Good afternoon and welcome to the Directa Plus PLC investor presentation. Throughout the quarter presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions then press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review the questions listed today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to run the following poll. I'd now like to hand you to CEO, Giulio Cesareo. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon to everybody. Thank you, Alessandro. It's a pleasure to be again in a position to talk with our investor. Let me introduce myself. My name is Giulio Cesareo. I'm founder of Directa Plus. I have 40 years of experience in carbon, graphite and graphene arena. The first 20 with Union Carbide, the last 20 with Directa Plus. In front of me sitting Giorgio Bonfanti, our CFO. Giorgio is going to introduce himself. Good afternoon, everybody. I've joined the company four years ago, after some experience in M&A advisory and audit. Let's start by introducing the point that we consider Directa Plus a leader in the graphene revolution. We have a sustainable approach, we have a strong IP portfolio, and we have a consolidated industrial presence. On the top of these three bullets, we have a quality very good pristine material, and we are able to produce different morphologies of graphene material. The price is well-positioned and very interesting, and the technological advantage that we designed is since the beginning is continuously improving. This slide show the advantage of our production system. Everything starts with the thermal super-expansion of natural graphite. We are expanding natural graphite at a temperature that is very close to 10,000 degrees centigrade. That is twice the temperature of the surface of the sun. That means that we are able to generate enough distance between the pristine graphene nanoplates that allow us to move to the exfoliation phase without the need to use any chemistry, which is, you know, the real competitive advantage of our process. On the bottom part of the slide, you can see that by the end of last year, we had 106 granted patents and 30 pending. When we will cover patents in the next slide, I will update you with the latest numbers. Talking about 2024 highlights, no doubt that in 2024 we faced headwinds, mainly because of the difficult situation in the company we acquired due to the Ukraine war on the Black Sea. In environmental, we suffer, you know, postponement of orders. We were able also to recover because we decided to acquire the entire package of Setcar company, removing a company and that was the minority shareholder in deep financial crisis, and that was the real constraint to work with large oil and gas company. In fact, posterior, we are immediately recovering a long pending customer relationship. The two significant order we were able to achieve, Midia International SA and OMV Petrom. Midia International SA is a company offering decontamination of drilling oil platform on the Black Sea, and OMV Petrom is our traditional customer. They are starting to place orders again. The percentage of environmental turnover in 2024 was 79%. In textile, similar situation with a percentage of turnover of 21%. We've again, a posterior recovery, despite the weaker consumer spending, and the not very positive growing of the luxury brand. Just an example, one of our major workwear customer in 2023, placed order for EUR 1.3 million. 2024, because some slowdown in approval of tenders, just ordered for EUR 250,000. 2025, the first quarter of the year, he order above EUR 300,000. The first half of the year, we will make more turnover than the entire 2024. I think this is a significant thing, and we are fact that we are recovering also in textile. With regards to group operation, two important points. We renewed the production team, that, to my impression, is the best we've ever had. We are remodeling the production line. This is going to create a significant quantum leap in terms of quality, price, and volume. I will cover with a specific slide. Giorgio will give an idea of the financial highlights during 2024. Yes. Thanks, Giulio. In terms of financials, we have already covered at the beginning of the presentation, but also in the past with the investors, the fact that we had a decrease in revenues. The revenues were EUR 6.7 million in 2024. This was mainly explained by two factors. The first one was the temporary delay in key customers' orders, and we are recovering in 2025. Also a strategic decision to exit from some lower margin contracts. We are now concentrating ourselves on higher value opportunities. As I said, we are trading in the first quarter of 2025, at inaudible level with revenues approximately EUR 2 million, which is approximately 40% higher than the same period in 2024. The EBITDA loss that we are showing in the table, this page, has increased, and the increase was mainly driven by the loss in revenues, partially offset by an increase in the gross margin. We will cover what we are doing also in order to improve our margins. The adjustments you see in the table are mainly explained by known cash items, especially the one-off expense for the Liberty contract that we cover in the next pages. Which was mainly incurred in 2023. And inventory write-off, which is the result of some more conservative policies provisioning policies on our inventory. As we know, we raised cash through a capital increase of GBP 6.9 million in mid-2024. We are in a strong position of cash with approximately GBP 5 million at December 2024. The next section of the presentation is covering four points, which are the main four strategic actions that we want to explain