American Battery Technology Compan Aktie

Good afternoon. I'm Tiffiany Moehring, and I'm the Director of Communications and Marketing at the American Battery Technology Company. I would like to welcome everyone to our fiscal year third quarter 2026 earnings call. On behalf of the entire team at American Battery Technology Company, I would like to sincerely thank everyone for taking the time to join our call today. Following this presentation, a recording of this call, along with our press release will be available on our website. This presentation does include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation 1995 Act. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding the factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in our annual filings.

On today's call, our CEO and CTO, Ryan Melsert will provide remarks regarding our 2 lines of business, which include our lithium-ion battery recycling business and our primary claystone to lithium hydroxide business.

It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Ryan, who is joined by our CFO, Alex Flores.

Great. Thank you, Tiffany, and thank you, everyone, for joining today. As a reminder, we are a critical mineral manufacturing business, and we are working to implement a domestic closed-loop supply chain. In order to do this, we have 3 primary mechanisms. We have designed and are operating a lithium-ion battery recycling facility. This facility takes in waste from different steps of the manufacturing process as well as end-of-life batteries. We process those materials and make critical minerals that we then sell back into the market to our partners.

Closing the loop is extremely important for gaining access to these critical minerals. However, in addition to closing the loop, we also need to fill that loop the first time. And that's why we also have acquired critical mineral deposits within the U.S. and have designed our own processes for how to access these critical minerals and how to manufacture them back into battery-grade products. So with these 2 lines of business, we're both closing the loop and filling that loop the first time with domestic low-cost, low-impact critical minerals.

When we look at operations from our past quarter, we have been operating our first battery recycling facility near Reno, Nevada. And while operating this quarter, we did have record-breaking revenue. So we were able to generate about $7.8 million, a 64% increase from our previous quarter. And this was achieved largely through increased capacity factor at our first facility as we've continued to ramp operations and scale production. While our revenue grew substantially, our cost of goods sold to operate this facility grew at a much lower rate. So only about 11% increase in cost of goods sold compared to our previous quarter.

And when removing noncash expenses such as depreciation and stock-based compensation, this drops down to about $5.8 million of actual cash costs. This allows us to have a positive gross margin, the first positive gross margin that this company has had. And this is an achievement that many start-ups never get to. So we are very excited and proud at ABTC that we've achieved these positive gross margin operations at our first battery recycling facility and encourages us as we move forward with future facilities. Again, we're not including cash expenses. This adjusted gross margin grows to $2 million for the quarter. We've also maintained a healthy cash balance, about $38.5 million as of the end of the quarter. And also, we, as a company, still have no debt whatsoever. So leaves us with a very strong balance sheet as we move forward, continuing to scale our first facility and also moving forward with the construction of additional facilities.

In addition to our 3-month performance, if we step back and look at our fiscal year-to-date, so 9 months into this year, we've generated about $13.5 million in revenue so far this fiscal year. And again, our cost of goods sold is about $17.9 million. And when looking specifically at our cash cost of goods sold, $14 million. So as we look at the 9 months of operations to date, again, we are getting very close to adjusted gross margin positive operations. So we have 3 more months in our fiscal year, and we are looking forward to continue to ramp our facility and to show even stronger performance as we wrap up our fiscal year in a few months.

Within the battery recycling business itself, the growth in revenue and operations really was about increase in our operational effectiveness as we continue to scale these operations. We work very closely not just with automotive companies to recycle electric vehicle batteries, but also with large grid operators. And a significant portion of our feed over the past few months has come from these large energy storage systems that are largely used to support data centers and artificial intelligence development. While our revenue grew again by about 64%, we only grew the cash cost of operations by about 11% as we continue to implement our cost down optimizations to really be able to provide a much healthier gross margin in this past quarter.

We continue to work with many government agencies and handle both universal waste and circular classified material, which does end up being a significant portion of our feed as we work with all different types of battery materials throughout the country. Because of the operational effectiveness of this first facility and as we continue to increase the capacity factor, we are moving forward with the construction of a second critical mineral recycling facility. And over the past few months, the team has spent significant time meeting with economic development agencies, with politicians at the state level. And we're excited to shortly announce the details of our next recycling facility to be located in the Southeast U.S.

And we continue to work with a lot of our partners as well. A lot of the decision of where we actually specifically put the second facility is in consultation with our partners throughout the supply chain so that we continue to enhance operations as we scale the second facility. On our primary lithium business, we are continuing to develop our Tonopah Flats Lithium Project, which is one of the largest identified lithium deposits in the U.S. We published our pre-feasibility study last fall and are now moving forward with our definitive feasibility study.

