Asp Isotopes Inc Aktie

Good afternoon to those of you here in London, and welcome to everyone joining us on the webcast. I'm Shveta Dighe, the Head of Investor Relations at ASP Isotopes. On behalf of the entire leadership team, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our inaugural Capital Markets Day.

Before we begin, a reminder that participants today may make forward-looking statements with respect to the operations and financial targets of ASP Isotopes. These are based on current management expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made today reflect the knowledge and information available at the time of this presentation, and the company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements. We encourage you to review the forward-looking statement disclosure in the slide deck accompanying this presentation. We'll hear from each of our businesses today, followed by a panel and audience Q&A. So please hold your questions until then.

Let's begin with a short video about the company, our plans, our people and the breadth of what we do.

[Presentation]

Join me in welcoming our Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Paul Mann.

So thanks, everyone, for coming today. It's great to see so many people here, and thanks, everyone, for joining us online. It's great for your interest in the company. So it's actually our fifth birthday at the end of this week. Robbie and I started this company up 5 years ago, and it was just 2 of us then, now over 400 people operating in 3 different continents. We have multiple plants around the world. So it's been quite a journey we've come on over the last 5 years or so. As I look forward, the last 5 years have been about building a company. The next 5 years about growing the company and really scaling it up now to become one of the biggest suppliers of critical materials globally. And there are so many critical materials the world needs.

As I said on the slide, we've built sort of 3 or 4 enrichment plants or chemical plants in South Africa. And our goal is to achieve over $300 million in EBITDA in 2031. And we're going to take you through the path of how we get there over the next 5 years.

We've built plants and facilities that will service industries where we have structural shortages. These industries are growing at rates well above GDP, and they're needed for the future of our life in terms of improving our life. So you think about nuclear medicine, we've treated tens of thousands of patients a year. We have got a number of drugs in development, and you'll see those today, some of them going to the clinic later on this year. We've now got 4 radiopharmacies servicing patients. And this is really kind of growing. And we're in the early innings of a new therapeutic cycle where nuclear medicine is used to both diagnose and treat cancer patients, and it's very exciting to be involved in that industry.

Electronics industry, semiconductors have kind of exhausted the laws of physics now. New materials are going to be needed to make faster semiconductors, new materials needed for quantum computing. And our goal is to be the supplier of those materials for next-generation semiconductors. The world is desperate for helium. You can't launch a rocket without helium. You can't make a semiconductor without helium. You can't make an MRI scan without helium. And we're bringing on our helium supply exactly at the time when the world needs more supply from a more diverse geographic range of suppliers. And finally, nuclear fuels, if we want to power the earth in 2050, the world wants to triple the amount of nuclear power over the next 25 years or so. It's probably not going to manage that. But if it wants to double or just grow it, it needs a lot more nuclear fuel. And Ryno and his team at Quantum Leap Energy will explain what they're doing to try and solve that nuclear fuel supply chain.

And what we've done over the last 5 years is we found some really unique assets that we've managed to acquire at very attractive valuations to really drive shareholder returns. And so 5 years ago, we acquired our first assets, the isotope assets in South Africa, the team of scientists that were responsible for South Africa's nuclear program back in the '80s. We bought them out of retirement. We kind of constructed a couple of plants there, and those plants are now operational. We acquired PET Labs as a springboard to grow into nuclear medicines. We're vertically integrated from the stable isotope to the radioisotope. PET Labs is now quite a sizable business. It grew 50% year-on-year in the first half this year. And that's going to provide fantastic returns for shareholders.

And then finally, Renergen, or Noble Africa, we acquired that asset in January of this year. We've added a lot of headcount to that business. We've invested in it. We've made some management changes, brought in a lot of engineers and a lot of drillers. And that plant started cooling down and commissioning during August. And we essentially hit the target temperature of 4 Kelvin. And now we should start producing commercial product by the end of September.

So here are some pictures of our plants that we've built over the last 5 years. So you'll see on the left is our first plant, the Carbon-14 plant. That's currently producing Carbon-12. And I'll give a full update on the exact operations later on in the presentation, but you see a picture there of a plant that we acquired in pieces, and we put it together to make a Carbon-12 and Carbon-14 plant. You see in the middle a Silicon-28 plant that is enriching Silicon-28 today. There's been some delays and some start-up problems, and we'll address those later on. But that's our second plant, and that's currently enriching product exactly in line with what we expect it to do. And the Ytterbium-176, we first enriched Ytterbium-176 about a year ago, and we spent the last year turning a small kind of scientific vessel or a scientific production plant into what is commercially viable to produce large commercial quantities of an isotope that the world needs to treat patients with prostate cancer.

So on the left here, you'll see Noble Africa, our Renergen site in South Africa, in Welkom, South Africa. And this is one of the most unique assets in the world, and we'll talk about it more later on today. But there really aren't many -- no gas fields we've seen like this in the world. It's an incredible location, incredible product that comes out of it. And I say the world is desperate for a new supplier of helium. And PET Labs in the middle is already generating good revenues. We treated over 10,000 patients last year. This as far, has gone exceptional. We've added another cyclotron to it, and it's growing fantastically. And we're very proud at PET Labs. We supply all of our doses to children under the age of 18 free of charge in South Africa. It's not appropriate for a child to suffer from cancer because the parents haven't got insurance can't afford it. We make sure the local youth population is looked after.

