By the way, that makes my track record for successful videos at this conference for the last 15 years. I think I'm 1 for 24. There's always next year. Moving along, you guys, are we good on the slides? Quicker, please. Great. Okay. Moving it right along. We have a really unique company. We're truly one of its kind to present next, MP Materials, which is based in Las Vegas. It's the owner and operator of the Mountain Pass rare earth mining and processing facility. It is a critical component of the transition to electric vehicles and really the only mine of its kind to be able to produce rare earth elements for magnets that go into motors for EVs. I'm joined by Ryan Corbett, the company's CFO. Company has 178 million shares outstanding, trades at around $31, $5.5 billion equity cap, good balance sheet, and it's net cash of about $600 million. I will give the floor to Ryan. Ryan, thank you very much for being here. Thanks for having me. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. Obviously, as you mentioned, I didn't have to travel very far. Our corporate office is down the street, but nonetheless, very much appreciate you guys having me out. Quickly, before I dig into this, I think you did a great intro, so this may be redundant and you did it a lot quicker than I would. I will note from a safe harbor perspective, we will talk about non-GAAP financial measures. We will make forward-looking statements. Please take a look at our SEC filings for the appropriate disclaimers on those. I'll also note, we do report earnings on Thursday, and so we will refrain from talking about anything relating to this most recent quarter, and please do so in Q&A as well. As was previewed so well by Brian, rare earths are critical components to the electrification of the automotive supply chain and many other critical supply chains for our future that represent growth. Industrial motion robotics are really synonymous with rare earths, given their critical functionality within the magnets that power motion. I call this the now duh slide, particularly at an automotive conference, but I think it's quite clear that the world is rapidly electrifying, particularly in the automotive space. We get a lot of questions about, you know, what's different this time. You know, from our perspective, you've got certainly, you know, we're very close to California, our facility's in California. We're proudly, you know, mining materials in a very clean and green way in California. I think what's very exciting about what is quote-unquote "different this time" is you've got governments really putting their money where their mouth is. For example, with California, not only are they focused on transitioning us from a product perspective to EVs, but they're also supporting the infrastructure and supply chain that's required with companies like ourselves to get us there. This is also, you know, the fundamental change that we are seeing in the market that positions MP Materials so well and that, you know, we're excited to capitalize on and, you know, further our mission into, which is the complete change in the supply chain and a very marked change in the way automotive OEMs go about procuring their materials. It's not just the shift, you know, that's pretty obvious here in moving from, you know, petroleum-based to mineral intensive. It's also how thoughtful some of them have become in the way they think about, security of supply and how they ensure that they don't, you know, trip over dollars to pick up pennies in the way that, you know, many had in the past. To be more specific on where you find our materials, neodymium and praseodymium are the critical elements that are generally found together and will produce a Mountain Pass NdPr oxide starting next year, that makes its way as the fundamental building block of permanent magnets. Those permanent magnets are found in the traction motors for electric vehicles as one of the primary use cases. As I mentioned, there are plenty others, gearboxes for wind turbines, things like that, which is, if you think about it, sort of the, you know, the opposite of what we see with a traction motor. But the really interesting thing about where we sit here in the vehicle is we are agnostic to the battery chemistry. We are agnostic to the propulsion source. It could be hydrogen. I know a lot of automakers are still sort of holding on to that hope and frankly, you know, whether that wins out, whether it's solid state, whatever it may be, if you're moving to an electrified future, those vehicles are very likely or have to have a traction motor. Right now, north of 90% of those traction motors are permanent magnet motors. There is a fundamental advantage of permanent magnet motors versus the alternatives. We may get to this in the Q&A, but given packaging requirements, lightweighting, et cetera, that is one of the main reasons why you see such a high percentage of traction motors deployed with permanent magnets. So what does that mean for what we make? This is just a depiction. Obviously, you know, anyone can pick their timeframe for when we get to fully electrified, and that may be many decades. Just to give a sense of scale of where we are, and frankly, this chart probably looks better this way. Same idea. We have a critical shortage of the materials that we make, given the growth and demand that we expect to see from electrification taking hold, you know, at a greater scale. Within just the automotive supply chain. The