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

Hello, everyone. I'm George Gianarikas, one of Canaccord Genuity's sustainability analysts. Thank you for coming to our 45th Annual Growth Conference. And I think we're maybe -- or the market is most excited about having MP with us today. Thank you so much for joining Ryan Corbett, CFO of the company; Martin Sheehan from Investor Relations. You've been up to a lot recently, been very, very busy. Maybe very quickly just to focus on the 3 stages of the business, Stages I, Stages II, Stages III. We won't get into the deals that you've announced maybe until later, but -- the Stage I of your business is getting to 40,000 tons a year, which you've done -- Upstream 60K eventually, getting to 40,000, eventually to 60,000. Maybe walk us through -- Sorry, I was having a technical issue.

You got to turn it on.

Good. 40 to 60. So can you just talk us through the path in getting to 60 level of confidence time frame, et cetera?

Yes, no problem. Thanks for having us. Happy to be here. Right now, we're actually producing our LTM is just north of 50. So we've made some pretty big strides there. I think in the quarter we just reported last week, we had an outstanding quarter north of 13,000 tons of production. The team has done a really unbelievable job focusing on some of the lower capital intensity, more optimization pieces of Upstream 60K in the last several quarters. And so we've been able to make a lot of progress there. Interestingly, we've continued to drive incremental production out of Stage I, while we've shifted our focus really more towards focusing on concentrate quality more than just quantity. We've pushed in the last quarter, while production was really excellent, our highest overall average grade of concentrate that we've ever produced. And that, I think, over time, will have positive implications for the midstream section of the business as well. And so Upstream 60K is one where, as we've laid out, as you mentioned, some of the deals that we've recently done, we laid out sort of a framework of what we think our baseline earnings power is of the business at $650 million pro forma for a lot of these deals that we've recently announced. One thing that is very clear upside to that is Upstream 60K. We didn't include any of the potential earnings power in that baseline number. And so it's something that we continue to execute on. But for the short term, we're really focused on quality. But I think over time, there's a lot of upside.

What does that do to your mine life as you move to 60K of production?

Well, the great thing about what the team has been able to achieve is really it's neutral to positive despite the incremental production because the vast majority of what we've been able to achieve is from recovery. So we're feeding the same amount of material from the mine into the concentrator. This has really almost all been driven on overall recoveries. And so as we look out and we've planned the mine for our 60,000 tonnes of oxide production, we don't need to increase feed rates and aren't planning to increase feed rate to get there.

Maybe focusing now on Stage II, is getting to the refined NdPr, you have the stated goal of 6,075. I still remember that number.

I don't know why we didn't just round down to 6,000, but that 6,075 is the target.

We still use it in our model. So can you just talk about progress there, time line of maybe getting to that 6,000? Any -- what bottlenecks, if any, you're seeing at this point in the?

Sure. Yes. So Michael guided the Street in the last call to 10% to 20% sequential growth, which if you sort of zoom out and look at what we've done, we really started the refining operation at the very end of 2023. And if you look at sequential growth and sort of average it out, and as those of you that follow the story know, we have semiannual plant shutdowns. And so it's not a straight line. There's usually progress and a slight step back or leveling off and then forward progress. But if you average out our sequential growth since we started, we've averaged at about 25% sequential growth. So if you just play that out and compound that, if all we do is continue to execute on the trajectory that we've been executing on, we'll be there in the pretty near term. We'll be there by the end of next year. Of course, in any plant is really a brownfield certainly more than a greenfield. And so we had a great head start, if you will. But with any plant of this complexity and scale, there's always 2 steps forward, one step back as you dial in recovery, throughput and uptime and get all of those levers right in order to maximize production. And so with the 10% to 20% that we expect next quarter, that's with taking some of the incremental downtime that Michael talked about in July in order to dial in some of these improvements to the NdPr finishing circuit that you talked about on the call. And those are the types of things that you sort of don't see under the hood when all you report is a headline number, right? If you take a couple of weeks of downtime or a week of downtime to achieve and implement some of these improvements, you don't necessarily see exactly where we're run rating after that. And so there's always that 2 steps forward, 1 step back. And so to your question on what are the bottlenecks that we're seeing, I think fundamentally, at this point, given what we've been able to execute and now feeding north of 50% of our upstream feedstock into the refining circuits, there's no doubt about our ability to produce at scale at this point. It's really just a matter of when exactly do we get to 6,075. And what we are seeing in terms of the issues that we are tackling at this point is it's mostly materials handling. If you think about our operation, it's a highly complex operation, 24/7, 365, and you're dealing with solids, solutions, slurries, wet solids, dry solids, you name it. And so it's almost a good thing that the type of issues that we're dealing with at this point are mostly interprocess material handling and things where we need to drive better mechanical reliability in those areas. And there are very clear pathways to do that. And Michael and his team have been doing an excellent job, and we've got a lot of confidence in the team to get there.