And then finally, we've got 2 radiopharmacies in the U.S. Our goal is to expand PET Labs globally over the next 5 years, and this is our springboard for the U.S. And I say the world needs to probably double or triple the amount of radiopharmaceutical production over the next 5 or 10 years, and we intend to be one of the drivers of that growth. So this just summarizes what's producing revenues today, what to expect in terms of revenues in the near future, and it shows you some of our targets. And I'd say it's -- things are really starting to motor now. And it feels like the company is really at an inflection point where we really start to start moving a lot faster.

So next slide. So to summarize, these shortages that the world has are structural, and they're not going to resolve themselves. We've built capacity in plants and technologies to solve them. Many of these are needed for technologies that the world needs to grow to have new semiconductors, to have new nuclear medicine to launch rockets. We've constructed now 3 isotope plants and a very large cryogenic plant, and they're all up and running and 3 of them are producing -- some of them producing revenues already. I guess the milestones for the second half of the year, the first helium production should happen in September. And then the first commercial isotope shipments should happen through the second half of the year. And then in terms of corporate transactions, we've said we're going to list Noble Africa listing via reverse merger with ENDRA, ticker code NDRA. And the goal is to list QLE as a separate entity before the end of the year.

So I'm going to hand over now to R&D and engineering. None of this will be possible without our R&D and engineering team. We put together a magnificent team in Africa to design these plants, to build them to do research, and we're continuously researching to make our process better, more efficient, cheaper. So I hand over now to Dr. Ferreira and Dr. Puts.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Dr. Ignatius Ferreira. I hold a PhD in Chemical Engineering, and I am the Head of Research and Development at ASP Isotopes in South Africa. And I will be taking you through a quick overview of the capabilities and the functions within the R&D department.

Before we start off, we first need to understand what is an isotope. So an atom consists of protons, neutrons and electrons, where the number of protons define the element. But for a specific element, you can have a different count of neutrons and that is an isotope. So isotopes also occur naturally and depending on the element in a certain ratio. So for example, here, silicon is given, we have Silicon-28, 29 and 30. So what is it what we do? Well, we can target, for instance, Silicon-28 specific isotope. We separate it and then we can concentrate it and that is our product. So now the question arises, why are we interested in a certain isotope? So a certain isotope can have certain special chemical properties that we can exploit for certain applications.

So how do we go about this? Well, we essentially have 2 enrichment platforms. The one being Quantum Enrichment, this involves lasers where we exploit the transition energies to ionize the isotope. We then separate this by means of an electric field. What makes this technology unique is that it enables us to enrich isotopes of metals. It's extremely capital light and has a very high selectivity. On the other hand, we have the Aerodynamic Separation Process. So this involves in principle, gaseous diffusion, where we can enrich, in particular, gases or light gases of a low molar mass. So you can look there Silicon-28, Carbon-12 and Carbon-14. Extremely important with this technology is that it is scalable because it's a modular technology. I'll get into a bit more detail later on that.

So if you have a look at the Quantum Enrichment platform, every isotope absorbs light at a slightly different frequency. So by tuning lasers, we can then select an isotope or target it and then separate it electrically. Selectivity is extremely high, and that enables us to reach our enrichment in a single step. In principle, we can use this technology to separate most elements.

Moving on to the ASP technology. So in essence, it consists of 2 stages, so 2 stages in 1 separator unit, where the first stage is a stationary wall centrifuge compared to conventional technologies where you have many moving parts. So you have pressurized flow through the cylindrical wall, and it enables us to enrich lighter isotopes. The second stage involves flow directors. So for illustrative purposes, the schematic is shown of the Becker nozzle. For IP reasons, obviously, we won't be showing our own highly engineered flow directors, but you have 1 unit consisting of 2 separation stages. What this boils down to, it is capital light, modular in capacity, low energy costs, and we have a proven track record.

So as mentioned earlier, it is modular. So what this means is we can combine many modules or units to create a cascade, where you have enrichment across the stages. Just to mention here or to highlight, this is only for illustrative purposes. This does not reflect the number of stages we would typically need. But you will have enrichment in one direction of an isotope and then by default, you will have enrichment in the other direction. And dependent on the targeted isotope, you can either have this as a product or that as a product depending on whether you're interested in the heavier or lighter isotope.

So how do we go about in the R&D department to develop the technology. Emphasis here everything is done in-house from theoretical -- apologies, from theoretical development all the way to handover within our own operations. So from step 1 to step 5 is quite an iterative process. So we start off with theoretical development. We design the module or the unit, we simulate it, then we physically manufacture a prototype. We verify its performance with our test benches and then we move on to chemical analysis to validate the results that we've predicted. We iterate here until we finalize the design. Then we are able to upscale because it is modular, so we can create the same unit over and over. Each and every part is manufactured in-house and assembled by our dedicated assembly team. So from there, we qualify the units and we hand them over to our own operations. What this means is there's no licensing fees. The entire cost and schedule is our own, and we are not dependent on external parties.

So within the R&D team, how do we achieve all this? We've invested greatly within the R&D team. So currently, the R&D team consists of about 30 individuals where consisting of chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, support personnel and experienced technicians. And what does a diverse team enables us is to have a multidisciplinary look or perspective on the technology to continuously improve. The R&D function is not stagnant, and we are continuously looking at improvement and looking at new technologies as well. So in essence, what it boils down to is the people who invented the separation technology is now also industrializing and commercializing it.

