Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Loop Industries Fourth Quarter of 2023 Update Corporate Call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. The conference is being recorded today, May 19, 2023, and the press release accompanying this conference call was issued after market close yesterday, May 18, 2023. On our call today is Loop Industries Chief Executive Officer Daniel Solomita; Chief Financial Officer Fady Mansour, and Kevin O'Dowd;, VP of Communications and Investor Relations. I would now like to turn the call over to Kevin to read a disclaimer about forward-looking statements. Thank you, operator. Before we get started, let me remind you that today's meeting will include forward-looking statements in the meaning of the securities laws. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things, current plans, expectations, events and industry trends that may affect the company's future operating results and financial position. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties in future activities, and results may differ materially from these expectations. Additional information concerning these statements and related risks and uncertainties is contained in the Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statements section of our latest annual report, Form 10-K, filed with the SEC yesterday in yesterday's press release. Copies of these documents are available at sec.gov or from our investor relations department. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Fady Mansour; Chief Financial Officer of Loop Industries. Fady, please go ahead. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me here today. I'm so honored to be part of this leadership team. I'm a newly minted CFO. I've got four weeks under my belt. It's been a rock and roll four weeks, but I couldn't be more excited to join this amazing franchise. The combination of the stellar team that we have, the cutting-edge technology, and the aggressive milestones that we have going forward are really what attracted me to this company, so I couldn't be more excited, and I look forward to working with all of you in the future. Please, Dan will give an update on the business, and I'll pass it over to him later, but I'd like to go through the financial results. Obviously, I wasn't here, but I've got caught up on the results that have happened in the past, but also what I call it a pivot point right now. We're pivoting from 2022, 2023 to the future as we get off the dirt trail of experimentation and R&D and onto the highway of deployment and commercialization. I will go through the results. Obviously, for the quarter ended February 28, 2023, we saw our expenses come down, and that's gonna be a common theme that is gonna hold as we go forward. A lot of engineering related to basic design package came down. Our external engineering came down tremendously, and you could expect that to continue into the future. Our machinery equipment, as we finalized Terrebonne, saw a dramatic decrease in expenses. More of a sign of things to come. We saw total R&D expenses come down by more than two-thirds to more of a steady line run rate, but we're gonna continue to look at costs decreasing, and I'll talk through that in a couple of minutes. From the G&A perspective, the costs were down pretty much across the board. That's another area that we're looking to optimize for, which is the combination of professional services, employee comp, more of our back-office functions. We're looking at the frontline team and obviously the backline team to get to a total of reduced expenses. Obviously, we benefited from the gain on the disposal of Bécancour. It was two tranches. One happened in the fourth quarter of 2023, and we recorded a gain just under $10 million. There was another gain that was recorded in the third quarter, which was $6.7 million. It brought our full year gain to about $16.7 million. More importantly, it solidified our coffers and built a nice amount of dry powder, and just make sure we can fund our operations for the next couple of years. Turning over to the full year, again, same theme that you saw a tremendous amount of reduced expenses for the same reasons that I articulated for the last quarter. One of the things in the G&A, the G&A perspective, we had a higher stock-based comp because it was related to a performance condition that was met in fiscal 2023. The stock-based comp was vested. It hasn't been exercised. That was kind of a one-timer that occurred. Obviously, in addition to that, our tax credits, we had a bigger tax credit related to the Terrebonne upgrade. That was good news that served to reduce our expenses. More importantly, as we pivot forward, of I told you about the pivots that we're gonna do in looking at our back-office expenses. When I look and I've had a time to work with the team, internal stakeholders, and see how we're able to reduce our expenses going forward, I'm proud to say that from a recurring expenses standpoint, we're looking at reducing our current run rate by about 50%, which is a total of R&D, engineering, and G&A. We understand that we won't be able to generate revenues or material revenues next couple of years. We have to have a keep the lights on mentality and preserve our precious e-expenses in line with the cash that we have on hand. 50% cost takeout. Obviously, Terrebonne is complete right now. Like I said