Yahoo Finance MP Materials Corp. (NYSE:MP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
MP Materials Corp. (NYSE:MP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 2, 2024
MP Materials Corp. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.04 EPS, expectations were $-0.01. MP Materials Corp. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good afternoon. Thank you for attending the MP Materials First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call and webcast. My name is, Victoria, and I'll be your moderator today. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Martin Sheehan, head of investor relations. Thank you. You may proceed, Martin.
Martin Sheehan: Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the MP Materials first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me today from MP Materials are Jim Litinsky, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Michael Rosenthal, Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Ryan Corbett, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations that are subject to various assumptions and caveats. Factors that may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation, earnings release and in our SEC filings. In addition, we have included some non-GAAP financial measures in this presentation.
Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today's earnings release and the appendix to today's slide presentation. Any reference in our discussion today to EBITDA means adjusted EBITDA. Finally, the earnings release and slide presentation are available on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jim. Jim?
Jim Litinsky: Thanks, Martin. Hello, everyone. As is our usual program, I will open by covering some year-to-date highlights. Ryan will then go through our financial performance and operating KPIs. Michael will follow that with an overview and updates on Mountain Pass operations, and I will then come back with some closing remarks before Q&A. So, let's start on slide four. As Michael hinted at on our fourth quarter call, our concentrate production in the first quarter was outstanding. We produced the second-highest tonnage of REO in Mountain Pass history. Plant uptime was at near-record levels. This was a particularly impressive quarter of upstream execution, given that we are operating with the backdrop of continued downstream optimization and site expansion efforts.
As discussed in detail last quarter, we are tactically managing our refining ramp in light of the market environment. We are focused on near-term cash flow optimization while we position for maximum long-term profitability. Consequently, record-level production this quarter meant strong concentrate sales. In addition, the team continued to advance projects on Upstream 60K, our effort to increase Mountain Pass upstream output by approximately 50% over the next four years with modest levels of incremental investment. We expect this to create significant value for shareholders over time, and we are very pleased with what we are seeing so far on this execution journey. Moving to the midstream, we made our first NdPr metal sales out of Vietnam in the quarter, with most of that going to our Japanese partners through our Sumitomo relationship.
We are steadily expanding our ex-China customer base. With initial deliveries of NdPr oxide and metal to these new customers, we are building trust as a reliable supplier of on-spec, separated products. We expect these sales to ramp significantly as we support growing downstream demand outside of China. And of course, as Michael laid out in February, and we'll discuss in more detail in a minute, we are making solid headway on dialing in process conditions and implementing important improvements to optimize production and reduce costs in our separations business, which we expect will allow us to make step-change improvements in output in the back half of the year. Moving on to our downstream magnetics business, we made tremendous progress in the quarter.
I am very pleased to announce that the initial 1,000 metric ton design capacity of Fort Worth is fully committed. We have a lot of execution to do, but this is certainly a major milestone in the development of the business and is risk-reducing from a financial standpoint. As far as operations, we successfully completed a commercial-scale North American Electra-winning pilot with exciting results. We advanced installation and commissioning activities of magnet precursor materials in Fort Worth. In addition, we began commissioning our magnet prototyping line, which by the way, is quite a scaled operation relative to anything in the western world. This is critical as we expect Fort Worth to be the IP generation and operational know-how center for a powerhouse global manufacturer of scale.
What we are building now is important. Finish magnets are very much an engineered product, and there are a variety of market verticals. In addition to a wide range of standard magnet grades, each end magnet customer has its own requirement for performance, form factor, shape, coating, and heat resistance. Our pilot line allows us, using smaller-scale equipment similar to our commercial scale and often manufactured by the same vendors, to prototype specific magnets for customer qualification and process optimization. This really matters for long-term use cases beyond just scaling up for the EV hybrid, wind turbine, or HVAC growth opportunities. Vast commercial and national security use cases such as humanoid robotics and drones are going to need suppliers who can be more of a partner with scale instead of solely sourcing with mass-subsidized mercantilist manufacturers with competing priorities, to say the least.