I'm now going to hand over to Dr. Puts from the engineering department, where we have a very, very close collaboration. Dr. Puts?

Thank you, Ignatius. So as Ignatius mentioned, I'm Gerard Puts. I am the principal process engineer for ASP working in the Engineering division. And the Engineering division has a very close collaboration with R&D. Now isotope separation is a very niche industry. This is not oil and gas or automotive or any of these other industries that have been existing for quite some time. Isotope separation, commercial isotope separation, the way we're doing it has actually existed only for a very short period of time. So there are no EPCM houses. You can go to and ask them, please design me an ASP plant or design me a laser separation plant. There are very limited suppliers that you can approach in order to get equipment for these kinds of plants. So for that reason, we have had to in-house our own EPCM capabilities also in order to protect the technology, which is a statutory requirement.

So in our engineering team, we in-house, we have the entire EPCM function in-house. We have process engineers, we have mechanical engineers. We have our EC&I team, which is the electricians and the control team, and we also have nuclear engineering, all of that under one roof. We also then have our own project management, our own project control simply so that we can maintain control over the schedule and we can maintain control over the actual project and the procurement and all of these time lines.

But then because isotope separation is such a unique industry, oftentimes you find that whereas other industries can buy software that they can use to aid in the design or aid in the simulations, you could get a package, but then you'd have to go and modify it to meet your specific needs or you couldn't even find software to begin with. So we've also in-sourced our own software development team to enable us to generate the necessary engineering tools in order to achieve our goals. So we have this full EPCM capability, and our headcount has grown every year. Now it's quite simple. The engineering scales ahead of the plants, not behind them. That's why you have the engineering team growing and increasing upfront. So some of the advantages of having an in-house engineering team is shown here and is summarized very simply. When the market cannot supply it, we design it and we make it ourselves.

So there are some examples of what we have designed. The first one over there is a molar mass meter. So of course, in our plants, we've got gases flying around, and we need to measure the composition, which we express as the molar mass of the gas. Now yes, you can find equipment commercially that can do this, but these pieces of equipment have very long lead times attached to them, sometimes 2 to 3 years. There's export control, all of these sorts of issues. So we have gone back to first principles. We have designed and we have constructed these molar mass meters from first principles. We have built them, we've commissioned them, we've put them in the plant and the process control is running off of these equipment.

Another example of this is the PAR control valve there. So long technical story about what that is. It's commercially available. And when we approached the suppliers, they told us that lead time is 90 days plus. They weren't sure about the 90 days part, but they were very sure about the plus part. So of course, you can't do business like that. So we decided, okay, we're going to do this in-house. We went to first principles, and we designed this, we built the prototypes, we did the testing and then we headed into commercial production for 160 units, all within the space of 6 weeks as opposed to 90 days plus plus.

The third item over there is the orifice flow meter. So isotopic separation requires you to have very tight control over your mass flow in your plant. And we went to the market and we evaluated all the technologies for mass flow measurement, and we came up short. There simply was not a solution available in the market to service our particular needs. So we had to go back to first principles, and we had to design an entire mass flow measurement system, of which the orifice plate flow meter there is the heart of it. It's a point of pride for us that we managed to get all of this done. We did the mathematical derivations ourselves, the design, the construction, the calibration, the commissioning. It's in our plants, and this is what our plants are running off of.

The final item there, which we highlight is our compressors. So the ASP technology has 2 critical components. The first one is, of course, you're separating elements that Ignatius spoke of. This is the core technology. But then beside that, you also need compressors. If you don't have compressors, you don't have an ASP plant. And the trouble with the compressors for ASP is that it has very specific requirements. Now when you go to the market for these specific requirements next to everyone will tell you, sorry, we can't do it. So we've actually been forced to go and do our own compressor development. And what you see there is an example, it's an oil-free diaphragm compressor. It was designed in-house, constructed in-house. It was commissioned in-house, and it's now sitting in the carbon plant and it's running.

So within the engineering team, we then also have the manufacturing floor where we've got our own CNC machines, our own laser cutting capabilities. We've got our own experienced welders and highly technical welding teams. We even have 3D printing for rapid prototyping. Now this is not your run-of-the-mill 3D printing that you can go buy at the corner store. This is engineering plastics and engineering printing. We've actually printed prototypes that we've installed into the plant to go and test before we went to actual metal manufacturing. And then, of course, we also have the design and the programming and all the quality control that goes with that. What this enables us to do is it allows us to produce the separating elements, the cascade segments. It allows us to produce the cryogenic equipment. It allows us to produce instruments, valves, things like this, fittings, R&D parts, all of that.

Now why this matters is lead times from manufacturers can be measured in months, in quarters or in years, whereas we are in control of the lead times. So our lead times is in days and weeks, not the lead times of the manufacturers. And we have also found that in the isotope separation industry, material of construction matters. Now if you go to a supplier, they will tell you, this is the material we supply. And if you don't like it, go find someone else. So with the construction being in-house and the design and manufacturing being in-house, we have control over the material. We decide what we put in the plant, what's best for the plant.

And then, of course, if you find that there's something on the plant that's not working 100% correct, you need to tweak it. A supplier won't allow you to go and change their design. They won't go and change their design for you unless you decide to order 10 million units. Whereas with us, we build it in-house. We can just quickly change the design and have them machine another unit for us so we can carry on with life. And then, of course, this allows us to support plant construction. It allows us to support maintenance. We've got everything that we need. We're not beholden until anyone to get our work done.