before, we're off the dirt trail of R&D and onto the highway of commercialization and deployment. Engineering projects are gonna obviously go up as we get all set up and running and the future facilities. Those costs, we are looking and doing cross-charging all of these expenses because they are incremental to the projects. The theme looking forward from our expenses is lower headcount, lower spend on machinery and equipment, cost-cutting from a back-office perspective, watching all forms of spending, really bifurcating what's discretionary versus what's needed, and obviously treating our R&D and engineering expenses as a cross-charge. Even if they hit our P&L from time zero, we're looking at cross-charging them very quickly so that we get the recovery from the P&L perspective, and more importantly, we get. We preserve our precious cash. Turning over to the balance sheet, obviously, the sale that happened in late 2022, the third and fourth quarters of the current fiscal year,, or of last fiscal year helped to shore up our finances. Three-quarters of our total assets are cash on hand. That's gonna give us the dry powder that we need to make sure that we're able to fund our minimum expenses going forward. We have more than two years of operation expenses that we can fund, so we're well-served and well-anchored on delivering all the projects that we see in the pipeline, and most notably, the first terminal that we're looking to get shovels in the ground by the end of the year, which is the old time. We're really in good shape from a balance sheet perspective and a funding perspective. On the cash flow, obviously, we had two positive cash flow quarters, the latest two, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, because of the excess land sales that I referred to. Obviously, we are laser-focusedasspending more on making sure that the expenses come down with that. That's where we are from the P&L perspective. Again, like I said, we're at the pivot point right now, we're keeping track. Back-office expenses are gonna be on a de minimis perspective, and we're gonna be spending more on the project expenses, which is obviously the cost of success. I'm happy to spend money on projects;, they're recoverable and they're what's needed to get our company to the next level. With that, I'll turn it over to our CEO, Daniel Solomita. Daniel? Thank you very much, Fady. It's a great pleasure to have Fady join us. He's been a tremendous resource, even though for the only four weeks he's been here, he's been fantastic. Got to know Fady about six months ago, so we took the time to get to know each other and make sure that Fady is gonna be the right fit for the CEO role moving forward. Really happy to have him on board with us. It's been an eventful year. We've got a lot of milestones that have been completed, I don't think Loop has ever been in a better position than we are today to supply, you know, virgin quality PET resin and polyester fiber to global brand companies around the world. Customer demand is extremely high for our products. Being able to supply virgin quality material from our Terrebonne facility to global brands all around the world is such a big difference, and we're the only company out there that's able to supply this type of material to brands, 100% recycled content, virgin quality material. Brands are really responding very well to this. You know, we're negotiating contracts for the Ulsan facility, also for the French facility and other future facilities as well. There's really been a strong demand from the customer side, which is really exciting. You know, right now in the world, the only way to get recycled content into, let's say, packaging today or with the fiber space is through mechanical recycling. What we've seen and what the world has seen, and especially what our customers see, is as government regulations are forcing more and more brands to use more recycled content into their packaging, the quality of the recycled PET or rPET is going down dramatically. You could see that if anyone looks at a bottle made from that mechanical recycling today, most of the bottles are like a very dark gray, or they have to dye them blue or green. It's really something that's really concerning for all of the global brands because the quality is continuously going down. As those packages get back into the recycling stream, the quality is only gonna get worse. That's really where Loop steps up and brings in the virgin quality material, exactly the same quality as the petrochemical industry made from 100% recycled content. That's really been a huge plus for us. We launched a really exciting program with Garnier, L'Oréal brand, the Micellar Water brand in the United States last month. The package of the Micellar Water, it's sold exclusively in Ulta stores across the United States. That was a tremendous achievement working with the L'Oréal brand. You know, what a great brand they are. You know, huge cosmetic company and they're gonna be a future customer of our facilities. That was a really exciting launch. We have some other things with L'Oréal later on this year in New York. The On AG, we signed an LOI for an offtake for the Ulsan facility from On AG, the exciting Swiss shoe manufacturer that makes the Cloud running shoes. Really excited to work with them. That's a fiber-to-fiber application. Again, that's only Loop that can provide fiber-to-fiber