Good morning, everyone. I'm George Gianarikas, one of Canaccord Genuity's sustainability analysts, and thank you to everyone for attending the second day of our 46th Annual Growth Conference. We're very happy to have with us today MP Materials CFO, Ryan Corbett, who's come here a few times before, and always has really interesting things to say, actually. So I'm looking forward to the conversation. Looking forward. Thank you for h aving me again. Of course. I have the quote here in front of me. I want to read it. I thought it was super interesting from Michael, Okay. Your COO, and he said We're going to start with stage 1. Okay. We are highly encouraged by early exploratory drilling results that suggest the potential for additional ore within the existing pit contours." Translating that, I think it means that you have potentially more mine life, so maybe if you can explain to us where it stands today and where it could stand after you're done with this drilling. Sure. Yeah. I like that quote, too. I gave him a little bit of crap. Pit contours. Sounds very. The reality, though, is I think we've said pretty consistently there has not been a significant exploratory drilling campaign at Mountain Pass, frankly, for decades. What we have seen within our existing resource and reserve report, and what we file annually, is we very consistently have positive reconciliations on actual results versus what the block model is telling you should be there. Our view has been pretty consistently that when we do undertake a more fulsome exploratory drilling campaign, we can at least fill out those blocks a bit, if not expand what the pit shell ultimately could look like. We've undertaken an early smaller scale amount of drilling. I think we're seeing exactly what we expected to, which is what Michael is alluding to, is that within the individual blocks of the block model, we believe that very clearly we'll be able to bring more ore into those blocks within the model over time. I'm not going to promise you it'll be this year's S-K 1300, maybe it'll be next year's, but undoubtedly, I think it speaks to the scale and long-term nature of this resource. Mountain Pass has been in existence in some way, shape, or form since the '50s. We are consistently surprised to the upside on how high quality this resource base is. I think the great thing is that not only are we seeing the ability to bring in more quantity of resource, which would certainly extend the mine life at existing throughputs, but it continues to be extremely consistent in mineralogy, which is something that obviously allows us to maintain the cost structure that we have. Interesting. You operate in California. Does that mean new permits, or can you operate without them? Thank goodness, no. No, we have our mining permit, and whether the mine gets bigger or smaller, that mining permit is still there. I think the great thing, though, is despite having a facility that mining is viewed as dirty, the way that we do it is not. We have a tremendously positive relationship with the regulators and the government within California. I think that what we continue to see is, frankly, an ability to expand the asset base of Mountain Pass. If you go out there today, the amount of cranes that you will see expanding the heavier separation capabilities, the recycling facility that's being added there. Thinking about stage 1, we've talked about some of these technologies that are generally basic mining technologies that we haven't needed to bring to bear, but we think really make a lot of sense now, ore sorting and things like that, to be able to leverage some of the theoretically lower grade ore and upgrade it before it goes through our process. There's a significant amount of capital going into the ground at Mountain Pass. Hmm. You've had this program in the past, and I think you've sort of achieved this based on some of the quarterly run rates, but Upstream 60K. Sure. Is that still a target of the firm and potentially, to put any words in your mouth, maybe even higher than that at some point in time? Well, look, I think that we continue to believe firmly the mining constraint on the entire business. If you look at the full stream, the mining constraint to continue to grow magnet production in the Western world is access to NdPr. And so undoubtedly, that presents us with interesting opportunities, including looking at expansion of Mountain Pass. To your point, from an upstream perspective, we have hit 13,500 tons in a quarter on upstream REO production before. And so we have gotten quite close to that 60 number. But I think when we laid out Upstream 60K, we said it will be four-plus years and pretty back-loaded in capital. We got 60%-70% of the way there with very minimal capital and very quickly. But some of the other things that will take us eventually to higher levels, like I laid out, are being brought to bear in 2027 and 2028 regardless, like ore sorting and things like that. Now moving to stage 2, which is refining the material. You have talked about getting to It used to be 6,075. You were very particular. Yeah, I think we- 6,000 tons of NdPr run rate refining production by the end of the year. Maybe just talk about some of the things that you have to figure out to make sure you get there by then. Sure. I think to your point, it is still technically 6,075. But if you look at the journey we've been on, we've really been refining at scale for two and a half years. So, we went from zero refined product production to run-rating, where we are today, in pretty rapid pace. It's taken peers out there with similar facilities seven plus years to achieve what we've achieved in two and a half. I just want to reiterate if Michael is listening, which he's probably not. Incredibly proud of