So some of the engineering examples, some of the engineering that we've worked on is the Carbon-14 plant, as Paul mentioned, the Silicon-28 plant and the laser plant, which are all in Pretoria. They're all running. They're all producing isotopes. They're all enriching. Then we've got some future work, which is currently in progress. We have the actinides, so that's the uranium, and we are currently working on the processing, the conversion of yellowcake to UF6 as well as the designs for enrichment projects. The regulations, the regulator has been involved, and we're busy with the licensing, things like that. Then we, of course, have our own manufacturing and support, which we are continuously improving with new equipment, new instruments, 5-axis CNC machines, that sort of thing.

And then the ultimate goal is to have a multi-isotope facility in Iceland, where we're targeting the zinc. We're targeting an upscale of the silicon plant. We're targeting xenon, molybdenum and, of course, some others. And the basic engineering for this is already in progress. We have P&ID levels, we have CAD models, that sort of thing.

So some pictures because everyone loves pictures. There are the pictures of the Carbon-14 plant. So right up at the top, you'll see an isometric drawing. So the way we work is that when you've done the process engineering and you've gotten to P&ID level, you go to the mechanical guys and you have them make a digital twin of the plant so that you can be sure placement and routing and all sorts of things like that are in place before you go to construction. It's not often done in small companies. They prefer to go directly to construction and then they have trouble upon trouble upon trouble. We don't do that. We do things properly the first time around. So picture 2 over there, come and ask me afterwards what the green is for. I'll explain it then it's a bit technically involved, but it's very interesting.

So the Silicon plant, which everyone is, of course, interested in. Again, we have our CAD model. So we plan before we construct. And then, of course, we have some pictures over there. The most salient one is picture #4, which shows the actual enrichment cascade. Those are the segments. Each individual bay there is a segment, and then we've got several stages per segment going on.

So in summary to both the R&D and the engineering, why all this matters is it's capability we own, not capability we buy. So separation to us is the barrier, not procurement, not construction, not commissioning, not the engineering. It's separation is the barrier, and we can clear that economically with our technology. We have a flexible technology base. So between the lasers and the ASP technology, we can tackle a wide variety of materials, a wide variety of elements to get whatever isotope we require from the market. And then, of course, we own the engineering. So the road map occurs at our pace, not someone else's pace. We're in charge of when something happens, where something happens and how something happens. So that's how we can support more effectively the actual commercial base. And then, of course, everything we do, every build compounds into the next. Every design you do, everything you construct, everything you operate, one thing feeds into the other, and it just makes us more and more effective, more and more efficient. We can get things done faster and more accurately with improved cost, which is the benefit, of course, to the company.

So then with that, thank you very much. I'll hand over back to Paul.

Thanks, Dr. Puts. So I'm just going to give you a quick update now on our stable isotope operations and exactly what we're doing in each plant. And so this slide here just shows how we enrich something like Silicon-28. So you will see that we enrich in campaigns. Each campaign takes it to a great level of enrichment, and we can do as many campaigns as we want to and need to, to achieve the desired enrichment. So if you look at the left-hand side, that's 104 cascade enrichment plant. So we compound each individual separator over 104 stages. And you'll see in the first campaign, we increased from natural silicon, which is 92.2%, up to 98.4%. That becomes a feedstock then for the next campaign, which goes up to 99.6%. That's the feedstock for the next campaign, which goes to 99.9% and so on. And finally, we get to the desired enrichment of 99.995%.

Now right now, we've had problems with the Silicon-28 plant in terms of the compressors. You never expect to buy an OEM compressor and find they don't meet the specifications and don't work. And so we're having to replace a lot of the components within the compressor because the OEM manufacturer simply didn't provide them to specs. We've only got 42 enrichment stages working today. And as you'll see, when we have 42 enrichment stages, we can get to 99.1% enriched. And so our first campaign goes from 92.2% to 95.7% and so on. So what we're actually seeing in the plant is we're achieving 95.706% and that's been measured by an analytical lab. So the theoretical number should be 95.703%. We're coming in at 95.706%. And so we're very happy that actually the enrichment is happening exactly as we expect it to per the mathematical calculation and theoretical formulas that it should go to. The problem we have is with reliability and compressors.

And so if you look in May, the plant had 58% uptime. So almost half the time the plant wasn't operational. We improved that to 80% in June and 90% in July. And of the downtime, 97% of it was due to compressors, either mechanical failure or EC&I failure. And I say we're getting better, but we're actually really struggling with the compressors here. And these are just OEM supplied compressors that just don't meet the spec. So how are we solving that problem? Well, as Dr. Puts alluded to, we find when we make our own components, we do it better than most OEM suppliers do.

So we've actually designed a new compressor for the ASP process. It's hermetically sealed, so it's helium tight. It's made out of materials that are pretty special and don't corrode with gases and don't pollute gases that we use. And what we're seeing is substantially better flow rates, substantially better pressure ratio, and this will translate to a significant reduction in energy consumption. This will be used in our future plants.

In terms of Quantum Enrichment, as you can see, we enriched Ytterbium successfully last summer. You can see on the left is the feedstock with Ytterbium-176 about 13%. And after passing through our enrichment chamber, we got to 94%. So a significant amount of enrichment in a single step. It's extremely powerful, this laser enrichment.