chart before was just fully electrifying the North American automotive fleet. You know, a lot of folks ask us, "Okay, this is pretty scary, so what's gonna keep you know, keep automotive OEMs from seeking alternatives?" I think the reality of this industry is, there are scaled players like ourselves that have the ability to continue to grow into demand. You know, what we see as very exciting for the medium and long term is for an ex-China supply chain, and one thing we didn't touch on quite a bit yet, but I'm sure we will, is just how dominated this industry is by China right now. North of 90% of the industry is in China. For an ex-China supply chain to really grow at scale, you're going to have to continue to see higher prices. Where we sit on the cost curve, which is very unique for being an ex-China player, is we are one of the lowest cost producers globally of these materials. If the incentive price, you know, needs to continue to grow outside of China to drive incremental supply, as one of the low cost producers globally, we expect to be able to benefit from that trend in pricing over time. Just to give a quick sense of our business plan and where we've been. In order to really stand up the rare earth supply chain in the Western world, which, you know, as I mentioned, really doesn't exist at scale in the Western world, we've approached this in a multi-stage plan. MP Materials was founded in 2017. We took the company public in 2020. We currently are producing under what we call stage one of our strategy, which is producing a mixed rare earth concentrate that we send overseas into China to be refined into the constituent rare earth oxides and eventually make its way into permanent magnets and, you know, much of which find their way into the automotive supply chain. Given where we sit on the cost curve, we knew that multi-billion dollar industries are not gonna move overnight. You'll hear a lot about this industry and folks that wanna do everything at once, but the reality is this is hard work. We have a north of $2 billion of invested capital in this site. It's taken us many years to achieve the results that we have, and we have a methodical owner/operator culture that is focused on executing. We've started with this stage one, generated a significant amount of free cash flow that enables us to invest what is required to maintain our advantage from a cost perspective as we move further down the supply chain. When we talk about stage two, what that will be is bringing the refining capability that originally existed at Mountain Pass back online. Our guidance on that is we expect to be mechanically complete by the end of this year. We expect to be ramping into oxide production next year. That will enable us to access further markets outside of China to sell into, namely Japan, Southeast Asia, and others. Of course, we'll be able to eventually sell into our own supply chain as we methodically move downstream and vertically integrate. Our view has been that you need all legs of the stool really for this to be successful. When you think about why the magnetics industry doesn't exist at scale in the United States and in the Western world, it's primarily because there is not the requisite feedstock to support it. We're solving the chicken and egg problem here, and we're investing, you know, our own dollars into what we call stage three, which is vertically integrating into rare earth magnets. I'll talk a little bit more about our strategy there in a moment. To give you a sense of what we've been able to accomplish in what we're doing today in stage one, we're producing north of 43,000 metric tons of rare earth oxide and concentrate on an LTM basis, obviously as of June 30. This is about 15% of global supply. We've taken the site from a standstill in 2017 to 15% market share. You know, given what we've been able to accomplish from a production efficiency perspective and certainly a favorable market dynamic, as we've seen demand growth become more obvious, that's translated into adjusted EBITDA of approximately $380 million on an LTM basis. We're using the cash flow from our current operations to invest in our downstream strategy. This is partially what the downstream strategy looks like in terms of the refining operations at Mountain Pass. What we're doing in a nutshell is, as I mentioned, there's $2 billion of invested capital on site. The vast majority of that capital and of those facilities worked phenomenally well under the prior owner. For those of you that don't know the history, I'm sure we can get into that if it's relevant in Q&A. What we're doing is reintroducing a roasting circuit, which is well-proven technology in the mining and materials space, and investing in incremental product finishing capabilities. Given the slide you saw before in terms of the scale and the volumes that we're producing, the site was never set up from a refined product perspective to support all of that volume. We're investing in those capabilities to be able to support that volume. What that will enable us to do is produce at our target run rate over 6,000 metric tons of NdPr oxide. Again, the fundamental building block into magnets. One of the exciting things I think that's also not super well understood about our vertical integration strategy, and I'll get to the stage three piece of it in a moment, but one of the most important elements of moving into the magnetic space is the ability to deal with the waste that comes