So it's not a science problem.

That's exactly right. And what we see -- there's always room to improve. But in terms of what we see of feeding the refining circuits versus what we're getting out the other end, the yields and the ability to produce at scale absolutely are working how we intended them to and are aligned with all of the underlying assumptions that set us on that 6,000 target.

Is there -- let's just say a pipe breaks somewhere. Is there any supply chain issue? Does any stuff come from China, for example, that's hard to get?

It's a good question. At this point, we have been anticipating the shift in our business away from the Chinese market for some time. And so we have absolutely controlled for any of the supply chain challenges or any material coming out of China. As it relates to a pipe breaking and having supply chain issues, it's not normally exactly that. But there are challenges that -- talking about these implementation of upgrades, right? Some of those upgrades, once we identify them, we have to go through the process of a short engineering cycle, production, et cetera. And that's generally done in the U.S. but some of that has some time attached to it. One of the great things about our recent agreement with the Department of Defense is given the criticality of what we do and the criticality of magnets going into the vast end uses that they do go into and the fact that we are vertically integrated, our business now has what's called a DX rating, something called The Defense Priorities & Allocations System, where it's something that a lot of businesses don't really even know about. But any private business, public business, operating in the United States is subject to this. It's run by actually the Department of Commerce in partnership with the Department of Defense, but it requires the businesses prioritize production of products used in the defense industrial base. And so we now have the highest rating that's possible amongst the various ratings. And so we use this as a tool and work with our vendors to be able to accelerate time lines for any potential things that we need. And so particularly as we think about the downstream growth that we see in building out our 10x facility, it's a really important tool to be able to prioritize our products to be able to get things moving as quickly as possible.

Now the 6,075 tons was based on 40,000 of concentrate. If you get to -- when you get to 60,000, does that, over time, translate into 9,000 tons of NdPr?

So -- and we got this question in a lot of different ways on the last earnings call. And I think the way Michael described it is the capacity of Mountain Pass is not unlimited. But like your math is right. If we're doing 60,000 tonnes of REO and concentrate, in theory, we could do 9,000 tons of NdPr oxide. I think the thing that's fascinating about the place that we're at in this business is with the 40s of upstream product, we absolutely are going to get to that 6,000 tons over time. We've got that increment from Upstream 60K that can generate a lot of value. And as we talked about, that is not captured in sort of our baseline earnings framework. The other piece that's really exciting from a production standpoint is our announcement on scaled recycling. And so that's another opportunity for us to grow NdPr oxide production. And so we recently announced Apple as our foundational recycling customer. And so that's another lever for us over time. That facility will get built out in the not-too-distant future to be able to satisfy the requirements for NdPr and heavies for Apple at our Independence facility to make them their magnets completely from recycled feedstock, which we think is a really awesome addition to the business. And so there are a lot of levers over time for us to be able to grow production.

So to put you on the spot, but in theory, over 10, 15 years, give you a lot of time to figure this out. You can get from 6, maybe to 9 and then maybe on top of that, you have this recycling business that can bring you even beyond those levels.

Yes, I think that's right. And look, if you think about the opportunity set in front of us, we've talked about 10,000 tons of magnets, which in theory, depending on the type of magnet, making gross over generalizations, 10,000 tons of magnets is 5,000 tons of oxide. So what that tells you is we've still got a pretty significant midstream business that can support the market, can support our external customers that are super important to us. Japanese, South Korean markets are our largest markets right now, and we'll continue selling into those markets. But what it does spell is an ability to grow midstream and an ability to grow downstream over and so we certainly have our plate full executing on the items that we've laid out and getting to 10,000 tons of magnets and executing on all of our agreements with DoD and Apple and first and foremost, General Motors, which is coming into production at the end of this year. But we are -- we have established what we feel is a very strong and exciting platform for us to really accelerate growth even beyond what we've laid out. And so as you know, as a management team, we are execution focused. We want to execute first and then explain the upside later. And so our view is that we need to continue to make great forward progress on all of these initiatives that we've laid out. But as we move forward on those, I think there are great opportunities for us to grow even further. We're at the growth conference, so...

