Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. My name is John Viglotti. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for our next live presentation from Novonix. Please note you can submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings through the Schedule Meetings tab found on the conference platform. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Chris Burns. He's the Chief Executive Officer of Novonix Limited, which trades on NASDAQ and the ASX under the symbol NVX. Welcome back, Chris. Hey, thanks for having me, John. Great to be back this year. I'd like to welcome everybody to the presentation, and I'm excited to be back and give an update on Novonix and the progress we've made over this year toward the exciting space of starting production, primarily in our anode materials business next year in Tennessee. As always, please review the notice and disclaimers after the presentation. For those new to Novonix, Novonix is a leading battery materials and technology company, and we've been focused on process technologies with lower carbon footprints and the need for localizing the materials market here in North America to meet the demand of the growing electric vehicle and energy storage marketplace. Over the past seven years since we started our anode materials business, we developed significant intellectual property around the production of synthetic graphite for this key market, and that's where we'll spend most of our time speaking about today, but we've also developed other process technologies around high nickel cathode synthesis, And this has really been backed on by our Battery Technology Solutions group, a group that I started about ten years ago that really serves as the research and development core for the business, where we have full battery pilot lines, and we support the development of our materials projects, both on the anode and the cathode side, and of course, now we're living in a market where customer and government financing support is helping pave the way to building out facilities toward profitability. And we'll speak about our successes, especially on the anode materials side, in having support from the government. So to provide an overview of the business, again, at the middle is our Battery Technology Solutions business. This group was started about ten years ago from my PhD work around ultra-high precision coulometry, really as a method to advance and accelerate research and development in order to produce longer life battery materials faster. And we've built that team out to offer research and development services, have full battery pilot line capabilities, thousands of test channels to really help guide the work within our materials projects, which are our biggest area of focus. Our anode materials business division on the left, you see in the photo a picture of our production site, our Riverside facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We started this group in 2017 to become a leading domestic supplier of battery-grade synthetic graphite toward what was an inevitability of the need to localize key production of these materials, and again, we'll spend the bulk of our time speaking about that, but also out of our Battery Technology Solutions division, we continue to invest in cleaner process technologies in order to make the same or new materials for the battery sector, And from that has led to patented technology around high nickel cathode synthesis, and we'll spend a minute talking about our path in bringing that to pilot scale and the road to commercialization around that technology as well, and so what you'll see through the presentation is a real commitment to environmental, social, and governance practices, and of course, primarily with a focus on environmental benefits. We recognized a long time ago that as we needed to move the supply chain for battery materials from Asia and primarily China into North America, we had to do this in a sustainable way. And both in our anode materials and our cathode materials technology, we focused on how we can have cleaner input to our processes, primarily better process technology. This includes proprietary graphitization technology, no chemical purification in our synthetic graphite processing, and on the cathode side, an all-dry process to significantly reduce the environmental impact of the process technology. And of course, also focus on our outputs. We want to develop materials to support longer life batteries, reduce emissions from facilities, and this has really been a focus of our anode materials division to date, and we've done a life cycle assessment on one of our products, showing a 60% decrease in global warming potential relative to equivalent materials produced in China today. This is key as we look at gaining traction with Tier 1 customers here in North America. To set the stage for what we go through with the rest of the presentation, I want to discuss the key areas of focus for the business for this year and how those will move forward into 2025. We've really broken this into four key pillars. One, to scale our operations and be on track to deliver commercial production, primarily within our anode materials division. Two, secure key customers for this group. Three, secure the financing for that. And four, continue to maintain industry leadership across the sector, from research and development to production. And so when we look at scaling our operations, primarily with our Riverside facility, we've completed external engineering reports on the process technology, our engineering designs toward production, and we are looking at reaching our 3,000 tons of capacity toward the end of this year and into the first quarter of next year. That's really critical in supporting the customer timelines that we'll speak about. All of this engineering for Riverside is being done with mass production scale and therefore can be leveraged into growth into new plants in the future, and we'll speak a little bit