off of manufacturing magnets. What is the technology that's required to deal with that? It's this. It's taking the original piece parts and using solvent extraction and other technologies that we are well equipped to do. Having all of these stages under one roof, I think, is one of the major competitive advantages that we'll bring to bear. We get that question a lot. Okay, stage three, why make that investment? What I just spoke to is one of the critical differentiators for us. Of course, as I mentioned, our mission is to restore this entire supply chain. We haven't had magnetics in the United States because we haven't had the upstream. We've solved that first problem, and the logical next step for us is to approach stage three in the same way that we've approached the upstream, which is, you know, a walk before you run strategy and disciplined capital allocation to get this capability stood up and then move into further scaling it. What we started with is our initial facility in Fort Worth, Texas. It's about a 200,000 sq ft facility. We're very pleased to have signed a long-term agreement with General Motors, where we will supply a rare earth alloy and permanent magnets for them into their Ultium platform. This is the original design capacity is about 1,000 metric tons. And as you know, we've talked about our desire here is to expand significantly over time, as we think about and methodically take the learnings from this facility and apply them in a similar way that we've been able to do in our upstream business. With that. Great. We can encourage. Ryan, thank you very much. Let's get into some Q&A, if you don't mind. Just as a reminder, we certainly encourage this to be an open forum to ask your questions. Pursuant to Ryan's request and all of our desire to stay out of trouble, no questions about earnings, please. Thinking about the considerable progress that's been made towards becoming a vertically integrated miner, what's been more challenging than you would have otherwise expected? What are some tailwinds that you didn't expect to have encountered? I'm sure this is probably an expected answer, but the reality is, I think COVID and the supply chain concerns and issues that we've seen are frankly the answer to both sides of that. I think from a challenge perspective, you know, this is a several hundred million project to restore the refining process at Mountain Pass. You know, that has certainly been an incredible adventure in getting that done, you know, on time and on budget as much as possible. I think on the same token, what COVID brought to the forefront is a realization of the fragility of our supply chain. I think that frankly, you know, we've been on this mission since 2017 and frankly, you know, earlier when, you know, the original investor group identified this asset and identified its capabilities. The view was the single point of failure risk is never going to be acceptable when we move to electrification in an industry as important to employment and GDP and all of those things, national security as automotive. That had always been the view. But when you see how quickly demand has grown for electric vehicles and some attribute some of that to, you know, things that occurred over the course of COVID. Very importantly, the shift in mindset for automotive OEMs, wind turbine OEMs, you know, you name it, to understand that, you know, globalization, the way that we had it before likely is not going to work. I think that what's so exciting for us is we don't need to have the largest market share in magnetics. We need to be thoughtful about how we allocate capital to drive our mission forward. We see very, very exciting high return projects to methodically get us there. You know, without that realization in terms of the way OEMs need to think about their supply chain, this would probably take a little bit longer. A perfect example is when we went public, you know, we talked about magnetics being a 2025+ event. You know, here we were December of last year announcing actually we're gonna do it now. That's really because we saw that demand pull from customers. This is clearly out of my bailiwick as far as it relates to my own career. You know, this move towards refining, talk about the, maybe the purity levels that you need to make these goals a reality. Sure. You know, you get physical development by the end of the year, but how long do you anticipate that proving strategy to turn? Sure. Well, you know, for these materials, namely for NdPr oxide, which will be the, you know, the building block that goes into magnets. There's a quote-unquote market spec, you know, 99.99, you know, whatever it is. For different materials, they're a little bit different. I think the thing that's so critical to understand about our assets at Mountain Pass is the vast majority of what is needed to produce on-spec NdPr existed on site before we purchased the site, operated at scale, operated efficiently and effectively producing on-spec materials. We get lots of questions like this, you know. How are you gonna be able to do it? Well, we did it before. What we're doing is introducing optimizations that in fact should make that easier. You know, make no bones about it, commissioning and getting all of these assets up and running is not a walk in the park. Yeah. Commissioning any sort of scaled industrial process like this is going to take time, and we've been very clear that next year will be a transition year as we ramp