We're excited to have been chosen by the National Energy Dominance Council and the FAST-41 Permitting Council as a covered project. So essentially, we've been selected for streamlined federal permitting as we move this critical mineral lithium project forward. This deposit is located entirely on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of Interior. So working closely with the Federal Government and having these fast-track streamlined operations has been extremely meaningful over the past year.

Last fall, we announced that we did complete all of our environmental studies that were submitted to the BLM and have been reviewed by the BLM itself. This is something we started back in the fall of 2022. So almost 4 years of efforts were culminated by completing each of those baseline studies and environmental analysis. The DFS is really the final phase of the engineering and financial analysis that we need to communicate to our offtake partners, to our investors and to all stakeholders. So again, as we complete our PFS last fall, we are working towards the completion of this definitive feasibility study. And some of the stats from the PFS are on the right, which really show how we plan to scale and operate this 30,000 tonnes per year facility and the financial attractiveness of moving this project forward. For the 3 months ending in March, our financials presented here against that same quarter a year ago. So again, substantial growth in revenue from this quarter, about $7.8 million worth.

With our cash balance, we also are generating income from interest on that cash balance itself. And while the revenue grew dramatically, we see only moderate increases in the cost of goods sold as we scale these operations. We continue to work with several agencies within the U.S. government who are funding specific parts of both our development and construction of projects. And as we look at how we use cash over this quarter, we had a significant drop in cash really needed for operating activities compared to a year ago. And within this quarter, we didn't raise any funds through issuances through our at-the-market instrument or from exercising of any outstanding warrants or options. And we ended the quarter with about $38.5 million in cash.

When we look over the 9-month period for fiscal year-to-date, again, a very large increase in revenue and only a moderate increase in cost of goods sold as we continue to grow the product we make much more quickly than our operating expenses themselves. Continue to work with the Federal Government over the past 9 months. And again, when we look at how cash has been used. So an increase in cash used to purchase property and capital equipment. And even with a much higher throughput than our recycling facility, we actually reduced operating costs from a cash basis in the past 9 months versus the 9 months of last fiscal year.

Last fall, we did raise substantial funds and again, ended this quarter with about $38.5 million in cash. Separate from our financials, at ABTC, we do think it's important that really all employees have company shares as part of their compensation agreements. This is throughout the entire structure of the company itself. When these shares are awarded, they're generally issued over many years and spread out over time. And many of them are conditional as well, meaning they're only awarded if certain individual or company milestones are achieved.

When we work on preparing our financial statements, a decision is made about whether a future milestone is likely to be achieved or not. And even before any shares are issued, then this starts appearing as an operating expense on our financial statements. So a lot of these expenses can be inconsistent as they show in some quarters, really as it becomes more likely that a milestone is achieved. But the chart there really shows that over the past few years, really the amount of shares actually issued to employees is relatively consistent. So just over 1 million shares per quarter. And again, this goes all the way throughout the chain of the company. We do think it's important that all employees really do have ownership. It does align incentives, and it does allow us to grow together with the employees and the company itself.

So that's the walk-through of our financials from our fiscal Q3 for the fiscal 2026 year. And again, thank everyone for joining this call, and we hope you are as excited about our path forward as we are.

Good afternoon. I'm Tiffiany Moehring, and I'm the Director of Communications and Marketing at the American Battery Technology Company. We would like to welcome everyone to our second quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call. On behalf of the entire team at American Battery Technology Company, we would like to thank everyone for taking the time to join our call today.

Following this presentation, a recording of this call, along with our press release and our quarterly SEC filings will be made available on our website. This presentation does include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigations Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding the factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in our annual filings.

On today's call, our CEO and CTO, Ryan Melsert, will provide remarks regarding our two lines of business, which include our lithium-ion battery recycling business and our primary claystone to lithium hydroxide business.

It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Ryan.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to this meeting. As we've discussed beforehand, we at American Battery Technology Company, have our two main business units, and we are working to implement the closed-loop infrastructure shown on the right. So first, we have our lithium-ion battery recycling technology that we have developed over the past several years. We built our first commercial scale facility about 3 years ago and are in the process of designing and constructing a second facility. We work closely with each of the partners and the other sectors of this closed-loop economy. We received waste streams back from each of them as well as end-of-life material to process in our battery recycling plant, where we then manufacture critical mineral products to sell back to our domestic customers to work to close that supply chain.