But, as we set up this business, we will be maniacal about sources and uses and overall capital return and efficiency. We have to be thoughtful about how we manage risk and what are the right approaches to take to scale. In April, we received an initial $50 million prepayment for the manufacture and delivery of magnet precursor materials, which will begin later this year. We also recently announced a $58.5 million award of advanced energy project tax credits from the U.S. government, also known as the 48C tax credit program. It is important to note that the application process for this funding was incredibly competitive. We believe it was roughly 10 times over-subscribed. Winning this award highlights the significance of our mission, the unique technical and commercial capabilities of our team, and the high-impact nature of this project.
Lastly, many of you have heard me talk repeatedly about how much capital structure matters, especially given the volatile nature of our industry. And regardless of any short-term oriented shareholder pressure, we have been consistent in highlighting how much we recognize that thoughtful financial execution is key to our long-term success and value creation. I have made clear that we would act methodically when we could do thoughtful things with material impact. Well, in March, we were able to be opportunistic in a substantial way across our capital structure. We issued a new $747.5 million 2030 convertible with a low 3% coupon and in parallel effectuated a capped call that set the economic equivalent conversion price at a 100% premium to the then share price.
This computes to a 4.7% effective cost of debt capital MP through 2030 until our share price exceeds $31. We primarily utilize these proceeds to repurchase $480 million of our 2026 notes for about $0.89 on the dollar. And most importantly, bought back 7.3% of the company at a price we believe is heavily depressed relative to MP's intrinsic value. In addition, we have the added benefit of pushing the vast majority of our debt maturities out by a number of years to 2030. So in summary, we navigated another quarter of difficult down cycle macro conditions in our industry with relentless execution, both operationally and financially. Material value creation is often recognized on a lag and I think this quarter will be appreciated by investors over time.
With that, I will turn it over to Ryan to go through our financial performance and KPIs. Ryan?
Ryan Corbett: Thanks, Jim. Turning to slide six, I will walk through our operating metrics for stage one on the left-hand side of the page and our stage two metrics on the right. In the Upstream business, we produced 11,151 metric tons of REO and concentrate in the quarter, a 4.5% increase over the last year and over 20% more than Q4, mainly due to near record uptimes and higher feed rates. This higher production combined with our focus on efficiently increasing NdPr production we discussed in detail last quarter resulted in strong sales of REO and concentrate of 9,332 metric tons. This is down year-over-year as we consumed nearly a quarter of our concentrate production for downstream operations versus last year when we had all of our concentrate production available for sale.
Our realized price of REO and concentrate declined to $4,294 per metric ton due to the overall weak market pricing in rare earth materials. As we look at Q2, should prices hold in the mid $50 per kilogram range for NdPr, we would expect pricing to be down mid-single digit percentages sequentially as we deal with the slight lag in price realizations. Moving to the right side of the slide, as Michael mentioned in February, NdPr production volumes were roughly in line with our Q4 output at 131 metric tons. As we look at Q2, given some of the continued optimization steps we are taking here in April and May, even with our one week plant shutdown which was just completed, we would expect NdPr production to roughly double in Q2. And as Jim stated, we would expect much more meaningful step ups in production in the back half of the year which Michael will discuss shortly.
Looking at NdPr sales volumes, we sold 134 metric tons of NdPr on an oxide equivalent basis, mainly to customers in Japan. I would note that NdPr sales volumes will naturally lag production volumes as significant portions of our production are being toll processed into metal in Vietnam as we've discussed in prior quarters. This is part of the working capital investment you see on our balance sheet as we scale this midstream business. The lag on any given unit of production, of course, depends on a variety of factors, but we generally are seeing at least two to four months as we continue to fill the tolling channel and convert production into sales. Lastly, on the far right, you'll see our realized price per kilogram of NdPr was $62, which as we mentioned in February, exhibits a more notable lag to market prices than that of concentrate, with Q1 sales prices primarily based off fourth quarter market indices.
As such, we expect Q2's realized prices to decline approximately 20% following the trend we saw in market prices for Q1 over Q4. Turning to slide seven, revenues declined from last year to $48.7 million, driven by the lower concentrate realized pricing and sales, partially offset by beginning of sales of NdPr oxide and metal. Sequentially, sales improved 18% due to the increase in sales of NdPr oxide and metal. Adjusted EBITDA and related margins declined year-over-year to negative $1.2 million and negative 3%, respectively, in the quarter, primarily due to lower realized pricing for concentrate just discussed, which impacts EBITDA on a dollar-for-dollar basis, as well as the current subscale production of separated products. Adjusted EBITDA was impacted by a $6 million inventory reserve taken in Q1, which was included in cost of sales on the P&L.