this. This is not as easy as flipping a switch by any means. I think one of the things that's unique about our asset versus if you think about a greenfield, generally brownfields are a little bit easier, but in particular, the piece that takes the longest to start producing on-spec products is the solvent extraction process. That's if you go on our, you know, website, you'll see our solvent extraction facility. You know, I think it's in the top left of your screen. It's like three football fields long. That's all filled with solvent extraction cells. Mm-hmm. Of mixers and settlers. Those need to be at the right balance in order for on-spec product to come out. What's great is when we took over the site, that asset was shut down mass balanced. What otherwise could take six months, you know, if we really wanted to, you could turn it on and have product come out today. You wouldn't have feed to keep feeding it, but, you know, that just gives you a sense of we have a nice head start from a variety of vantage points. That gives us a lot of confidence in us being able to execute on moving this forward. You know, the historical know-how capabilities, intellectual capital is all there, and it's just a matter of executing. Also helps you don't have the massive debt that Molycorp had to deal with. Yes. All right, you used the M word, so, yes. Obviously, we've also positioned, to your point, the company to withstand whatever exogenous shock we could think of, and also, of course, be prepared for, you know, whatever execution challenges may arise. I think we spend a lot of time thinking about controlling risk. To your point, you know, we've got north of $600 million of cash, net cash on the balance sheet, roughly $1.2 billion of gross cash. We've been very thoughtful about ensuring that, you know, we can withstand, like I said, most market environments. In addition, you know, we fundamentally believe in a business like this, that our shareholders should benefit from what we see, from the supply-demand dynamics in the market. There certainly is plenty of operating leverage in this business from a price perspective. Adding financial leverage when we are, you know, purely commodity levered is not something that makes sense to us. Will we continually reevaluate that as our business mix changes? Sure. For right now, we think that's the thoughtful way to approach it. When we were here a year ago, we were talking about $7,300 in realized price per metric ton, which was up roughly 100% from the prior year, from $3,700. You are now at $13,900. You know, that in place, and let's talk about discussions with your customers and what they are doing to be able to handle these increases in their own costs for whether it be rare earths or other parts of the- Sure. the supply chain. Yeah. I think the benefit that we have versus what I'm sure some of the other you know materials companies that are presenting at an automotive conference are you know most of the focus in this industry from a raw materials perspective is on lithium or nickel or cobalt or whatever is required for the battery. Clearly, the battery is a huge percentage of the bill of materials of an electric vehicle. The nice thing about rare earths is the magnet is a very, very small percentage of the bill of materials. Of course, you know, with the mission to drive further EV penetration, every dollar matters, and we are absolutely committed to you know as we move downstream, trying to be as cost competitive as possible on the magnetic side. From, you know, what happens when NdPr prices go up a bunch, if they double or triple or whatever from here, you know, the reality is, if you look at the technologies and what the alternatives are, you've got, you know, an NdPr permanent magnet machine, or you've got an induction machine, and a lot of folks will try to sensitize and say, "Okay, now leave the induction machine at price X. How much of the efficiency advantage of a permanent magnet motor do you get. You know, try to measure how much NdPr prices would go up to eat into that efficiency advantage. The problem with that analysis is in what world our NdPr prices triple and the copper, you know, two times, three times as much copper that's required in an induction motor isn't also up. That analysis is just tough to do. I think what I would say is that the fundamental advantages of a permanent magnet machine give us a lot of confidence in, you know, in the demand picture. I think last month we were at 94% of traction motors deployed, from a kilowatt hour perspective were permanent magnet machines. You know, that could go to 90 or 85 or 80 or you name it. With the sheer volume of units, you know, underpinning that from a growth perspective, you know, that's still fine, and very good for us. you know, I think that there's always a focus on being as effective and efficient as possible, but there's also a recognition on the part of many of the OEMs that right now the trade-offs and any really foreseeable scenario from a commodity price perspective, making sure you've got the magnets is much more important than Yeah. You know, really worrying about if prices are ±20, 30, 40%. We have a question for Chris in the corner there. One second, please. Yeah. Can you just remind us if there's any direct government support for domestic permanent magnet supply? And if not, sure. Is that something you're pursuing? Sure. In terms of permanent magnets specifically, you know, there have been a couple of