Implementing this closed loop is very important. And if the amount of batteries in the field was fixed, battery recycling alone could supply just about all of the minerals needed. However, as the amount of batteries in the field is growing, in addition to closing the loop, we also need to fill the loop the first time. So that's why here at ABTC, we also have our own critical mineral resource, and we've developed our own technologies for how to extract the critical mineral lithium from the ground here in the U.S., how to extract it, how to purify it and how to make it into a final battery-grade critical mineral product.

So we are happy to be joined by a new executive in the company as well. So Alex Flores, as our new Chief Financial Officer, has joined as of this coming Monday. He has over 20 years of experience, leading financial organizations in both the battery and the automotive sectors throughout North America. He's worked leading significant projects and proposals with the U.S. government, supporting different types of financing and has significant experience driving operational improvements through large organizations. So we're excited to welcome him this coming Monday as we ramp our business units to their next levels.

As far as our financial summary for the previous quarter ending in December, we're excited to highlight that we have broken all of our records and achieved record high level of revenues for this facility. So we sold about $4.8 million worth of products just in the quarter ending December. And additionally had about $300,000 in our interest from income. So a substantial amount of $5.1 million we generated in that revenue and interest income for the quarter.

While we substantially scaled operations at our first recycling facility through a lot of operational efficiencies, our operating costs actually increased by a much smaller factor than our revenue. So as we're operating now going forward, that $5.1 million in revenue and interest income, during the same corresponding period, we had about $4.9 million in cash expenses to operate that plant. And when including noncash costs, including depreciation and stock-based compensation, about $6.4 million. So we were getting to the point where the amount of revenue and interest income we're generating is very close to the amount of cash costs it requires to run this plant.

We have additional ramp-up operations in place for this facility, additional operational efficiencies to put in place. And we're excited to be passing through the breakeven point on this plant and continuing to grow our margin as we move forward.

We also are at one of our highest cash positions we've been at in years through strong market actions last fall as well as many of our existing shareholders electing to exercise their warrants. We had a cash balance of $48.7 million as of the end of quarter in December. So as we have this cash balance, we'll be using that to continue to scale operations at this first recycling plant, continue to add additional value-add processes and also work to move our two new facilities forward.

Just as important, we were able to pay off any remaining debt or convertible notes in the past quarter. And as of now, we, as a company, have absolutely 0 debt. So very strong balance sheet as we move forward. Some of our largest cash positions in history, no debt, significantly increased revenue and only a minor increase in operating costs for this quarter ending December.

And that ramp of revenue is, again, more revenue generated in this quarter ending December than the previous 4 combined. So this is much greater than linear growth as we work to scale this facility.

Some of the highlights from the past quarter. We are receiving quite a bit of material from the automotive sector, but an increase in amount from the stationary grid Battery Energy Storage System field as well. Several large projects we have announced, we continue to receive material from each of those sectors. And again, increasing these operational efficiencies in the plant as we continue to scale operations, have reduced cost through economy of scale, but also lessons learned that we have an ever more trained workforce and keep offering the plant in more efficient manners.

As mentioned, we have received our CERCLA certification. We are able to receive this type of material that is generated from different types of stationary facilities throughout the country. It's a rare certification we have. We have a strong relationship with the EPA to manage this certification and are proud to be receiving these types of materials from different types of applications throughout the country.

As far as our recycling operations, we have announced that in addition to our first recycling plant near Reno, that we are moving forward with the design and construction of a second battery recycling facility in the Southeast U.S. So even just the past few months, we've had several team members at our site in the Southeast U.S., really working with local partners, a lot of our strategic partners in the area as well and moving the second recycling facility forward.

In our second business unit, we are manufacturing this lithium hydroxide from our claystone material. Again, we are continuing to move this Tonopah Flats Lithium Project forward. This is one of the few lithium projects in the country that has been identified at this scale and is actually moving through the maturity steps.

We built our integrated demonstration scale facility about 2 years ago, have had that running and actually demonstrating a much larger scale than is conventionally seen how we take our actual claystone from our own mine, how we move it through each of the operating steps through our extraction, our purification, our conversion, and our crystallization into a final battery-grade lithium hydroxide product.