So, before this reserve and the costs for magnetics embedded in our operations, our concentrate business remains nicely profitable, even at multi-year lows in commodity prices. As we discussed last quarter, our early cost of production of separated products is higher than our expected costs once we reach more normalized production levels, given we are staffed for higher production rates and early production often requires additional processing, labor, and certain rework that should not recur once operations normalize. With these impacts and the rapid deterioration in market prices, we reserved for certain inventory where costs are currently estimated to exceed net realizable value. This is not unexpected as we ramp up the plant and may continue for a short period as we finish our initial optimizations.
That said, we remain steadfastly confident in ultimately achieving a best-in-class per unit cost profile, and we should see improvements later this year as our production rams towards run rate levels. On the far right, you will see adjusted diluted EPS was a four-set loss, driven by the lower adjusted EBITDA and higher depreciation from the significant amount of assets placed in service over the last year. This was partially offset by lower tax expense in the quarter due to lower pre-tax income. GAAP EPS was also impacted by a $46.3 million gain associated with the early extinguishment of the majority of our 2026 convertible notes, which leads me to slide eight. We haven't shown a slide like this in some time, but given the significant transactions that took place in the quarter, we thought we would give an updated rundown of the changes.
So, running through the transactions. First, in early March, we issued $747.5 million of new 3% convertible notes due in 2030, strengthening an already solid balance sheet by materially extending the maturities on our debt, with the primary use of proceeds being to buy back a large portion of our existing 2026 notes. The new notes convert at a 40% premium to the share price on the date of the transaction, or $21.74 per share on a standalone basis. But, in connection with this offering, we entered into capped call transactions to effectively increase the premium of the 2030 notes to 100%, or $31.06 per share. The 3% coupon on the notes, while higher than our near-dated debt, reflecting the current interest rate environment, remains below the current market rate we receive on our cash investments, continuing to provide positive carry.
And, when including the cost of the capped calls, the all-in cost of the notes is approximately 4.7% until conversion, a very positive outcome for the company. As mentioned, the primary use of proceeds from the offering was to repurchase $480 million of our existing 2026 convertible notes, which we did for $428.6 million, or $0.89 of par value, which drove the $46.3 million gain in the quarter. I would also note that we made the election to pay any principal remaining on the 2026 notes in cash at maturity, so the shares underlying the remaining principal will fall out of our diluted share count calculations in future periods. Importantly, we also used $200.8 million to buy back 13 million shares, a fairly substantial retirement of 7.3% of the company's outstanding shares.
We have always said that we would be opportunistic on capital return, given how we have positioned our balance sheet, and given the confidence we have in our go-forward plan, as well as the substantial drawdown in our market value, in line with the current down cycle in NdPr prices, we saw a significant opportunity to create value for shareholders while maintaining a prudent balance sheet. As of March 31st, we are roughly net debt neutral after undertaking all of these transactions and continuing to invest in the required working capital to grow our midstream business. And despite weak commodity prices, we continue to expect our balance sheet to remain robust, with several cash contributors in the short and medium term beyond our base business, including significant product prepayments in our magnetics business, as well as the substantial cash impacts of both our 45X and 48C tax credits, which I will discuss in more detail in a moment.
To term out the vast majority of our debt maturities while capturing the value of both our depressed share price and the below par price of our existing notes, we expect will prove as we look to a stabilization and recovery in our commodity prices, as well as continued execution on our business plan. To put all of these transactions into a simpler form, particularly as it relates to the impacts on our share count, we have laid out the changes on the left-hand side of the slide. Please note that our GAAP diluted share count does not incorporate the anti-dilutive impact of the capped call transactions, which you can see incorporated in our adjusted figure on the bottom. And the table on the right side of the page walks you through the bridge from the left-hand side to a calculation of market cap and enterprise value, which would capture the principle of the convertible notes in the debt calculation and not in shares or market cap.