different avenues of government support and involvement. I think certainly in the Inflation Reduction Act, you know, we saw a couple of elements of that that are very positive for our business. There are two pieces of the IRA 45X production tax credit and the 48C investment tax credit. The production tax credit relates to our upstream business, oxide production, which is obviously, you know, required to move downstream. The 48C investment tax credit is something that certainly we believe would be applicable for permanent magnet manufacturing facilities. In terms of direct production tax credits or production support, we haven't seen anything yet, but we have seen introduced legislation, both in the House and the Senate, both on a bipartisan basis, about production tax credits to support permanent magnet manufacturing. The other, you know, very interesting element was that, you know, recently permanent magnets were the subject of a Section 232 investigation by Commerce, and they put out their findings very recently that found that imports from China of permanent magnets are a national security threat. It did not put immediate tariffs on them, which frankly you can, you know, read in that report what our public comments on this were. you know, we think the government's made some very thoughtful steps, and recommendations in that report, namely to really focus on the types of legislation that we've seen introduced that have not quite passed yet. I think if we do start to see that level of support, you know, we feel very confident that that will be a positive in driving further domestic capacity. I think for sure what other players are looking for, and you know, I may have mentioned this earlier, but we are absolutely of the opinion that a vibrant downstream of multiple players in the United States is healthy. We don't need to have 100% market share. I think for other players to make that investment, we started to see rumblings of it, but they wanna see us produce, you know, at the scale that we've talked about. We're about to do that. I think we're just at the tipping point for seeing real investment in permanent magnet manufacturing in the United States. Of course, you know, we've committed $several hundred million into our own facility and are, you know, excited to continue to focus on investing into that opportunity. With one question there. Well, can we get a microphone over to Bradley? Uh-oh. Yeah. I was just gonna ask, are y'all doing any mining for graphite? No. Our ore body is a bastnaesite ore that is, you know, probably one of the world's preeminent rare-earth ore bodies. You find, you know, plenty of other elements in the host rock, but for sure the highest and best use of this ore body is, you know, the extraction of rare earths from it. Around your facility, how much land does that take up? We've got 2,200 acres of land. The mine is a very small portion of that. We've only disturbed, you know, several hundred acres at this point. It's pretty hilly. It's in the, you know, Mojave. I think the nice thing that's also very unique about our mine versus others is it is right off of I-15. It's pretty amazing to find something as high grade and with co-located processing and all of the infrastructure that's, you know, not in the middle of somewhere that's gonna cause a bunch of consternation, but at the same time is directly off the highway. We feel like we've got a lot of advantages from that. Certainly, you know, when we think about growth over time, you know, we do own mineral claims, you know, across the highway and, you know, all around the area. You know, certainly that's something that we can think through over time. I think just the focus for the moment, given what we see as such an exceptional return on capital opportunity, is to bring, you know, stage two online, stage three online. In the back of our mind, we're continually thinking about expansion and how we drive further growth in the upstream, which could come in a variety of different ways. Right. The land that you're occupying now is a certain size. In the future, with these other mineral rights that you have, are you gonna take over that land? If so, you know, how much total land space would you have access to? It's hard to say. What I would say is our focus clearly is on the, you know, the in-process mineral asset that we have today. The Mountain Pass mine, to give you a sense, has a 35-year mine life at the volumes that we are expecting to produce in stage two. That is, you know, put together with, in my view, conservative assumptions across the board. I don't know how familiar you are with, you know, how you put together these S-K 1300 resource and reserve statements. We have to make, you know, a lot of assumptions. I think we made very conservative assumptions in those, and so, you know, it may have many more decades. Obviously, we have to prove that out over time. We have such an exceptional opportunity with the assets that, you know, that we have and that we know that that's really our focus for the foreseeable future. Ryan, unfortunately, I think we're bumping up against the bottom of the hour, so we're gonna have to to cut it short. I just wanna thank you very much for coming here again. Then, you know, whether it's five minutes down the road or 1,500 miles, you know, it's greatly appreciated. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Just a quick reminder, there is lunch next door. We'll start with Gentex in a minute here.