We were proud to be selected last summer and fall by the Trump administration as a priority project. So we have been assigned essentially a liaison from the FAST-41 Permitting Council, holding weekly meetings, really working to drive each of our federal permits forward to accelerate the commercialization of this critical mineral facility. So we're excited to have a lot of that status on the public dashboard on the FAST-41 website, and we continue to move through these permitting steps at an accelerated rate after becoming a priority project.

We have completed all of the steps for submitting the baseline studies are now going through the NEPA process with the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy. And have been working on that process since the spring of 2023. So we're excited as we move forward and keep taking steps with the federal government.

We did publish our Pre-Feasibility Study last fall, showing the technology and financial road map for bringing this mine and refinery to market. So this is for the 30,000 tonne per year facility. We modeled it with a 45-year life-of-mine, showed very attractive returns with a net present value after-tax of about 8%. And one of the most competitive portions is the production cost at just over $4,300 per ton of product. This would make it one of the most competitive commercial scale facilities in the world and is really an artifact of us designing these processes internally from the ground up with a blank page system as we work to bring one of the first and only claystone mine and refineries to commercialization.

We've updated our lithium resource and reserve estimate several times. Within the PFS, we showed about 21.3 million tonnes of lithium hydroxide that is accessible from this report, included a substantial portion that has been upgraded beyond our resource into proven and probable reserves. As we've published that PFS last fall, we are now working diligently on the Definitive Feasibility Study to be published shortly. This really is the last step to having a bankable design as we engage with each of our investors for the investment in the refinery mine itself in addition to finalizing the offtake agreements for the product out of this facility.

For the financials, again, in summary, we're excited to show about $4.8 million of revenue from selling our product, an additional $300,000 in interest income for the quarter. The cost of goods sold increased by a much lower factor than our revenue increased, showing our approach on the margin for this recycling facility. We continue to receive funds from each of our government grants that we have contracted that are supporting the operation and construction of these facilities. And again, on our cash balance, substantial investments were made in the fall in this quarter ending December to bring our total cash balance up to about $47.9 million. So again, that balance is being used now to expand our current facilities and to break ground on our new facilities.

So again, thanks to our stakeholders, our shareholders, our partners, and we look forward to continuing to inform you as we scale up each of these operations moving forward.

And I believe we may have 1 question or 2 from the audience now.

Yes. We do have one question by Jake Sekelsky, who is the Managing Director and Head of Metals and Mining Research at AGP. He has the following question for you. Can you discuss progress related to the ramp-up of the $30 million EPA cleanup agreement?

Yes. That's in reference to the Moss Landing project in Northern California. That has been going through decommissioning for many months. We have been receiving material from that facility since the end of the summer. That represents a substantial portion of the feed into our factory, but we do have several other sources from the stationary market as well as the automotive market and the consumer electronics field. So we received large amounts of material from that project. We are still on pace to receive substantially more material and are happy to be working with them as partners.

I believe that's our only question for today. So again, thank you, everybody, for joining this webinar. Our actual 10-Q financials are being published now as well. And thank you, everyone, for your support.

Good afternoon. I'm Tiffiany Moehring, and I'm the Director of Communications and Marketing at the American Battery Technology Company. I would like to welcome everyone to our Fiscal Fourth Year Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. On behalf of the entire team at American Battery Technology Company, I would like to thank everyone for taking time to join our call today. Following this presentation, a recording of this call, along with our press release and our quarterly SEC filing, will be available on our website at investors.americanbatterytechnology.com.

This presentation includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Act 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding the factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in our annual filings.

On today's call, our CEO and CTO, Ryan Melsert, will provide remarks regarding our 2 lines of business, which include our lithium-ion battery recycling business and our primary claystone to lithium hydroxide business.

It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Ryan.

Great. Thank you, Tiffiany. As many of you know, we work in the critical mineral manufacturing business area. We are working to try to make the closed loop for the battery mineral supply chain within North America. Right now, this is much more of a linear economy and as we work through the system, we're working with many of the partners in the other areas of the closed-loop infrastructure.

In order to fully implement this closed-loop system, we found that multiple different aspects were needed to be added. The first is the implementation and commercialization of a lithium-ion battery recycling system. In this system, we take back waste material from other stages of the industry as well as end-of-life material, recycle those materials through a multiphase process and then make battery-grade materials that are sold right back into that closed loop.

If the total amount of batteries in the field was stable in a mature industry, recycling could provide the vast majority of minerals needed. But with how quickly, the battery industry is growing, in addition to closing the loop, we also need to be filling that loop the first time. So in addition to our battery recycling business unit, we have also acquired large amounts of mineral resources in the U.S. and developed our own first-of-kind technologies of how to extract those individual battery elements, how to purify and upgrade them and how to also make battery-grade products from our primary battery metals manufacturing business in addition to our better recycling business.