about the growth plans toward the end. The biggest thing is securing Tier 1 customers. Our goal is to allocate all of our production capacity from Riverside through the course of this year and continue allocations into new plants, with customer agreements this year, and earlier this year, we announced an offtake with Panasonic Energy, which will begin production for next year, and this will be the first major offtake between a Tier 1 cell supplier producing in North America and a synthetic graphite producer in North America, and we'll speak about that, and of course, securing financing to scale these operations. We've done very well with government funding. We've received a $100 million grant from the Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains division of the Department of Energy. We were selected for the competitive 48C tax credit process, where we've been allocated $103 million tax credit toward our Riverside facility, and we've been working very closely with the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office to potentially support a large portion of financing of our next plant beyond Riverside. And this type of federal support for our projects is really allowing us to discuss with strategic investors to bring the capital needed to scale our operations to their potential. And behind all of that focus in Tennessee is, again, our research and development efforts to grow the business beyond graphite in the future. And this includes a focus on our cathode technology, which I spoke about, and continuing to grow our research and development efforts within our battery technology solutions group. And so I'll quickly talk about our technology solutions group, cathode materials team, and then focus on where we are with our synthetic graphite business and the future for that. So as I mentioned, this group was started about ten years ago around our testing equipment technology, which you see here on the left. It really enables faster R&D cycles, and we've built from that around it: materials characterization and development, battery pilot lines for cell design and prototyping work, and testing work that we support across the industry. And this really helps us stay in touch with the changes and the ever-changing movements in battery chemistry and ensuring that we're developing products and process technologies that are robust to what we need today and into the future. And this is where we see our focus in synthetic graphite, high nickel cathode chemistries, as being key technologies that will continue to be needed over this decade and well beyond, to support the diversity of chemistries needed in the lithium-ion battery landscape. So on our cathode materials side, we started this work about three to four years ago, with a focus again on how we could develop better process technology to make the same high-quality products that are needed in the battery industry. Today, high nickel cathode materials are made through a complex wet chemical process. They involve sulfate precursors, they have significant solid and liquid waste streams that need to be treated, and they produce sodium sulfate as a waste product, which right now is discarded in Asia, but needs to be treated and dealt with in North America and will be made at a scale that's unsustainable to scale cathode production in places like North America and Europe. So we developed process technology in order to cut out the wet chemical process and do it in an all-dry state, where we are able to have more flexible feedstock materials and produce the same types of materials that we can heat with lithium and turn into these high nickel or NMC products, and has significant benefits in both potentially in cost and environmental impact. And we've signed development agreements with companies like CBMM to focus on niobium materials for doping and coating, ICoNiChem to focus on recycled feedstock materials. Also, we can develop a robust portfolio of IP, including the core patents that we've been granted, in order to show that this technology can move to scale. And now we are running this at pilot scale within our battery technology solutions group on a nameplate 10-ton per year line. So this gives us the ability to be working now with potential customers and partners and demonstrate the scalability of this technology. And of course, alongside that, we have to demonstrate the benefits. And we did an engineering study last year with Hatch to show the potential impact of transitioning from the traditional co-precipitation synthesis technology to this all-dry, zero-waste process. The key findings were about a 30% reduction in capital intensity in building a plant, a 50% reduction in operational process costs. This excludes the cost of the raw materials themselves, but significant reduction in the processing costs and a more environmentally friendly process with lower power consumption and carbon intensity, the elimination of significant amounts of wastewater, All of the process stream wastewater, and the elimination of the sodium sulfate by-product, which is going to be problematic for the scalability of this sector moving forward. These are huge findings and benefits in terms of the process technology itself in supporting a more sustainable and scalable industry moving forward. Of course, along with the key process technologies, we have to demonstrate the product performance. The materials need to meet the high standards expected by the vehicle and the energy storage sector, and they have to be able to prove that at scale. So we've invested towards pilot to our 10-ton per year pilot scale capacity, and through our battery technology solutions group, are able to demonstrate the performance of these materials in full cells against commercial benchmark materials and show that we can meet all of the required performance characteristics of these using our all-dry synthesis technology. So now we're very focused on continuing to refine the process technology, building our