recycling, so supplying all of the textile industry with virgin quality fibers, which is something they cannot get today. To be able to start with a fiber. Nobody can recycle polyester fibers back into virgin quality polyester fiber or going from a fiber into food grade packaging, and Loop can do any of those things. That really sets us apart from anything that exists out there. That's another really exciting opportunity for us. Fiber to fiber is really gonna be the driving factor for the Asian partnership with SK Geo Centric. Most of the, you know, global supply chain of textiles and polyester fiber is all in Asia. Most of the feedstock that we're gonna be using for those facilities is polyester fiber. So, you know, we probably secured about 60% of the feedstock for the Ulsan facility will be coming from the textile industry polyester fiber. That's really a really exciting market for us. You know, today having the Terrebonne facility up and running, operating, getting material into customers' hands so they can see the quality has completely changed the game. Operating this facility for the past two and a half, three years has really, you know, been hugely beneficial for us as we move to global expansion. To Being able to get that knowledge of running the facility for three years, operating it, and getting all that data is really, really important. You know, today we supply from our facility. Today, we supply customers in the, obviously, in the packaging, food grade packaging industry, in the automotive industry, textile industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the toy industry. We have five different real segments that we're into today from our Terrebonne facility, and most of those customers are gonna translate to our larger facilities. Customer demand never been higher, and everyone is really excited about the quality. The other big milestone, obviously, is the SK Geo centric partnership. You know, we've been working with them for over two years, so it's not a huge surprise, but it is good to get the joint venture agreements finalized. Two companies complement each other really well. You know, Loop brings in the technology piece. Loop brings in the customers, the marketing and the branding. You know, we get our Loop logo on the package, which is tremendous branding and marketing with all of these great brand companies that we work with. SK brings in all of the construction of the facilities, the operations of the facilities, and all of the day-to-day manufacturing and maintenance of the facilities. It's a really great partnership where each company brings in their expertise. Strong customer demand for Asia. A lot of our, you know, existing customers and all of our, you know, close partners are gonna be off-takers from the Ulsan facility. As I mentioned earlier, the fiber feedstock is gonna be the main feedstock used for those facilities, so textile waste. We've already secured over 60% of the feedstock coming from fibers for that facility. Really excited. The SK partnership is to develop multiple facilities across Asia. First one in Ulsan, South Korea, but we're already discussing and looking at other facilities in Japan. China would be able to absorb at least two facilities. Vietnam is another exciting location. Tremendous expansion plans with SK Geo Centric moving forward, and I couldn't ask for a better partner than them. As for our French project, we updated the markets. We chose Saint-Avold in the Grand Est in France. We did an exhaustive search of all the different sites all over France and decided on Saint-Avold, which is right near the German border. Great location for logistics and feedstock, so we're really excited to be there. The president of the region, Franck Leroy, will be visiting us next week at Loop. He's coming to visit our facility. We're gonna tour the factory with him and talk about our expansion plan there. Tremendous government support for the French project. I was just at Choose France on Monday, hosted by President Macron. I was there. Mr. Na from SK was there as well. The CEO of SK GC was there, and Sabrina Soussan, the CEO of SUEZ. All three of us together were meeting with all of the government officials, all of our customers, and feedstock suppliers. It was a great event hosted by President Macron. That was the second year that I've attended. The tremendous support from the French government for the project. They need solutions in France for packaging, and France is really leading the way for sustainability in the plastic space. That's that project is really moving forward well. Feedstock has all been secured for the projects through SUEZ. Obviously, SUEZ is a large waste management company in France, they've secured a, a percentage of the feedstock. Loop has also secured a percentage of the feedstock. Feedstock has been secured for the project. Customer demand is huge from our French brands such as Danone, L'Oréal, L'Occitane, and the rest. That's a really exciting project. We're in the permitting phases right now. We're going through the permitting and expecting to break ground on that facility in 2025. It's to be up for 2027. It's like I said, it's been a really eventful year. Loop has never been in a better position to be able to execute on our business plan. We have the best quality material coming from 100% recycled content, great partnerships, great customers. Now we're just