to investors, it provide an update with what are the latest developments or the four main strategic actions that we discussed with investors the last time. Starting from the Setcar restructuring after the acquisition. Giulio, starting from the Setcar restructuring. Yes. Let me remind everybody that we acquired 51% of Setcar in November 2019. We completed the acquisition of the full package of the company in May 2024. Immediately, we start to introduce quick and effective changes. The first one was to reconstitute the local board of director. We have a new chairman and 2 new directors. I took the responsibility to be the chairman of the company, to send a very strong signal of presence and desire to move on a new and different direction with Setcar. We also introduced a new general manager that is already in Braila. He's a young man with 15 year of international engineering experience. He's not part of the small oligopoly of the local environmental company, which is a plus, because he will look at things with a different perspective. Together, we are working on a head count reduction that already started because December 2024, we had 165 employees. Today we have 141, and we expect that in December 2025, we will have 130. Same time, we are moving down in the senior leadership role. We have already a new sales director, and we are securing multiple new contracts and we are able to renew some of the old important contracts. Second point is what we are doing on our cost base and our direct production costs. We have covered already in the past the fact that we have secured approximately half a million EUR of targeted annualized cost savings. We've identified a number of cost saving that are not impacting our growth strategy in the short term. At the same time, we keep working on reducing our direct production costs. We made many improvements in our production line over the last years. We have put in place two main actions recently. The first one that we covered in September is the replacement of our main energy source from argon gas into nitrogen, which is It's cheaper and also has some benefits on the environment. In parallel, we are also working on remodeling our production line, and Giulio will cover shortly what we are doing on this. We'll generate some benefits in terms of cost, production costs. Third point, we are focusing on contracts with higher profitability. I will move to the next page, and Giulio will cover. Yeah, this is a very basic picture of what we did on the production line with the objective to protect margins and preserving liquidity, also to capture large order opportunities. To be able to capture these large order opportunities was key for us to work on cost efficiency, product differentiation, and volume increase. In the upper part of the slide, you see the way our production line was designed. On the bottom part is the new major adjustment. Of course, I will not enter any engineering detail, but I would like to stress to our investor attention that we work on three main areas. We introduced an automated control drastically reducing the need to adjust parameter for fine tuning morphology at each department. We designed the system with the possibility to bypass one of the production step. We introduced multiple precursors. That means that we are able to introduce a material at different stage of the process. The final result of all these activity that are almost completed, are that we will face a production line at half cost but triple capacity, which will allow us to play a significant competitive role in capturing large supply chain demand in the area of batteries, in the area of concrete, in the area of plastic, and in the area of paint. Third point is what we are doing on our sales team in order to convert our pipeline of opportunities. We have enlarged our sales group, consisting in internal sales team, but also agents and distributors. We have a number of agents covering different geographical areas. Nowadays, we have approximately 13 agents covering different areas and different verticals and different applications. On the latest developments in terms of commercial commercialization on environment, we already mentioned the fact that we renewed our fourth contract in the first part of the year. We signed also the agreement with Midia International SA for EUR 1.5 million. We resumed activities with OMV Petrom, which is a key and successful case that we have demonstrated in the past. In textiles, we know that the performance was in 2024 was affected by the slowdown in the European textile market. We used those last months in order to reposition ourselves from a strategic perspective, focusing on, especially on new trends and workwear application, because it's where we believe our technology is appreciated the most. We keep working with major fashion brands, and we are looking also at high technology electronic applications. All the other verticals and opportunities. As Giulio said, our new production plant is opening up new doors to new opportunities. Our strategic goal is to start selling large volumes of graphene-based technology, starting from the asphalt, but also batteries, elastomers, coating cements and filtration. An area where hidden value is and has not yet been transformed into cash in is the IP portfolio. What we decided to do in the second part of the year is to create a team with me as facilitator, mapping and making an IP strategic classification. That means we will divide our IP in core, barrier to entry, and IP bundle. By bundle, I mean we will put together all the different patents covering elastomers or textiles. End of 2024, we had, as I already mentioned, 