IP portfolio, and looking toward partnerships with key downstream commercial partners in the cathode or cell manufacturing space that we could license or partner in the scale-up of this technology with. So it's gonna be a very exciting part of the business over the coming years. But of course, now our focus is on our anode materials division. We started this group in 2017, as I've mentioned. I had just spent two years at Tesla working on graphite materials, and the idea of the need for localization of graphite was very apparent. Today, battery-grade graphite is over 95% controlled by China, and this has been true and will continue to be true for the near future. And as we see huge growth coming in battery demand to support electric vehicles and energy storage systems, we've seen huge focus on key materials such as lithium and nickel, while graphite has somewhat flown under the radar. Now, graphite is the most susceptible material to external control, i.e., from China's control of the supply chain as we look to scale plants that will be reliant on that here in North America. In December of last year, China implemented export controls on battery-grade graphite, really showing their control over the sector and requiring licenses now to export graphite from China to other jurisdictions. This year, the battery-grade graphites, both natural and synthetic, were added to the Section 301 tariff list at a 25% rate. So those materials coming from China are tariffed now at 25% entering North America. So graphite has now become the focus of key materials that we are reliant on China on, and the government is focusing on how we can develop in the local market here today. And when we look at the demand side of graphite, roughly speaking, about a thousand tons of graphite is used to produce one gigawatt hour of batteries. From benchmarks data, toward the end of this decade, there will be between one and 1.5 million tons of demand of graphite in North America. Right now, the forecasted supply of all the potentially announced projects in North America is about half of that. We're gonna have significant local market shortfalls of this key material, and the balance of which will need to be made up by China, which is now in the face of geopolitical tensions. As we talk about building this business, we have agreements in place both on supply and technology development with KORE Power, LG Energy Solution, Panasonic, PowerCo. These types of customers account for about a third of the demand that you see there, in terms of the 2030 profile. And so it's critical to be working with the key customers that are going to drive growth in the sector and are focused on the need for localization. And just as we looked out on the cathode material side, it's equally important that we show the benefits of both our process technology and our product performance. And so what you see on the right-hand side is a focus on some of our materials, outperforming all other natural and synthetic graphites in terms of capacity, retention, and longevity in the battery. And we've always promoted that this is critical to vehicles and energy storage systems. And so when we started this group, we really focused with four key pillars. The first was domestic supply, as we've spoken about. The second, high performance, because just like we talked about, the growth in the sector will be driven by the Tier 1s, and the Tier 1s require the highest performance and quality standards across the industry. We need a cleaner, more efficient process technology, as I mentioned up front, in order to localize in the Western world. And as a small company, we needed to establish key strategic relationships. Over the past seven years, we now have customer agreements with Panasonic Energy and KORE Power, development agreements with LG Energy Solution, PowerCo, Phillips 66, as a primary supplier of the precursor and feedstock materials that we use to convert into synthetic graphite. We have secured investments from both LG Energy Solution and Phillips 66. We have upstream supply partners, both on the equipment side, such as Harper International, and on the raw materials like Phillips 66, as it takes strong cooperation and collaboration to build a new sector from scratch here in North America. Most notably, there is the supply agreement and offtake with Panasonic Energy. Panasonic has plans to build 200 gigawatt hours of factories in North America. Of course, they're an EV battery supplier to the likes of Tesla, Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, Ford, and Lucid, and they have key requirements for both their existing plant in Nevada and their new plant in Kansas. And so under the terms of our agreement, which we signed earlier this year, we'll begin producing and selling material to them next year, a total of 10,000 tons over a four-year term. And as I mentioned, this becomes the first large-scale contract between a local cell manufacturer, Panasonic Energy, and a local producer of this key material in Novonix. And this will come from our Riverside facility. We purchased the site in 2021, and it's really set us apart from any other potentially competitive projects in North America, as we are already starting to demonstrate scaled production of our products out of this site. Something that other projects and other companies would have to still build an entire site in order to demonstrate mass production and then qualify those mass production lines, which we'll speak about in a minute. So we've retrofitted this facility, and our target is to build out to 20,000 tons of graphite. So you'll remember from the previous slide, the demand profile toward 2030 is between 1 and 1.5 million tons per year in North America. So these plants, in the scheme of the global market and even the local market, are not significant in terms of their current size. But what's critical is building our first plants, qualifying projects or products, and then being able to leverage that technology into growth