And now we have to scale that up. Our current vessel or the vessel we used to have could enrich for 3 hours at a time, 3 days a week. We have to heat it up, cool it down, open the vessel, put new product in, pull the vacuum again, heat process, so forth. What we spent the last year doing is making a continuous processing vessel that can process for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for multiple months at a time. And we think that will allow us to process over 50 milligrams an hour, and that should allow us to do about 350 grams per vessel and 3 vessels in parallel should then allow us to get to about a kilogram a year. And so we've just finished the construction of the continuous processing vessel. It's being commissioned right now. We expect to have some news and some data on that during the next sort of several weeks or so forth.

So I think what this shows is that the technology works. The technology is enriching as we would like it to. Scaling these up to commercial processes have proved a lot more challenging than we expected them to. And we had to fight our way through those to get them done. But what we see is a continuous improvement in our plants, continuous improvement in our technologies, and that should translate into being able to build bigger, better plants over the years.

So I'm going to hand over now and pass over to Robbie, our Chief Operating Officer, who's going to talk about the legislative environment and IP. Thank you, Robbie.

Hi everyone. So a quick comment on intellectual property and the nuclear regulatory environment that we operate under. These become more important as we go into our expansive phase as the engineering team have pointed out. I'm going to race through it. So I'm restricted to 5 minutes, so bear with me. Good.

So over the last 5 years, we've created a large pool of intellectual property. As many of you will know, intellectual property exists in unregistered and registered format. Our unregistered IP consists of know-how and trade secrets. We record this know-how and trade secrets internally in registers, internal registers, which are managed and monitored by our specialist intellectual property counsel. And we maintain that and build that base of knowledge over time. Certain parts of that intellectual property, which are not covered by nuclear regulation, which I'll come on to next, [indiscernible] are capable of being registered, and we have an active strategy to protect that certainly in the engineering department, the R&D department and in our nuclear medical subsidiary, we have an active strategy taking advice on what we should patent.

The importance of the strategy for intellectual property is where you position it. And the note I put there is the location to own the location to use. That will become apparent in the next slide when the cost of nuclear regulation comes to bite. So when you operate with nuclear materials, you come under the ambit of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and they police the Non-Proliferation Treaty for nuclear weapons. Most countries in the world have signed up to the NPT, a few notable exceptions, which you can probably guess.

The main issue with being regulated by the IAEA is you submit yourself to inspections. And our plants in South Africa are inspected twice a year. Both types of both laser plants and ASP plants are examined. And what they're looking for, the inspectors when they come down is they're swabbing for uranium. Both of our technology platforms have been used to enrich uranium. Everyone knows they can enrich uranium. And therefore, they are not only controlled technology, which means it's technology you are not allowed to transfer across borders. That's the essence of nonproliferation without special intergovernment agreements and sign off by the IAEA, such as we're in the process of doing in Iceland very successfully.

The other issue with managing control technology is you have to maintain safeguards. Safeguards are prescribed in the nonproliferation treaty and various other documentation issued by the IAEA. We've invested heavily in our asset protection department, which manages our compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and overreaches the safeguards that are prescribed therein. A subgroup of controlled technology is a dual-use technology. Dual-use technology is only technology where it has a civilian use, but can be retasked for weapons. And both our centrifugal ASP technology and the Laser-based Quantum Enrichment technology fall smack bang into the middle of that profile. So that means we have to in-country apply extra comprehensive safeguards. And we are very careful about where we do our research, generate our IP, record our IP, maintain our registers for different types of isotopes and different types of projects so that we are able to utilize the technology that we develop, the intellectual property that we create in the places where we want to.

That was a bit of a quick run-through within time. So anybody who'd like to know any more about it, then please just catch me afterwards. Thank you.

So we're going to have a review now of the major markets that we operate in. And one of the most exciting I find is nuclear medicine, and we're right in the early innings of a new therapeutic product cycle. And when you think about cancer 20, 30 years ago, we'd often use something like chemotherapy to treat the patient. And chemotherapy is very good at killing cells that divide and the goal of chemotherapy is to kill the cancer before you kill the patient. It's a pretty horrible drug to use.

A typical patient who would be diagnosed with cancer would, first of all, have a biopsy, which is -- years ago, would have a biopsy, which is an invasive procedure. Then the doctor would choose a form of treatment to treat the patient with. Maybe 6 weeks later, they do another biopsy and see is the drug working or not. So it's 6 weeks between first diagnosis and an analysis of whether or not the drug is working. That's a long time to wait when you've got cancer. So what we can do nowadays with radiotherapeutics and radiotheranostics is that we can actually diagnose the patient in a day without an invasive procedure. We can perform a radio scan on the patient and diagnose a particular type of tumor. We can then treat the patient almost immediately with a targeted agent that just targets the tumor and doesn't affect the rest of the body. And a couple of days later, we can do another scan and see is that drug working. So you can have real-time feedback and real-time evidence as to whether or not the treatment you're using is working. That's led to substantial improvements in patient outcomes, which is obviously a good thing. And we're really in very, very early innings of this. There's a couple of drugs approved and it's very much in its infancy.

