mean, I look to you guys, the investment community, I'm actually in shock that this isn't a bigger question across the board to Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, all of the people that you hear talking about AI, and we're bidding up these stocks around AI, and we're talking about trillions of dollars of enterprise value, and we're talking about robotics. And then we think about the fact that there are hundreds of Chinese robotics companies, thousands. And they've made clear, this is publicly stated that they're going to use their supply chain to make sure. So this isn't necessarily even we're going to cut you off. This is we're going to use our supply chain to make sure that our companies have an advantage over yours, right? And so how are the questions not being asked of defense tech or AI of how are we going to solve this issue? Obviously, they're starting to be asked. But every time you see a defense tech company or an exciting AI company or an auto manufacturer out there talking about all the exciting things happening in AI, the first question should be supply chain because it's not that the supply chain is so hard, but it's that your competitors, the Chinese are focused on this. And so it is sort of like a tiny DeepSeek equivalent, right? It's like here, you are spending all this money and you can just be disrupted so quick, you don't know what hit you overnight out of nowhere. And that question is not being asked enough. And obviously, we have screamed from the rooftops on the rare issue for -- since we've been public. Obviously, now people are paying much more attention over the last 2 months because of what's happened. And so let me give you a new scream from the rooftops is this has gone from a short-term crisis to a long-term crisis, but the crisis is much worse because it doesn't need to be about geopolitical challenge. It can just be about competition. The Chinese are going to dominate physical AI if we don't solve this problem.

Well, that was a good way to wrap up. We covered a lot. We could have covered a lot more, but Jim, really appreciate you joining the conference and sharing your insights.

Sure. Thanks, Bill. Thanks, everyone.