in the future plants, which we'll speak about. So this has been underpinned by our process technology that we've developed over the past seven years. Now, our supply agreements with KORE Power, which to support their KOREPlex facility, which they plan to build in Arizona and Panasonic Energy. And as I mentioned earlier, key financing support from the federal government under the Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, such as our $100 million grant and our $103 million tax credit. And in order to support our customers, we have to have developed the right process technology and the right products. We saw a brief snip earlier of the type of lifetime performance that we can get from our products, but we also have to have a diversity of products. These synthetic graphite materials are not commodities. Our customers require different performance specs for their products, and we have to be able to cater the performance of our materials from, for example, energy storage style batteries, to a need for electric vehicles or high charge rate electric vehicles. And we've been able to develop process technology from our pilot scale investments to develop all of these types of materials, and now we'll be scaling and demonstrating those within our Riverside facility next year. And of course, we need to demonstrate the ability to meet the targets that our customers need in terms of pricing and now for the company in terms of profitability. So we are looking at sale prices for these types of products in the local market, targeting between $7-$10 per kilogram or $7,000-$10,000 per ton. With production costs, depending on the product type, like we saw in the previous slide, between $6,000 and $8,000 per ton. What we've modeled here is the benefits, the potential benefits of both our MESC grant, our $100 million grant, and our $103 million tax credit on the operating economics of our Riverside facility. Remembering that this is not fully scaled facility, brownfield that we have adapted into this process technology, and we are targeting mid- to high 20% operating income margins. This doesn't take into account all the potential future impacts of government policies, such as the tariffs, Foreign Entity of Concern language regarding IRA compliance in order to qualify for different incentives under the IRA. But we need to be able to first demonstrate our production capability, our process economics, and then look at optimizing as we scale into our next plants. So where we stand today in terms of our focus for this year, I've mentioned some of these things. Of course, our offtake with Panasonic was signed in February. We've been focused on ordering and beginning equipment installation for our first integrated line in order to fully qualify that line, continuing facility improvements within our Riverside site, and we completed an external engineering report on all of this process technology and our plans toward production. As we wrap up 2024, we'll be installing capacity toward our 3,000-ton target that will be commissioning in end of this year and into the first quarter of next year. And twenty twenty-five is really focused on the startup of our 3,000-ton line in order to qualify the products from the mass production lines to customers such as Panasonic and KORE, to be prepared for their start of production targets with Panasonic late in twenty-five. Also, through twenty twenty-five, we'll be investing in the growth beyond our initial 3,000-ton capacity and building out toward our 20,000 tons. And of course, this will be focused on the customer demand that we secure and hopefully secure as we look toward the end of this year and early next year. So we continue to execute against building out our capacity, being prepared to qualify our mass production samples early next year, and start production for Panasonic in the second half of the year. Of course, this is just the beginning of the growth for our anode materials division. We think about three phases of growth for this business. Our initial phase being, of course, Riverside, which we've talked about, 20,000 tons underpinned by Panasonic and KORE Power. For perspective, I mentioned 20 gigawatt hours roughly of batteries, or about 360,000 EVs per year would be supported from this site. Our plans are to build an initial 30,000-ton greenfield phase one, which through our partnership with LG Energy Solutions and our joint development agreement, there's contemplated a supply agreement upon success of that, 4,000-5,000 tons a year that would come from this site and potentially more. And again, as we look toward the coming months, we hope to start allocating capacity from future customers into this next site, continuing work with the Department of Energy to potentially support this site with a target of breaking ground next year to continue the growth. And then, again, as we qualify lines from Riverside, we can secure significantly more demand from customers, and we look at growing to an eventual target of about 150,000 tons per year. And again, for perspective, this is only just over a 10% market share in the local market. Significantly lower when we think about the global scale being in the many millions or 10 million tons per year in the future of this material, primarily being sourced from China. When we think about the goals for the business, we've always focused on being at the forefront of product innovation, both product technology and process technology. We've become recognized as a leader in this space in North America around everything we've done, from our technology solutions group to, of course, our anode materials division, and now our cathode materials technology as well. Our key focus is at the top, scaling our anode materials production and continuing to develop and look at commercializing our patented all dry, zero waste process technology. All while continuing to build new parts of the business, developing IP, because we continue to see huge growth for the battery