106 granted patents and 33 pending. Today, we have 114 granted and 41 pending. This is a significant amount of value not properly perceived by the market. The goal is really to start to identify which are the patents that can be licensed and start to act, if possible, supported by professional people, in order to present and promote our patents to the outside market. Finally, the group outlook. In this page, we wanted to show a chart from an external source, showing that the market is expected to have a significant increase in terms of demand of tons of graphene across different applications. We are currently present in most of them. We believe that we will benefit from the market growth in the near future. In order to do that, we need, of course, to rely on our partners, because we are experts in producing graphene across different morphologies for different applications. We need to rely on their expertise in terms of knowledge, technical capabilities, and commercial networks. We are seeing an increasing interest from partners, we believe that we are well positioned to benefit from that in the future. Okay. Last slide. I just would like to stress again that our path toward profitability requires consistent quality. We have, especially, we have the ability to fine-tune the morphology. Sustainable across. We are the only company with no chemistry inside the production line. Strong IP, we just covered the number. Consolidated industrial presence. We are in the market, even in small quantities, since 2018. It's a long time, and we are learning a lot. The momentum is positive. We are leveraging it on Setcar to win large contracts, and we are building Setcar a new credibility and a completely different image. We are reconfiguring the production to gain advantages without sacrificing the marginality, the gross margin. We are expanding and making stronger our sales team on a worldwide basis. Just to summarize, we are moving from the status of just a graphene producer to the status of enabling technology platform, able to talk at various levels, with different kind of verticals and different kind of companies. Well, that's great. Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that is situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review the questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you that the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboards. As you can see, we have received questions throughout today's presentation. Thank you to all the investors for submitting those. Giorgio, at this point, what I'll do is hand over to you to read out the questions. Then I'll pick up from you at the end. Okay. Thank you, Alessandro. We have a number of questions, so I will read them, and then we will answer one by one. The first one is, have you taken all the main decisions on the restructuring of Setcar, or is there more to come? Well, that's such an interesting question. We started the restructuring since we introduced the new board and supported by the new general manager. We are now in the implementation phase. That means that we are monitoring and adjusting the decision taken. We are tracking the processes via the KPIs. The next two steps are very important because they are the steps designed really to consolidate the change. One is on cultural and leadership alignment. We need with the new leadership to keep stable the new direction we impose to the company. The last one is the post-restructuring optimization that will require focus on growth, innovation and long-term sustainability. Okay, the second question is, Romania has had its challenges, and you announced the impact on Liberty Galati and the loss of a large tender you expected to win. Can you provide more detail on this? Yes. Let me start from Liberty Galati. We got a contract in September 2023. The order was from EUR 5.5 million-EUR 8 million. Unfortunately, end of 2023, Galati announced a crisis. Stopped the Blast Furnace 5, and they restarted the blast furnace February 2024. After this restart, they stopped again. Let me add a personal comment. My working background is in steelmaking and everybody that knows a little bit of steelmaking knows that you cannot stop and start a blast furnace like a diesel engine. It's a problem. The good news is that we were good enough to deliver material during, you know, these working phases, but also to stop immediately as soon as they decided not to pay the supplier. Now they have a credit of EUR 10,000 that allow us to receive communication on insolvency and reorganization. Long story short, the best or the good news that I received an official document dated June 2025, where they are telling that Blast Furnace 5 will restart with significant financial support of the Romanian government. This means that probably not immediately, but between now and the end of the year, we will start to deliver again the material to the customer. With regard to the big, the big tender that we were talking in the past, the tender was awarded to another party under circumstances that raised concern due to the transparency lack of the entire process. So, we refrain from speculation. We are looking what's going on, and in any case, it was a smart decision to move this big number out of our forecast long time ago. Another question is, how difficult is it for your competitors to replicate your new production line? Well, that's quite interesting. In some area, it's not impossible, but the real entrance barrier is the thermal expansion of material. Nobody is able to generate this intermediate material that allows us to exfoliate without damaging the structure of the inaudible, and at such a low