As for our quarterly earnings that we are reviewing today, we're proud to show that compared to the previous quarter, we had a very large increase in revenue for the company. This is largely due to increased operations at our first battery recycling plant just outside of Reno. So we nearly tripled revenue this quarter compared to the quarter ending March. And at the same time, we had a much smaller relative increase in our cash cost of goods sold, really showing that as we hit economies of scale and larger operation, the first recycling plant, our revenues are growing at a much faster pace than our costs. So we look forward to continuing to ramp this plant and continuing to improve that gross margin.

Separate from our quarterly financials, we also did just finish our fiscal year. And when you tie those past 4 quarters together, we also see a very substantial increase in revenue of about $4.3 million for this past year compared to about $0.3 million the year beforehand. And similarly, it's a much larger relative increase in revenue than the increase in the cash cost of goods sold, allowing for an increase in margin as we continue to scale that plant and improve operations. Beyond just the recycling plant, total operational costs for the business actually decreased this past year over the year beforehand as we again experienced the economies of scale and had cost control measures to improve operations.

We were excited to have been selected to be listed on the Russell 2000 and 3000 indices back in June. This is really a sign that we have a different scale of investors as we move forward. And because of that operations, we have seen a very substantial increase in trading volume since being added to that index and a significant increase in percentage ownership from institutional investors. With that market activity, we've increased our cash balance to just over $25 million as of September 15 this year.

As mentioned, our battery recycling operations, the main metric over the past year is that we have increased the throughput of our plant about 70% in a single quarter for the quarter ending June versus ending March. This really has been about a large amount of incremental improvements as we continue to add headcount, add shift count, have increased amounts of material and improve our operations there.

We've been working with several different projects at this recycling facility for the past few years. One of them is a grant contract we won from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium from a project that actually started back in the fall of 2021.

We've worked on that project for many years, and we formally closed out that project a few months ago, really able to show that we had achieved each of the requirements of that grant contract as we work with the partners there: with the U.S. Department of Energy, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis; to really demonstrate that this recycling plant could take in full-scale batteries, recover those materials, purify the battery metals up to battery grade; work with our partner, BASF, to actually take those recycled metals, manufacture large amounts of high-energy density active cathode material specifically from those recycled mills and make large amounts over 100 full-scale automotive battery cells from our recycled metals and actually test those cells at both our partner and Department of Energy facilities against control group cells and really being able to show that there was very little difference about the performance of the battery cells when using our recycled metals versus using metals from the market.

This is a very important step for going through large-scale qualifications of many different customers. We were excited to receive financial support from the USABC and to now have this project closed out as we move forward to these different opportunities.

Because of our increased operations and the success is working with our partners on these early scale projects, last September, we were notified that we had been selected for a competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for $144 million to now construct a second battery recycling plant. We were selected back in September 2024 and through an accelerated process we were contracted in December 2024 and actually started this project back on January 1, 2025. So we're excited to be taking all the lessons learned in our first recycling plant, working through our next-generation designs and moving forward with a second battery recycling facility.

While we work with a lot of automotive companies the past half year, we've really started to work even more with stationary grid battery systems. So these large battery energy storage systems usually work to support grid operations. They tend to be extremely large in the gigawatt hour scale and have a different type of load profile than we see within automotive batteries. But because we make battery-grade minerals, they work equally well, whether they're sold to companies to make batteries for vehicles or batteries for stationary storage. And similarly, we received both types of material into our recycling facility near Reno.

A few months though, we were fortunate enough to have been invited to the groundbreaking ceremony of one of the fastest supercomputers in the world at Argonne National Lab near Chicago. And the supercomputer is backed up by large amounts of grid scale batteries. So it was great being able to join the ceremony. There were very few private companies actually in attendance. It was mostly different government organizations and to really highlight how the U.S. manufacturing of critical minerals support data centers, support supercomputers and support different types of artificial intelligence and machine learning operations.

We were asked to present at this event actually to several dignitaries, including the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, back in July. So really being able to explain to him directly at the Argonne National Laboratory why both battery recycling and domestic lithium manufacturing are important to support data centers, supercomputer and artificial intelligence operations as we move forward. Because of our large amount of interactions with the DOE, it was great to be able to connect with this new administration and really show them the benefits of the projects we're working on together.