We have 3 radiopharmacies around the world, so 4 radiopharmacies around the world. We produced over 10,000 doses of drugs a year, and we expect over $14 million in revenue this year. And this slide just shows the symbiotic relationship between ASP Isotopes and PET Labs and why when Robbie and I formed the company, we were so keen to have a company like PET Labs within our portfolio because ASPI should be able to produce stable isotopes, so Zinc-68 or Nickel-64. And a radiopharmacy converts that stable isotope into a radioisotope using either a proton and electron or a neutron and that radioisotope decays giving off radiation and energy, and we use that radiation to treat the patient. Now most radiopharmacies are buying their stable isotopes from Russia. Russia supplies about 85% of stable isotopes. And the supply has been fraught with problems over the last 20 years. And so our goal is to solve that by having a vertically integrated radiopharmacy.

I'm going to hand over now to Dr. Van Tonder to talk about PET Labs and exactly what PET Labs does. So thank you.

Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. So the examples that Paul showed, those include isotopes that allow for diagnosis and treatment. So it is important to realize that you need the radioactive decay property of those isotopes for both of those technologies to actually work. So that is very important to remember. And then modern developments and advanced molecules have created a synergy between the diagnosis and the treatment. So that synergy is called theranostics, so which is what we have on this slide.

So the concept of theranostics is about 80 years old. And it started with Iodine-131, but was limited at that time by access to advanced molecules. So the term theranostics was coined significantly later, and it only became a commercially significant segment of the market about 8 years ago following the approval of Novartis' Lutathera and Pluvicto products. So when you consider -- apologies, when you consider the PET and SPECT agents, you use those to visualize the body based on either perfusion or metabolism depending on the vector that you utilize. So the vector actually targets the area of interest. And that allows you to, for instance, confirm overexpression of a receptor for primary or metastatic lesions. So this is also where advanced molecules come into play.

And when you combine that with your quantifiable properties from your radionuclide, that is where you can actually then look into the patient and screen out nonresponsive tissue prior to drug delivery, and you can also monitor your treatment efficacy. So with the advanced molecules, this targeted approach can be extended towards treatment as well where you just swap out your radionuclide while retaining the same type of vector. So an additional advantage for the advanced molecules is then obviously your improved selectivity, which will give you a better quality diagnosis, which will lead to earlier detection and then improved treatment as well. So and both of those work together toward personalized therapy. So at the end of the day, you have a precision strike with localized cytotoxicity, and it can be repeated in successive cycles to actually achieve systemic tumor clearance.

So the role of the radiopharmacy is to actually manufacture these agents, so commonly referred to as your radiotracers. First off, you need to obtain your radioisotopes. So for your therapeutic isotopes, those are generally nuclear reactor products, but you can generate some of them using a cyclotron. The cyclotron is also a critical tool for PET manufacturing for PET radiotracers. And the cyclotron in essence, is a particle accelerator that actually is fitted with a target at the end that you can load up with a target material. So if you consider the cyclotron to be a rifle, your particles will be the bullet that then bombards the target material. And that is done with sufficient energy to actually change the element of the target material into your radioisotope. So different combinations of bullets and target material then generate your different radioisotopes.

So following your bombardment, you have your radioisotope and that is then transferred usually pneumatically to a designated area for chemical transformation, which is then where you produce your radiotracer product. And this is then where your shelf life product -- sorry, your shelf life clock starts. So that depends heavily on the rate of decay of your radioisotope, which is the half-life. So for example, if you have Fluorine-18, you have a half-life of about 110 minutes, which means 4 hours later, you have just over 20% left of whatever you manufactured. So that makes daily logistics a critical factor in our operations.

So the product is then shipped to the designated clinic, physician's office, wherever it might be, where it gets administered to the patient. And after a brief waiting period, the patient is then subjected to a scan. So the scanner detects the gamma rays that are actually produced during the radioactive decay process. So and that allows the instrument to render a 3-dimensional image, which is then interpreted by the physician.

So PET Labs operates in a global nuclear medicine market of about $33 billion, of which your radiopharmaceuticals make up about $13.5 billion. So of that, your commercial segment is about $5.8 billion and 85% of that is as a result of direct sales of your PET and SPECT agents. So your advanced molecules come into play where you can see that the contribution at the moment is very small, and that is exactly where PET Labs wants to be involved. So we want to be at the lead running your clinical lead molecules, doing your research on that. So we want to manufacture those to generate data and then assist in pushing new molecules to market.

So when you consider the introduction of theranostics and the aging populations worldwide, we expect an overall demand increase for these type of agents, your theranostic agents and advanced molecules with compound annual growth rates in excess of 20% for both your PET and your therapeutic agents. So with increased accessibility, this is expected to further drive demand. And then also what must be considered is the unbundling of the U.S. reimbursement model. So that is where your more advanced and more expensive molecules are now reimbursed in addition to the actual medical procedure. So most significant with respect to the regions are the regions containing your developing markets such as Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa, all showing a compound annual growth rate in excess of 10%. So for us to capitalize on this -- sorry, to capitalize on this opportunity, the challenges include your radioisotope availability and then also competent manufacturing staff and then obviously, your local infrastructure.

So PET Labs' strategy to address these challenges include global expansion. So that would be into the fast-growing regions and then also partnering with established businesses. So we have expanded into the U.S. by procuring 2 operational nuclear pharmacies. We plan to add about 8 more over the next 5 years. And with compound growth, we expect to have at least 30 facilities within the next 10 years, right? So PET Labs plans to achieve that by specializing in the fastest-growing segment, which is then actually the manufacturing of the advanced molecules for both your PET and your therapeutic agents.