sector through this decade and beyond. And so with that, I'll wrap up, and we'll take a minute to look at some of the questions and answer some questions that folks may have asked in the chat. So there are two questions here about the U.S. election. So the potential impact of the U.S. election on Novonix in the short and long term. So of course, being an election year in the United States, it's of critical focus. But I think it's important to recognize that regardless of which administration may come into effect in January, there's a lot of aligned policies as it relates to what will impact Novonix... Now, of course, Democratic or Republican administrations will take a different tactic to supporting sectors. But when we think about what we are doing, we are looking to localize manufacturing of key critical minerals to reduce the reliance on China and support electrification. So both Democratic and Republican policies can find key messaging in there that they support in terms of, of course, under Democratic administrations, supporting the electrification, highly incentivizing that through the types of grants, tax credits that we've won, electric vehicle credits for consumers, and even now, tariffs and trade policies. And I think as if we do have a change in administration, we'll continue to see support for key manufacturing, as well as the need to decouple our reliance from China for key materials such as this. So again, it was the bipartisan infrastructure law that set up the grants for which we won $100 million, because so many of these policies, while there may be differences in how they deploy tactics, are supported from both sides of the aisle. So a couple questions here around, let's say, revenues, start of production, status with customers and LG Energy Solutions. So to try to answer some of them together, our 3,000-ton line in our Riverside facility will be focused in the first half of next year on product qualification. So with any of these projects, we have to demonstrate our product quality from our pilot facilities, get that signed off by customers, and it's at, really at that stage, for example, customers like Panasonic, who then we demonstrate our path to commercial scale with, are able to gain confidence to enter the types of supply agreements and offtakes that we secured earlier this year. Then we have to scale that product to a fully integrated line from mass production and demonstrate that our C sample, full mass production sample, can pass all the performance requirements, processing, and quality audits that are required for any of the Tier 1 suppliers. So that is the focus of the early part of twenty twenty-five, is passing all of those final qualification programs with Panasonic, specifically, and then starting production in the second half of twenty-five. That's when we'll see revenues begin for our Riverside facility and then, of course, grow quickly as we look at expanding our capacity at the end of 2025, 2026 and beyond. The same is true for LG Energy Solutions. Our joint development agreement with them, we signed last year. They invested $30 million alongside it, so we could demonstrate and develop the product technology for their specific requirements. Now, we'll be in the process again of scaling that into our Riverside facility in order to qualify through mass production with them. And again, this is something that I think is critical to understand in terms of our position in the industry and why we view ourselves as at least two years ahead of any other competitive potential project. Because no customer can accept moving to delivery and sales without a qualification process from the fully integrated site at mass production scale, through which they'll be supplied. And therefore, if other projects do not have shovels in the ground, they're not built and cannot therefore demonstrate production at full scale, it will take them years still to develop those projects. And Riverside has been a key asset for us in order to show both the path to commercial scale over the last one to two years, in order to secure the types of agreements that we have, and now over the next twelve months, to be entering into deliveries and sales within that site. So that qualification program can take anywhere from four to six months on the short side, to 12-24 months on the long side, depending on how you look at it and how it's qualified through both the cell manufacturers and the OEMs. So we continue to look at our plan with LG Energy Solution to qualify from our Riverside facility, and then growth into our next plant can be done as a qualified supplier through much shorter timelines. Again, another critical element of our Riverside facility, setting us apart from any new facilities being built, that are not already in supply for the market. So we're a little short on time, but I will look at the questions again quickly. So there's, you know, there's several questions about, again, tied to revenue, I guess, around investment in Riverside and investment requirements. Of course, we're in discussions with potential strategic investors and partners in order to help secure continuing to fund the growth at Riverside. Of course, this has to be underpinned by further contracts. So we have a strong balance sheet still today to fund the operations and are growing into this first 3,000-ton line. As we look to secure the rest and allocate the rest of the capacity from that site, we'll then be working with potential customers for financing and other partners for financing, all sitting next to the strong support we've got from the government, the strong economics from the site, and at that point, then also the ability to be qualified and beginning production from that facility. So I know there are some other questions that I unfortunately didn't have time to get to, but we're at the half-hour mark, so I have to wrap up. Thank everyone for their time, and we'll look to follow up on any questions after the presentation. Thank you.