Regarding our cash balance, I'd note that subsequent to quarter end, and so not reflected on our Q1 balance sheet, we received an initial prepayment of $50 million for magnetic precursor products in stage three, and we expect a further $100 million of payments, assuming we hit our operational hurdles over the next 12 months. In addition, we expect approximately $20 million in cash from the IRS when we file our tax return here soon for 2023. And lastly, while timing and monetization options are still not finalized, we expect to realize $58.5 million from our 48C tax credits that we've discussed in the not-too-distant future. All told, that is over $220 million in sources of cash that we can expect beyond our base business operations. As it relates to cash flow in this first quarter, our cash from operations, in particular our working capital, was impacted by several discrete items, which is bridged in a slide in the appendix.
I would flag that our major NdPr metal deliveries were booked very late in the quarter, so cash was received in April. Further, we continue to build work in process inventory and finished goods inventory as we begin to further scale downstream production here in the next several months, and importantly, as we continue to feed the tolled metal sales channel. Lastly, we had a significant one-time cash spend on transaction costs in the quarter from costs recorded in both the Q4 and Q1 P&L, and made our typical Q1 annual bonus payouts to employees. Regarding gross CapEx, we spent approximately $51.8 million in the quarter in line with our full-year outlook of $200 million to $250 million, including Maintenance CapEx. With that, I will turn it over to Michael.
Michael?
Michael Rosenthal: Thank you, Ryan. Turning to slide nine, here is a picture of our Leach circuit, one of the areas I spoke about last quarter, where our focus is on optimizing NdPr recoveries while sustaining high cerium rejection. And on slide 10, we have an overhead shot of our separations pad, with the light-rare earth separation circuit on the far left, to the right of which are our product finishing circuits, water treatment plant, and power plant. Slide 11 shows storage racks of our NdPr oxide in one-metric ton supersacks waiting to be shipped. The highlight of the quarter was, of course, the very strong production in our Upstream business, where, with the adjustments made in the prior quarter, we were able to achieve slightly higher throughput per operating hour with a stable recovery end grade.
This, combined with less unplanned downtime and better operational execution and some adjustments to the cleaner flotation operation, resulted in solid production growth year-over-year. We had a modest headwind from reagent adjustments that temporarily impacted recovery. Looking ahead, the first Upstream 60K projects may begin trial operations in the third quarter. These include enhancements to the grinding circuits and a large-scale pilot flotation cell to improve rougher performance and deep bottleneck cleaner flotation. As with most new processes, we expect these could cause instability and or lower uptime before the benefits come through, but we are very excited about the long-term opportunity of both of these projects. As mentioned on last quarter's call, we spent much of the first quarter working to improve the efficiency of our midstream operations.
We are making very good progress. As part of these efforts and improvements, and given some unforeseen challenges, we ended up temporarily inventorying additional volumes of intermediate streams rather than seeing them through to finish product volumes. This partially contributed to the higher unit cost of production in Q4 and, to a greater extent, Q1. However, we made several breakthroughs that we expect to contribute to stable, low-cost production. In addition to those developments that I mentioned on the Q4 call, we made additional progress later in Q1 and into April in purification, separation, and product finishing. Adding it all up, we saw a slight decline in production quarter-over-quarter to 131 tons. Of this, over half was packaged in March.
April continued to improve on a production per operating day basis. In late April, we began our first semi-annual site-wide maintenance outage of 2024. We undertook two major projects that coincided with the end of life of assets installed by our predecessor. This included replacing and upgrading one of our power plant turbines and replacing the motor on our grinding mill. When complete later in Q2, the power plant turbine project should allow for higher generating capacity at lower operating cost and heat rate. The upstream business resumed normal production on schedule, and we are quite pleased with the results since restart. Several debottlenecking projects were implemented in our midstream business, both during the outage and thereafter, with one important project still underway.
As a result, and as expected, there will be a slight offset in the timing of restart of some of these midstream assets compared to the Upstream ones. NdPr oxide production in Q2 will therefore depend upon the exact timing and trajectory of restart. Nonetheless, we are targeting to approximately double production volumes here in Q2, with another significant increase in Q3. So, I would reiterate my previous guidance that we will only push volume when we can do so while also lowering our fixed and variable unit costs of production. All-in-all, we are feeling very positive about our recent operating performance. While we have enormous room to improve our processes and improve our internal execution, our largest challenges and frustrations are mechanical reliability that I strongly believe is in no way a reflection of our process conditions or design.