When we look at our primary claystone lithium hydroxide technologies, over the past several years, we have been building out this multi-tonne per day integrated pilot facility near Reno. While we finished bench scale operations a few years ago, it's very important to take those bench-scale results and actually build demonstration-scale integrated systems that operate in real time on a continuous fashion. This is a very big derisking step as we look to be building out our commercial scale lithium hydroxide refinery.

Similarly, we were fortunate enough to have the buildup of this demonstration facility supported by a Department of Energy grant. This project also started in the fall of 2021. And as of a few months ago, we've also officially closed out this project and completed all requirements, showing how we went through the design, construction, commissioning and then sustained operations in a multi-week run, showing how we feed our specific Tonopah Flats claystone material into this plant, go through each of the operating steps and make a battery-grade lithium hydroxide product at the back end. So we've made many different scales of samples to be sent out to different strategic customers and to be able to go through different types of analytical evaluations tests, manufacturing different types of active cathode material and again, making full-size battery cells with the lithium specifically extracted from our Tonopah Flats Project.

Because of the operations at our bench scale and these demonstration scale facility, we have continued to go forward with the design of our commercial scale 30,000-tonne lithium hydroxide per year facility, working with our selected EPC firm, Black & Veatch, continuing to send these materials to customers for a definition of different types of long-term offtake agreements as we progress that project. Building this demonstration facility has been great advancing the technology and derisking the construction but a parallel effort is advancing our permitting progress for the local, state and federal levels.

We were excited a few months ago to have been selected by the White House, the National Energy Dominance Council and the FAST-41 Permitting Council to have our Tonopah Flats Lithium Project be selected as a transparency priority project, which is really meant to streamline all federal permitting operations for high priority critical mineral projects within the U.S. Being selected for this was important to really get alignment amongst many of the different federal agencies. And this transparency priority project was really set up by the Executive Order that President Trump issued back on March 20.

But on top of becoming a transparency priority project, there was actually an escalation and we were approved to become a full covered project just back in August. So now having our Tonopah Flats Lithium Project be a covered project, we have a project coordinator actually assigned to this effort, holding meetings amongst all different federal agencies and really driving visibility and accountability as we move forward. So just in the past few weeks, we've seen very significant acceleration of these permitting efforts as we work to bring these different federal groups together.

And this FAST-41 Committee works amongst all different federal agencies, including we've mentioned that back in the spring, we did receive a letter of interest from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to provide a $900 million low-interest loan to support this Tonopah Flats Lithium Project. So as a federal agency, this is also being facilitated through the permitting council and through our selection as a covered project.

We mentioned we were added to the Russell Index back at the end of June. Since being added, we have a different set of investors really owning and trading our stocks. We've seen a very significant increase in our trading volume per day since the end of June being selected and also a big increase in the amount of institutional ownership. This does really provide many different types of discussions we've had with strategic investors since then and has really facilitated different types of funding opportunities as we move forward.

As a summary of our financial results for this fiscal year versus the previous one, as mentioned, a very substantial increase in revenue really by increasing the operations and the ramp rate of our first battery recycling plant. Our cost of goods sold has increased, but at a lower percentage than our revenue has increased. And as we continue to scale that plant, we expect to see continued improvements in our margin.

We continue to receive funds from our government grants we have contracted, including ones that have started partway through the fiscal year. So we do expect to see that increase as we ramp up those newer projects. And throughout the year, we were able to taking substantial funds through our financing activities, an increase in funds used for operating activities as we continue to ramp up our first recycling plant and a substantial decrease and our cash used for investing activities.

As mentioned, our cash balance has increased substantially, both at the end of the fiscal year and as in September as we continue to receive funds really facilitated by that listing on the Russell 2000 Index and the exercising of several of our outstanding warrants. We still have a large balance on our contracted government grants as these are multiyear projects that we continue to receive funds on as we move forward. And we have received some competitive tax credits last spring that will still be monetized as we move forward and continue to build out our first recycling plant near Reno, and our second recycling plant in the Southeast U.S.

That's a summary of our financial results for the past fiscal year. We will be holding our Annual Shareholder Meeting in November, at which time, we will go through more details about the operations of our past year and some more of our multiyear operations as we look more forward looking.

So at this time, I'd like to thank everybody for joining this earnings call as we went through the details of both our fiscal fourth quarter and our full fiscal year. And again, we look forward to seeing everybody in mid-November at our full Annual Shareholder Meeting.