working on finalizing our financing for the facilities. As Fady mentioned before, selling the land in Bécancour gave us enough cash to be able to get to our licensing fees, which will basically cover all of our top line expenses here at our head office. That was a really good move for us being able to sell that land, and now transitioning the company away from R&D and more into operations, where all of our different departments, so R&D and our engineering will be always a cost center now, where we'll be charging back to the various projects. We're really transforming the company from purely R&D into an operating company. It's a really exciting future. As far as financing for the facilities, you know, we're exploring a couple of different options that we're looking at on being able to finance the plans. We should be updating the market pretty soon on that as well. That's it for me. With that, I guess we'll turn it over to questions. Thank you. If you would like to ask a question today, please dial star one on your telephone keypad now. If for any reason you'd like to remove your question, please dial star two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your phone is unmuted locally. As a reminder, that's star one for any questions now. We'll just leave a moment for any questions to be registered. Our first question today is from the line of David Quezada of Raymond James. David, please go ahead. Your line is now open. Thanks. Morning, everyone. Appreciate the update there. My first question, just on... I guess we'll start with Ulsan and just thinking about the contracting strategy there. Great to see that there's a lot of demand, and you've got, On Holding on there now. Maybe Daniel, could you just talk high-level about what your strategy is for that facility? Will you look to contract all the volumes? Is there any any split between sort of local Korean customers and your international customers that you would look for? Just any, like, you know, broadly how you're thinking about it and how you can de-risk that from, I guess, from a sales perspective over time. Yeah. Thanks, David. Great talking to you. For the Ulsan facility, we'll probably sell about the capacity is 70,000 tons, we'll probably sell under contract about 50,000 tons with our existing customers. You know, the Danones of the world, On Holding will be our customers and a few others that we'll be announcing soon. It's gonna be probably a split pretty even of the 50, about 25 fiber, 25 bottle grade. Then the other 20,000 tons, we'll probably leave it for the spot market. You know, we see 2025 as being a really important year for brands, where they're gonna need more recycled content, especially in Europe. We wanna take advantage of that price swing and not have everything locked into long-term contracts. That's kind of the sales strategy there. We always use formula-based pricing anyway, as long as we use indexes tied to formula prices, which allow us to make sure that if the cost of raw materials go up or the cost of any of our inputs go up, then that's a pass-through cost to our customers. Customers are used to working with these type of formulas. This is what we're currently negotiating with all the different customers. Again, the real differentiating factor for us is the quality, and that's really what the customers need. The customers need virgin quality material coming from 100% recycled content. And a lot of the really great brands are not willing to sacrifice quality, you know, which they can't get today from the mechanical recycling industry. It's really interesting. I was going in a couple of stores in France when I was there for the Choose France event, you see some packaging from the mechanical recycling industry, and the bottles are, like, a really dark gray, and it just looks so bad visually. That's the really big thing with PET is the color. That's what chemical recycling Loop's depolymerization technology, that's what it brings. We break it down to the monomers and build it back up, we remove all of those colors. That's where our technology really shines. There's a huge difference between the quality of our packaging versus the quality of the mechanical recycling. Yeah, no shortage of demand for the facility. No shortage of demand for any of our facilities. Okay. Excellent. That's great color. Thanks, Daniel. Maybe just on the feedstock side, I guess for, again, for Ulsan, you mentioned that you've got, I think 60% of it secured. I'm guessing you'll look to contract all of it. Or, I'm just wondering if you're able to talk at all about the nature of those contracts. Like, you know, are they formula-based pricing as well? The term of the contracts, and I guess the mix between, is it gonna be all fiber or will there be some recycled bottles as well? Yeah. There's gonna be 60% of the feedstock is gonna be probably coming from the fiber industry. Textile waste from the polyester fiber manufacturing, which goes on a lot in Asia. You know, SK is really working hard on the supply chain in Asia. They've actually gone in, and this is public information. They've gone in, and they've, you know, made some equity investments into some companies across Asia to be able to supply our facilities with feedstock coming from either like the trays, from, let's say, you know, salad trays or fruit cups or that type of material, and also from the polyester fiber supply chain. A lot