Supply chains continue to be brutally slow, and this has delayed our ability to address some of the problems. However, we are starting to reach the end of these long lead times and are seeing the benefit of more reliable equipment. With this, we expect to improve our throughput with lower fixed and variable costs of production, with higher yields and less product rework. Before I turn it back to Jim, I'd like to highlight that we recently completed our fourth full year without a lost time injury. This is a remarkable achievement considering the complexity and growth of the operation and the number of new employees we have brought into the MP Materials family. I want to thank all of our teams in Las Vegas, Mountain Pass, and Fort Worth for their incredible efforts every day.
With that, I will turn it back over to Jim.
Jim Litinsky: Thanks, Michael. Let's move on to slide 12, where you can see a gorgeous night shot of our initial magnetics facility in Fort Worth. This looks like a rendering, but actually it is not. This is real and is the road front side view of our facility that spans 250,000 square feet and houses manufacturing operations, R&D, and our Magnetics headquarters. As I said earlier, we are making a lot of progress across our businesses. Unfortunately, this was another dismal quarter for NdPr prices. We see some green shoots with recent price action, but the trajectory to a market recovery is, of course, outside of our knowledge and or control. As I've noted, though, I strongly suspect that most of Chinese industry is losing money at these prices.
Some of you may have seen headlines about a recent high-level U.S. government visit, including the Treasury Secretary, to China last month, where discussion centered around China's state-led economic behavior. I doubt any of us would be surprised if this topic heightened into a hysteric pitch as we approach the election season. Regardless of the cause, there is no doubt that recent market conditions have crushed Western and allied attempts to broaden private investment in the rare earth supply chain. In addition, with so many investor revisions around expectations for EV penetration, or at least the timing of it, critical materials investing in general, especially for those that are battery inputs, is out of favor. There are some important distinctions, though, for rare earths and permanent magnets that will eventually matter.
First, as it relates to EV penetration, there is still growth, albeit slower growth, and hybrids are picking up a lot of the expectations slack. In March, in the U.S., for example, plug-in hybrids grew 56% year-over-year. This resulted in 19% year-over-year overall growth for electrified vehicles, i.e. those that are either battery electric vehicles or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. To remind you, permanent magnets are in the motors, not the battery. Hybrids still utilize a lot of permanent magnet content, so if the transition to full EVs involves increased short-term penetration of hybrids, we believe the rare earth industry is somewhat agnostic. Moreover, as the West revisits and reorients assumptions, China is still leading the way on electrified penetration.
The growth there was 35% in March on a larger base, and we should see electrified penetration in China in excess of 50% by next year. As we push through this tough period, there is something even more powerful happening that should remind everyone how important our mission is. In recent months, we have seen BYD, NIO, Li Auto, and Xpeng [ph] introduce extraordinary electrified products at remarkably low cost to the rest of the world. For those of you who have followed us, we have been talking about this evolution since 2020 when we went public. The historical criticism around EV penetration was that they were too expensive. In all the bearishness on Wall Street in recent months, maybe some are not fully appreciating a broader point. Electrified vehicles are now essentially on pricing par with ICE, if not even cheaper in many cases, especially those made by Chinese automakers.
To what extent then can state-led behavior around resources, specifically the sale of rare earths at a loss, persist in the face of a full-on downstream expansion into global competition with all the major OEMs? Our guess is that for both economic and political reasons, the price of our products will eventually explode into true market-driven pricing. Some Western companies are better positioned than others. We should expect to see major disruption in the coming years as Chinese OEMs displace some Western ones in global prowess. This leads to one final and more important strategic thought. This same theme around the rise of Chinese industry evolving from supply chain domination to full downstream leadership applies also in humanoid robotics and drones.
Humanoid robots now accelerated into reality with AI are likely to utilize multiples per unit of magnet content versus that of EVs. The national security implications here are extraordinary. For us in America, the runway to think about this issue is longer than in autos, but should begin now. There is no doubt though that the logical conclusion of all this is that MP's mission matters. With that, let's open it up for Q&A. Operator?
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