Thank you. I'll hand back to Paul.

So thanks, Johannes. So on the other side of the treatment, you've got diagnosis and then you've got treatment. So I'm going to hand over now to Martin Magwaza, who's going to talk about Alpa Theranostics. And this is a division or company that we've been incubating for a couple of years inside ASP. We haven't spoken much about it ever. This is the first time I think we've really presented what the company looks like and what we've been working on. It's one of the most exciting parts of the company, I think. So Martin, over to you, please.

Thank you very much, Paul. Hi, everyone. My name is Martin Magwaza. I'm the President of Alpa Theranostics. And I will take you on the journey of why ASP chose to enter this space, what was our motivation, what is our game plan and how do we envisage that we win in this exciting market.

Let's start by giving a bit of context. The global oncology market by the end of this quarter would -- of this decade, sorry, would have hit about $400 billion in global sales and estimates that at current growth rates would have reached about $600 billion by 2035. That presents a tremendous opportunity. But I'll take you through the reason why we've looked at this market beyond the narrow definition of the theranostics space and we looked at it as a more holistic opportunity for ourselves.

Perhaps we should start with what our game plan is at Alpa Theranostics. We rely a lot on the wonderful biology of Alpacas. And as many of you would know, Camelids have this incredible ability to produce very unique heavy chain-only antibodies, which are different to those that are produced by mice, other mammals and humans. So we take advantage of this to develop targeted diagnostics, which can be used for both imaging via PET and SPECT as well as therapy. There's 4 numbers that you need to know. First of all, it's the format size. VHH antibodies are 1/10 of the size of IgG antibodies. They are 15 kilodaltons in size as opposed to 150 kilodaltons.

Secondly, at Alpa Theranostics, we're looking at 5 tumor types. We're developing targets for them, therapeutic targets and assets for those, which means for each of the 5 tumor types, we'll have 2 entities, an imaging part as well as a therapy part. In the next 12 months, we'll be delivering our first-in-human data on what we've done in these 5 cancers. The last number to note is over the last 2 years, we've seen in excess of $9 billion in M&A activity. That tells you something about what big pharma is seeing in this industry of ours.

And secondly, I want to take you through why we think this is the right market for us to enter. What we've seen with Lutathera and Pluvicto from Novartis is that there's no longer a question about whether radioligand therapy is a valid modality for treating difficult cancers. Prostate cancer, neuroendocrine tumors have demonstrated a tremendous amount of commercial opportunity for Novartis that's already in the billions. However, we're seeing that there's still quite a bit of a ceiling in terms of targets. How much more could be achieved if we could unlock this by finding the right kind of models to target these additional cancers.

So what we've seen is that in addition to the validated targets of PSMA and SSTR, there's only a few other companies that are looking at targets beyond these 2. What is quite interesting is that in the top 10 tumors globally, it's actually essentially only PSMA that has -- or prostate cancer that has a radioligand therapy that is approved. For that area of the curve presents to us a tremendous amount of opportunity. The other limitation is that in as much as the IgG antibodies have delivered a lot of value in terms of improving treatment outcomes, their formatting for radioligand therapy is still suboptimal. They're simply too large. They are not flexible and not able to reach some of these difficult-to-reach targets in the difficult-to-treat cancers.

And additionally, a model that is based on large IgG antibodies is very slow, very expensive. The steel tank infrastructure required is quite heavy. And in the development process, what we find is that by the time that you realize that there's a likelihood of durability failures is usually too late. And that affects the likelihood of the companies delivering quality CMCs, which are required for further development of these drugs.

The other area that is of huge concern when it comes to IgG antibodies, tumors which have what we call the desmoplastic barrier where there's tumor involvement, they simply cannot penetrate. And that leaves a huge chunk of difficult-to-treat cancers without any treatment options that are actually are viable for the patients. Some of the examples are the triple-negative breast cancer, which we know is a killer of young women. The other one is, of course, small cell lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, PDAC, which are difficult to treat with IgG antibodies. And these are exactly the type of tumors that we know we can deliver a killing strike to them.

I'm now going to take you through just the top line methodology of what we do. So in the farm in South Africa, these are actual alpacas, by the way. This is not stock imaging. They have names. I just can't remember. So we have these alpacas, which we immunize with the target antigen. And over a period of 42 to 89 days, they start expressing antibodies against the target. So we do draw blood in a very safe and ethical manner, and we start panning and analyzing the sequences of these VHH antibodies. If we are not happy with the structure of antibodies, for example, if they have certain liabilities, whether it's the charge on the surface of the antibody itself, maybe there's some immunogenicity, which we feel might be a risk, especially in cases where patients need to be treated repeatedly. We use our advanced and proprietary computational power, which allows us to correct any of those liabilities to make sure that we can further develop the antibodies.

And once we've done our work on the discovery and the refinement parts via computational means, we then have a theragnostic pair, which is combined of a VHH antibody for imaging, which unlike just IHC and biopsies tells us a lot more about tumor location, its extent and that informs the treatment strategy that the doctor can engage in. That, therefore, allows the doctor to tailor the treatment plan using any of the other isotopes, which have been described by our colleagues, such as the beta emitters, the alphas, the Augers in certain instances, the conversion electrons.