of that goes with the government. There's a lot of government action within Korea to be able to develop this new supply chain. There's never been a company that is able to recycle this material, the supply chain kind of doesn't exist right now. SK is working very hard with the Korean government on setting up those supply chains to be able to capture all of that material. A really good example is there's 20,000 tons of brown beer bottles in Korea that use PET for their beer bottles, and those brown beer bottles obviously can't be recycled. That's another great feedstock for us. Trays is another great example where those trays are not recycled today in Korea, so the collection doesn't really exist for them. They go to the waste management companies, but there's no home for them. Those are, again, things that Loop's technology can handle. That's where SK developing that supply chain with the local governments. Okay, great. Thanks again for that. Maybe just on construction costs for the Ulsan facility. Do you think there have been any change, you know, over the past, call it six months or so, in terms of the expectation of the budget for that facility, or is that, you know, somewhat contained since it's on an existing industrial site? Yeah, we haven't seen too much of an increase in costs. You know, inflation in Korea is a little bit lower than, let's say, in North America, where we have these, you know, higher inflation numbers. The big jump in inflation happened probably like 2021, 2022. That's where we saw really big increases. We started to see things level off definitely right now. There's no big surprises on the, on the CapEx in Korea. Again, you have the advantage of building on SK site, so there is some infrastructure there at the site that's not needed in the CapEx. Costs are in line with what our expectations were. SK ecoengineering is doing all of the final engineering and the construction. Having that as an internal SK company also helps, you know, manage the costs of the EPC contract. Everything is in line. We're really happy with that as well. Okay, excellent. Thank you. Maybe just one last one for me, if I could. Thinking about expenses, obviously you guys have done or have made some really good progress already in reducing expenses. I'm wondering if you have a kind of like a run rate that you think expenses can get to on an annual basis that you can share, just from a, you know, a total expense perspective? I think right now we're at about $12 million. Yeah., Right now we're, you know, the expense, the projection for 2024, what we're ultimately targeting to, if you look at maybe not 2024, but 2025, we're looking to get to about $12 million, $1 million a month, give or take, David. Obviously we're gonna see a major decrease in expenses that are not project-related because of the cost recovery mechanism that we mentioned. We're gonna have a major decrease to the tune of 50%, next year for fiscal 2024, and then another, call it 20% for fiscal 2025. Our ultimate end goal is to end up, you know, at $12 million or below from expenses. $1 million per month and less. That's what we're currently in our projections, and that's currently we're all gonna be accountable for. That's great color. Thanks, Fady. Thank you. Just to touch on that, I would say, you know, the real transition that the company's making is now all of our employees, every department is now becoming, you know, we're charging back the fees to the projects. Let's say for the SK Ulsan project, any feedstock-related testing that's needed, right? When we're securing feedstock is sent to Montreal, we're testing it at the lab scale, we're testing it in the production facility. All of those costs are now being, gonna be, absorbed by the project 'cause it's ultimately the project is the one that's benefiting from that work. Same thing with our engineering team. We're gonna be outsourcing all of our engineering team to the projects because the project is gonna charge it back. These are all gonna be CapEx-related project costs that are coming back to us. Same thing for the French project. Any feedstock testing or any other work that we do that's getting charged back to the project. That's gonna be a really big difference. Obviously, the plant here, there's no more expenses as far as CapEx or things needed because the plant is up and running, it's operational, so that's really leveled off. We're on the right track in getting costs in line. The other big thing is once the, you know, construction is finalized for Ulsan, the Quebec facility here in Terrebonne, probably there's no use in running a smaller facility once you have the large-scale facilities up and running. This again would be if any customer wants to do some trials or a partner wants to do trials, we would have this facility available, but it would be charged back to the project. Really, we're really shifting our focus to be able to, you know, control costs as much as possible going forward. Perfect. Thanks for that, Daniel. Appreciate it. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please dial star one on your telephone keypad now. As a final call for questions, star one on your telephone keypad. It appears we have no further questions in the queue for today. I'd like to thank everybody for joining Loop Industries fourth quarter earnings call for 2023. Thank you for joining. You You may now disconnect your lines.