You're. You're building an enormous magnetics facility, multiple ones, one in Fort Worth, one at a location that I think hasn't been disclosed yet.

Correct. Okay.

You're going from 1,000 to 3,000 at Independent.

That's right.

And then an additional 7,000 at this location. What I found incredibly fascinating about the deal that you struck with the DoD is that they're basically committed to buying the 7,000 tons unless you find another commercial partner. That's right. And our math, not yours, would suggest that independence is already -- about 50% plus, this is our math again, has already been allocated to GM and Apple, which leaves a lot of room to negotiate contracts with others, but not too much, right, because capacity is quickly filling up. So how do you approach new commercial agreements, whether -- this is our, whether it's Tesla, GE, Lockheed, et cetera. Like what kind of expectation should we think just in terms of margin profile, commercial agreement, et cetera?

Sure. So one clarification. On Independence, the first 1,000 tons is committed to GM. What we've said is we're going to get that facility to 3,000 tons. And with the Apple agreement, the vast majority of that expansion is already contracted. So I would say your 50% is low. So the great thing about Independence also is it's modular. And so we view that facility as effectively sold out. And so at this point, of course, you can always increase volumes one way or the other. But in general, from the major capital investment that needs to go into it versus the returns we're going to get on the other side, we feel great about independence. And then to your point, on 10x, we have a 100% offtake. And so we are not in a rush to announce more headlines on customers unless and until we have the deals that we think are right. An example is with Apple, we've been working quietly behind the scenes with Apple for 5 years on optimizing recycling technology in order to bring us to this point. And if we had signed a deal in 2020, it might have looked a lot different than the deal we just signed. And so we have always been methodical in approaching customer relationships from a win-win perspective. We think that there is tons of opportunity for us to announce more over time. But from a fundamental business perspective, we've got visibility into our returns at this point. And so I think kind of what you're getting at is anything incremental will be better than the baseline economics that we've laid out. What I think despite all the attention that some of the recent deals have gotten, I still think it's underappreciated, frankly, writ large how critical the magnet supply chain is and how close the U.S. industrial economy came to really -- like I don't want to blow out a proportion, but near collapse. I mean we had auto factories actually shut, and there were a lot more that were very, very close to shutting from the export restrictions from China. And so undoubtedly, with a new 7,000-ton plant coming online, there are tons of customers that want to secure their supply chain. And I think the great thing about what we did with the Department of Defense is their focus is, first and foremost, on ensuring the defense industrial base is taken care of. But you can imagine that one of the reasons we decided to go all the way to 10,000 tons as soon as possible is a focus on ensuring economic national security as opposed to pure defense. It's really being able to play offense. And so I think absolutely, there is a lot of opportunity for the names that you mentioned to be a part of our story in the not-too-distant future. And so at this point, we're really heads down in execution mode. And the pipeline of customer interactions is absolutely gigantic given all the things that I talked about. I mean you had businesses that designed their supply chains around assuming that magnets would flow freely forever despite knowing for a very long time that there's a single point of failure in China, and that game is over. And so I think from that perspective, there's a lot of opportunity for us over time.

I find it fascinating that you think it's underappreciated. In other words, this was a come to Jesus moment for many companies that realized that they couldn't operate without...