cost and high productivity. There are signals of significant competitors, also UK competitors, very well connected with large universities that are presenting as, you know, the latest state of the art and equipment that we installed in 2020 in our production line, and that we modified drastically during the last 4 years, introducing a lot of engineering changes and also introducing, developing significant internal knowhow. That means to me that some of the decisions taken are now recognized by a competitor, and especially that the inaudible has still an interesting competitive advantage. The next question is, what type of new contracts does the new production line open you up to? I mentioned this before. The first target will be batteries with our partner company in USA, in inaudible. That by the way, just opened an office in Lomazzo where our production is located. We are targeting plastic. We are targeting elastomer. We started with elastomer, now we are back again with focus on automotive and the last one would be paint. Another question is CEO succession was trailing the final results. Should this be a concern to investors? That's an interesting question, and I'm happy to answer this. As in any company, we design and talk about succession plan since long time. Despite this is my little baby, was key to define a proper procedure to introduce the new and future CEO. This I would like to stress with a lot of emphasis to the investor, I'm not abandoning the company. I'm not running away. I will stay in my role as CEO till 2026, next annual general meeting, if the investor will decide to confirm my position. I would like to stay even longer, but with a different role as ambassador of the G-Class network. With working on the three main activities I'm in now. The Grafysorber facilitator, we want really to start to sell more and more. It is finally happening. IP licensing opportunity and special projects, you know, like supply chain, Romania, and why not US or Middle East opportunities. There are other three questions. The first one is, with the reported cost savings measures and production enhancements in place, what operational milestones should investors look out for to see whether it leads to stronger financial performance? I can answer that. I mean that we said we are working on generating cost efficiencies in two ways. The first one is general expenses. We have secured half a million EUR of cost savings that we believe will not have an impact on our investment strategy in the near term. We will see the results of those cost saving already in 2025. The financial performance will be improved immediately. On the gross margin, of course it takes longer time. We have been working on reducing our direct production costs since a few years. The new additional improvements we are doing now will allow us to have an increasing sales, we believe, because we will have access to new markets. We'll see also increasing sales thanks to those actions we have put in place. The other question is, "Is the current cash position sufficient to cover expected burn and investment needs over the next year?" Yes, we are trading at a burn rate of EUR 250 per month. In considering our working capital needs but also investment needs. Based on our forecast, we believe that we will have sufficient cash at least for the next year, but even more. The last question is, "As far as I'm aware, there has been no follow through the Gipave trials in England, such as with Kent County Council. Where are we currently with Gipave? Well, Gipave is slowly but moving in the right direction. As I mentioned many times, it takes a lot of effort and energy to get the proper attention and certification from local authorities. In Italy, the motorway from Milan to Turin finally started. We are supporting our partner, Iterchimica, in conversation in USA and Middle East. We expect that some new achievement will be announced by Iterchimica in the before the end of the year, and we will be very happy to be part of this announcement. Perfect. Well, Giulio, Giorgio, thanks very much for answering all of those questions from investors. Of course, the company can review the questions submitted today and will publish a response on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors prior to their feedback, as it's typically important to the company, Giulio, can I just ask you for a few closing comments? Yes. No, just a very basic comment, but I think that investors will appreciate, because on graphene there was a lot of excitement and then now there are some skepticism. Let me remind everybody that Roger Bacon in 1958 invented carbon fiber and invented carbon fiber in Union Carbide lab, a facility in Parma, Italy, where I've been for many, many times. It took him almost 40 years to widespread the industrial use. Geim and Novoselov isolated graphene in 2004. Directa was created in 2005. In 2018, we move already in some different verticals with products. Nowadays, everywhere, not just with us, but with any significant graphene producer, supply chains are placing a question, and they seem ready to start to buy, significant volume. That means that, it will not take as long as carbon fiber. That means to me that without any doubt, in the next three, four years, we will see, the widespread, of graphene, industrial use. Giulio, Giorgio, thank you very much for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors now to close the session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback and all the management team can better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team of Directa Plus PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.