the team and what they've been able to achieve. I think the very exciting thing about getting to the ultimate targeted throughput is it's not a technical challenge, it's a mechanical challenge. It is a pretty typical one at a facility of the scale that we're talking about. Certainly, with some of the upgrades and new assets that we brought to bear and then the recommissioning of assets that were built in the 2010 timeframe. Primarily what we're focused on at this point is materials handling and mechanical reliability. The good thing about that, none of the debottlenecking process is fun or good, but it is necessary. It's a matter of continuing to push throughput while maintaining uptime. The numbers that we report to you guys, obviously, I think people look at them and see, "Oh, that's your theoretical output." But there's two levers, there's uptime and there's throughput. It's really making sure that we're managing both, and we're going to continue to do that thoughtfully. Hitting a number just to hit a number in a quarter, if it upsets the cost structure, produces bad WIP, et cetera, is not the right way to go. We just want to be very methodical in how we approach it. I remember when I spoke with Michael last, he talked about it is like a pipes and hoses kind of problem. Yeah, upgrading. It is literally you run something at 350 tons a month and the pump sizes are fine. You push it to 400 tons a month and you are like, "Okay, these pumps are getting overwhelmed." Rip the pumps out, throw new pumps in. It is annoying, but imminently solvable. He did mention, if he is listening, to give credit to some of the people that work there, that he had someone on his team go on a Sunday to the Port of L.A. to get some piece of equipment. It was an interesting story. No doubt. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty typical. Moving to heavies. Because you're starting to separate those two, maybe just talk broadly for the audience what you plan to do there, what the facility is capable of. We'll get there eventually, but this list of heavy, it's not just DyTb. Right. There are other things that you're going to refine that could provide value to the marketplace. Sure. We have been focused on bringing our initial heavy rare separation capability to bear. I think we actually started engineering in 2021. The team's done a great job getting our initial facility that's focused on, at first, dysprosium and terbium. Really ready to go. We're filling cells as we speak. Commissioning is in full swing. Our intention is to have sufficient on-spec dysprosium and terbium product to bring to independence within this year. That continues to move apace. The interesting thing is if you look at the heavy fraction, we've been producing and stockpiling what we call SEG+, samarium, europium, gadolinium, and then everything heavier than that since we started refining NdPr. Obviously, we're taking the lights, we're doing the NdPr separation, cerium, and lanthanum, and then we were leaving the SEG+ in effectively a concentrate form, a mixed product. When we do the separation to bring dysprosium and terbium out, we create an SEG, samarium, europium, gadolinium, and then we create a yttrium holmium plus fraction. What you heard us announce on the last call is obviously samarium is very useful for certain defense applications, and as part of our Department of Defense public-private partnership that we announced in July of last year, we talked about the fact that we would extend the separation capability to separate from that SEG, the samarium. That's already in the works. That will be ready for production at the beginning of 2028. The exciting thing that we've since added on is a long-term contract with a leading aerospace and defense firm to produce separated gadolinium on a long-term basis. I think this speaks to we have all 17 rare earth elements in the ore body. We have a lot of them in pretty exciting quantities given how big of an operation Mountain Pass is. There continues to be very interesting investment opportunities for us where we can create long-term, high-return projects out of some of these, what people would view as sort of ancillary product streams. Certainly, the gadolinium announcement is one where it's a very logical next step for us and something that we're very excited about. Nine figures, you mentioned. Nine figures. That's a lot, and for an ancillary product, right? Well, that's the thing that I think often gets lost when you look at the scale of Mountain Pass. It is truly an unbelievable world-class asset. The thing that I sort of alluded to on the call is gadolinium, very significant potential product stream. We've got the other side of the coin. We've got yttrium holmium plus. All of those products have real and exciting use cases and are starting to be viewed as very strategic commodities, given everything that we're seeing geopolitically. We have those, we have the technology to separate them, and hopefully there'll be more to come there. You're going to start separation by the end of the year for other heavies, not the gadolinium side, is that- For dysprosium and terbium, cells are getting filled. Dysprosium and terbium will certainly sort of have quite a bit of action and an initial product within the year. I ask that question specifically because one of your peers reported earlier this week, they talked about there being an issue with scarcity of heavies. Sure. Yeah. You've been ahead of the curve a little bit in trying to get some feedstock. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, look, I think our view is that it's easy to focus on the scarcity of heavies, particularly when you ignore what I think is the elephant in the room, which is access to NdPr. Yeah. If you're not really focusing on where the market is going from a magnet perspective. We've talked about our progress, and admittedly we started our magnet business effectively in 2021, and the Chinese and the Japanese have had quite a head start on us. But the amount of progress we've been able to make in heavy earth reduction within our magnets, and I think often what people will look at is they say, "Oh, it's grain boundary diffusion, it's GBD." It's much more than that. GBD is helpful, but it starts all the way up at the strip cast operation. It is how do you hone the microstructure of the rare earth elements within the strip cast alloy flake to be able to support higher coercivity with less heavy rare earths? How do you create the formulation with using other elements instead of dysprosium and terbium? It is microstructure, it is alloy formulation, it is certainly GBD, it is frankly particle size in how you produce powder. There are so many elements to this that over time we have continued to push down the heavy earth requirements for a given use case and a given specification, and I think that will continue. Certainly there is a bit of hysteria in the market about heavies at the moment. I think Jim, our CEO, has been quite public in saying he is not particularly bullish dysprosium and terbium prices because he sees our results. When you look at growth and demand of magnetics, it is one for one with NdPr, if not more than one for one, because generally you go from 30% NdPr to 31% NdPr if you are tweaking down the heavy earth content, and that ratio is the opposite on those heavies. I think we are a lot more bullish toward the other heavies. That is something that we think about. Certainly, we are well-positioned for what we need to do from a magnetics perspective, but that is generally how we see the market. Can we talk about that light scarcity? You have mentioned this in the past, Japan has a deal with Lynas. Yep. You are vertically integrated. Yep. And so your point has always been, well, where's everybody. Where's it coming from? Yeah. And so it's- Do you know? No. Can you tell me? Well, look, I think that at the end of the day, certainly this market has changed drastically. You have the two largest ex-China producers, both with minimum price floor guarantees from governments, right? We've sort of protected the base of that industry. I think a lot of people would say, "Okay, prices are up. There's a minimum price floor guarantee, mission accomplished." Look, as we've said, as we grow our business, we'll look at expanding. Lynas talks about expanding. If you look at the scale of ultimate magnet demand, y ou're not going to get there by just expanding Mountain Pass and expanding Mount Weld. It's not even going to come close. One of two things has to be true. Either not all that capacity in magnetics is going to get added, which frankly from the way we position our business, if that capacity is not added, look how much more valuable our capacity is on the magnetic side. Then the flip side is, okay, it is going to get added, so where's the NdPr coming from? Our view is the incentive price to drive the scale of NdPr oxide- 1,000 USD. Capacity is many multiples of the current price. People really are not taking into account when they build these models capital cost. Some people are using sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid's doubled in price. Luckily, we don't have to use sulfuric acid. It's doubled since the Iran conflict. This is not easy stuff. Just saying, "Oh, prices are 110, that's going to take care of it," not even close. If that's true, the earnings power of the- It's pretty high. The material segment is incredible. We are really excited about how we position the business, where it is like heads I win, tails you lose. Right. Right? In the sense that no matter what the outcome is, the way we position the business is one where we are incredibly excited about the future, and we think that the earnings power of the business is significantly higher. Well, that has been something we have written about, is it is hard to discern exactly what that clearing price is for the Nth kilogram of NdPr. Right. That you need to get to full independence for the U.S.- Right. And the West. Moving to magnets. Sure. You're starting production, you're getting your sea legs under you, so to speak. Yep. What does the qualification process look like now for General Motors or for other customers- Sure. That are on the pipeline? Yeah, I think certainly the automotive, we call PPAP process, production part approval process, is really intense. We knew that going in. Frankly, we think that our ability to get through this process with our initial scaled customer is going to set us up for success across the board. We are very encouraged with our interactions with General Motors and what we have seen so far. This is much more than, "Are you making a part to our specification?" That is easy. We were doing that three, four quarters ago. It is a full understanding and alignment of making the parts to scale, to spec, and then feathering them in to where they are needed in our customer supply chain. If you think about what needs to happen here over the next several quarters, right now we have magnets that are doing in-vehicle testing, in-motor testing. A lot of those results take many months for us to ultimately get. That is part of what takes time, is getting those ultimate results. If we need to make any tweaks here or there, we can do that. There are multiple part numbers. There are multiple production facilities. There are multiple suppliers, potentially, that we might be supplanting. When you think about how the growth trajectory of ultimate magnet deliveries will look, I think oftentimes, outsiders will oversimplify and be