Unquestionably. And I think the thing that's so interesting about it, too, is what we ended up trading here in this daytone with China is China sending us magnets, which again, with all due respect to us, it's not AI chips, right? And we're sending them AI chips in exchange, right? And so we can never let the country be in that position again. And I think that we are leading the charge to make sure that never happens again. And so in addition to having our shareholders as our major stakeholder here, our country and our government, we cannot let that be the case again. And it really was at that point. I mean, you had major industrial manufacturers, automotive, A&D, consumer electronics, I think making very clear to this administration, if we continue on this track without some sort of daytime, we're in deep trouble. And so I think we are a major solution to that problem over time. You saw auto factories shut in May. And these restrictions went in place in April, which tells you how tightly the supply chain was running from a just-in-time perspective. And I think the thing that I've started to see that I find so fascinating too, is OEMs from all industries not having realized even that certain parts had magnets in them. We had one OEM come to us and say, "I didn't know this piece had a Samarium– Cobalt magnet in it at all." And so it's one of those things where when the product is freely available, subsidized, you didn't have to pay that close of attention. And I think, again, the game has totally changed. And it actually presents some really unique opportunities, not just from contracting and establishing long-term relationships with some of these really important American and global companies, but it's an opportunity for us to change the way magnets are made, sourced, specced, et cetera. What we've seen, in particular, is as some of these OEMs have gotten smarter about what has magnets in them and what exactly do the magnets look like that are in these various parts of their products, it's really then taking another layer deeper and saying, why is the magnet to perform at 200 degrees C when this application never sees over 120. And that is an opportunity for us to really drive more standardization in the magnet market. And frankly, it's one of the reasons that one thing I'm sure we'll talk about that we haven't yet is the heavy rare earth content. It allows us to have great visibility into significantly reducing that. And so overall, it makes me extremely bullish on NdPr, it makes me realize that we will be in a great position to be able to grow our magnet business while lowering the heavy rare earth content purely from dialing in specifications, let alone a lot of the R&D that's going on that has allowed us already within our existing spec to pull heavies out of the mix.

That was my next question about heavies.

I know you well and I found out.

We get it all the time. People want to know how you're going to solve that riddle, so to speak. I mean you were already starting to build refining capacity in Mountain Pass the time I was there. Feedstock, refining capacity, how confident are you can ramp that up?

Sure. Yes. And so for some of the reasons that I just laid out, we don't view that as a bottleneck over the medium and long term. In the immediate short term, we've obviously prepared for this moment for a long time. We have stockpiles of the materials that we need for the immediate launch of production at Independence. And so we're well covered from the immediate-term perspective. And then in 2026, we will have our refining capacity come online. You hear lots of people out there say like, oh, we're a light rare earth deposit and then there are heavy earth deposits. I hate to break it to them, heavy rare earth deposits don't exist. Every single deposit that has rare earths in them generally has more lights and heavies, always. And we say generally, it's always. And so for example, we have 15.7% NdPr in our elemental distribution. We still have 1.7% heavy rare earths and 1.7% of a really big number is a much bigger number than 3% of a really small number. And so that is sort of the misunderstanding about heavy rare earths and their -- where they're sourced. I think fundamentally, what we see is we are covered from our own production from Mountain Pass or for the launch of independents and covering the GM agreements as they grow. With Apple, we also have this recycling capability and the feedstock that we'll be bringing in also is another source of heavy rare earth content. And so that agreement is also well covered. So independence from a heavy earth perspective is well covered. You probably also saw in our transaction agreements with the Department of Defense that were filed when we announced them, we are approaching this together with DoD as our partner in sourcing more heavy rare earth rich feedstock to feed into Mountain Pass to serve the 10x facility. And so there really are no major ex-China sphere of influence. Actually, there are no ex-China sphere of influence producers of heavy rare earths out there, refiners. We will have the only refinery outside of that sphere of influence and it will be online in the short term in 2026. And so that puts us in a great position to be able to be the refiner of choice for projects out there that do have potential heavy-rich feedstocks, but that don't have the mine life or the economics to support building out a full refining capability. In the same way that you saw us in the early days start with an upstream product that was sent overseas for refining. That is probably the most thoughtful way to bring some of these projects to bear over time. And so we expect to see a lot of opportunities to bring heavy rare earth-rich feedstocks into the Fold of Mountain Pass and use that to satisfy 10x demands. And that's on top of some of the items I mentioned before, which is if you think about the biggest use cases of magnets as we look forward. Jim mentioned on the earnings call, we're sitting here at the precipice of the next big thing, which is the physical manifestation of AI, robotics, et cetera. And you actually heard Elon Musk talk about on his earnings call a couple of calls ago, I think the Q1 call that the ramp in Optimus was interrupted because of an inability to source rare earth magnets. So it tells you how important these things are to robotics and some of these future-facing industries. The great thing about some of these applications is some of them have no heavies in them. And so I actually think the overall mix of heavies as a proportion of the [ build ] materials in magnets writ large is actually declining. And so it's something that a lot of people like to talk about. But from our perspective, between R&D, mix and the refining capacity that we're bringing to bear, we think this is well covered for us.

It's a great place to stop. Congratulations on all your success, and have a great day.

Thanks.