like, "Well, how much can you make? That is how much you sell." It is not going to be exactly that way. It's going to be not just how much can we make, but have we gotten all the paperwork done on part A for facility A and then part A for facility B, how much inventory is existing at facility B, and sort of feathering that in over the next several quarters. I think that overall, from a quality perspective, from a manufacturability perspective, can we do this? We're incredibly encouraged, and it's just working through these processes with our customer over the next several quarters to get ramped up. You've talked in the past about being almost partners with GM and other potential customers, and helping them simplify the magnets- Sure. That they use in their products. Sure. Is that happening? Well, I think that one of the amazing things, frankly, is that I cannot think of a better initial customer than GM because they did a lot of that work on their own, particularly from a powertrain perspective. There is a tremendous amount, and they are very public about this. This is not any unique information to me. But the way they have standardized their powertrain portfolio, it is one that allows parts providers like us to have a much simpler life in providing high volume for them. I think they did a lot of that on their own. What we see with really every automotive OEM, though, particularly when April 2025 rolled around and everyone realized, "I am not getting out of China what I thought I was getting out of China," is there are magnets everywhere. People are figuring out they have magnets in seat belts that they did not realize they had. What you have seen over the last 10, 15 years is everything was cheap and easy to get out of China. In typical, we have this debate with our engineers all the time where they add a factor on top of a factor on top of a factor, and it is like, do we really need all of this? You see that in magnetics as well. Where, okay, we are going to plan for 150 degrees Celsius of temperature exposure, and so you need the magnet to perform at that temperature. Then, you will ask the folks in procurement at those companies, "Does this product ever see 150 degrees Celsius? No. That's sort of the discussion that I think a lot of OEMs are having right now, is have we overspecified? This gets back to your heavies question, too, is demand may be artificially higher because it was easy. There's a lot of rationalization happening, and certainly that's a big part of the conversation that we're having with our customers. That's a big driver behind Project Swarm, as an example. Their issue is different, where they're not coming from a legacy of 50 different tiered suppliers, all with different requirements, and a lot of them with too much engineering fluff on top of them. They're coming from it from a greenfield perspective. What we're trying to do is tell them, "Hey, have these things in mind as you look at your motor technologies, because it will simplify manufacturability for magnets that are so critical. Hmm. Maybe last question. We have a minute and a half left. I am trying to gauge what sort of freak-out moment the industrial supply chain is having and calling you, because there are two things that happened recently that are super interesting. Number one, the executive order that focused on defense supply chains. Yep. Number two, I have another quote. This comes from Peter Navarro that we have written in one of our notes, and it is just so interesting, I had to read it out loud, regarding China. "What they are doing is they are lying to us, first of all, with all their deals. They told us they would give us magnets. They are not." How does that not cause your phone to ring off the hook from several customers? Well, it is. I think that oftentimes, and we get asked this consistently, people mistake not announcing a deal every 20 minutes for not getting a phone call every 20 minutes. I think if you believe, and we believe everything that I just laid out in terms of the strategic value of what we have built, particularly given the way that we have set up the business, where we have contracted cash flows at both magnet facilities, you would want me to be in no rush. Because the strategic value of that capacity is increasing by the day. We believe that to be true. I think I talked a little bit about our deal process on the call. There is a tremendous freak-out moment. If you think about the use cases in magnetics that are poised for very significant growth, and we get this question a lot, like what happens if everyone hugs and shakes hands in November? The growth vectors are all dual use items, so it does not matter. This is literally equipping the future of warfare, the future of economic competition between two great powers. There is no way a switch flips and everything goes back to normal. I think it sort of speaks to the strategy of being methodical and making sure that we extract really maximum strategic value from the assets that we are building. Before I let you go, I warned you this was going to happen. Yes. I was doing riddles with my daughters this weekend, and I decided to add a little flavor to our presentations here. I am going to ask a riddle of the audience. Okay. Whoever gets it right gets a very high-quality CG Hydro Flask. Made in the U.S., or? Made in-- That's a good question. I do not know. I do not think there are any magnets in it, actually. Here it is. A cowboy rode into town on Friday. He stayed three days and he left on Friday. How is that possible? Speak up. Any answers? The horse is named Friday. That's right. The horse is named Friday. Okay. Winner. Thank you so much. Well done. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks. Appreciate it. That was awesome, as always.