I'm going to go back a little bit just to tell you a little bit more about why this format is so exciting. And I must add, this is not new. This is not -- VHH antibodies are not new exotic science. This has been 30 years in the works. And as a matter of fact, a company called Sanofi-Aventis a few years ago, acquired Ablynx, which has developed quite a number of VHH antibodies for a few cancers in the ADC format as well as treatments for some difficult-to-treat ocular disorders. But we have chosen to take this amazing format and apply it in the radioligand and the diagnostic space.

As I've said, the size is an advantage. It allows us to hit targets that IgG antibodies do not reach. And this is a function of how the CDR3 loop of the VHH antibody is structured. It acts as some sort of a wedge. It's able to reach nooks and crannies of cancer targets that the larger and bulkier IgG antibodies are not able to reach. And this allows us to -- not to get too technical, even in cases where a patient has been treated, for example, with trastuzumab or pertuzumab, we are able to raise antibodies that can identify other epitopes in the tumor type that are not subject to the resistant patterns that the tumor may have developed.

And of course, it acts as a single entity. This is the entire therapeutic unit as it stands, which allows us flexibility to radiolabel. And if we want to combine them and bring about other formats, we can do that depending on the need. And what is also important due to the lack of what we call sequence homology between our immune system and that of camelids, we find that there's very little immunogenicity that emerges with the alpaca-derived VHH antibodies. However, as I said, in the case where there is some level of immunogenicity, we can correct this quite easily with our computational model. And this allows us to have drugs that can be used routinely on a chronic basis should the patient require.

And just another view. This is just by comparison, for example, what we know from the world of ADCs versus the VHH area. So the beauty of the VHH antibodies is we've seen this in our preclinical model. There's a lot of deep tumor penetration even in areas where IgG antibodies cannot reach. The half-life is also built for the short half-life nature of some of the isotopes that we're using. So you don't have, like in the case of some of the IgG antibodies, long circulation time of an antibody with a radioactive payload, irradiating blood and a lot of the other sites that are not the target of the treatment intervention.

And then, of course, the other exciting development, which many of you may know about, even though they are larger than the 400 dalton limit of diffusion in the blood-brain barrier, we've seen that they are able to transcytose the blood-brain barrier with a little bit of engineering. And then, of course, for us in the space of oncology, that means a lot, especially in cases where cancers have spread to the brain or in some cases, when a patient is diagnosed with the glioma that requires more aggressive treatment, which has a radioactive payload. So this allows us that kind of flexibility.

And if we look at what big pharma has been doing in this space. And as I mentioned in my opening, it's been quite exciting to see the level of activity happening here. And what is more interesting is that the deal sizes has been between $1 billion to $4 billion. I mean, I can give some example, BMS and RayzeBio, the likes of AstraZeneca acquiring Fusion, of course, Lilly acquiring POINT and Novartis back again after a long list of other acquisitions in the RLT space since 2018 or around about through the acquisition of Mariana. And what is interesting is a lot of these deals were struck when the companies which were targets had only demonstrated a proof point or data readout from Phase I as well as Phase II. They don't even wait until there's a Phase III data readout because they understand they're chasing a far larger market here, which is oncology.

And of course, what will it take for us to win in this space? We feel very strongly about the need for us to break the target ceiling. The VHH antibodies allow us to target more tumor types even in difficult-to-treat cancers. They allow us to win in the therapeutic index because we can penetrate tumors in the tumor microenvironment where other formats are not able to reach. And then, of course, the other big win here with what we've seen, if we are able to treat these cancers effectively with this format, we might start seeing a greater migration from third line, second line to first line. And of course, we've seen this with Pluvicto, where for the first time, a radioligand therapy has a definitive phase first-line therapy. So this, of course, allows us to move beyond just being a treatment of last resort to being a treatment that can be considered much earlier in the treatment continuum. And that, of course, speaks to the tremendous amount of value that could be harvested in the broader oncology market.

And of course, the other important thing is the format allows us to combine it with other interventions, whether it's immunotherapy or other treatment options to ensure that there's a far greater cancer killing effect to improve patient outcomes. And of course, my colleagues have spoken a bit on this, the ability to own the value chain by having in-house isotope production, especially in the world where there's just not enough steel and not enough isotope production. So this is going to be quite crucial. And we believe with the structure of ASP and the companies underneath it will allow us to play in this game.

And the most exciting news for us is, as Paul said in his introduction, we've been doing quite a bit of work in this area. We have quite a number of assets that are in the preclinical setting. And a lot of this work is being done in a site called NuMeRI in Pretoria. It's renowned for this kind of work. I mean, relying on South Africa's 6 decades of nuclear sciences expertise. We work with the renowned Professor Mike Sathekge, who's published more than 500 articles in this space. And our first target is, of course, the lead program in triple-negative breast cancer, which is quite a serious underserved need. HER2-positive breast cancer, especially in the metastatic setting where the tumor may have even spread to the brain. And then, of course, for pediatrics, where not very little -- very little work is done in the likes of osteosarcoma. We have some targets which we know will bring something really meaningful in this indication, which the FDA and EMA define as an orphan disease.

And then, of course, colorectal cancer, amongst the top 10 neoplasms that still does not have highly effective therapies. And then a nice technical challenge for us in the glioma space where there's an absolute need for crossing the blood-brain barrier. Of course, these VHH antibodies that we're developing in this area will have, as I said, the imaging component for PET or SPECT and they will be paired depending on the physician's choice with either a beta emitter, an alpha, an Auger emitter, in some cases, conversion electrons.

Second last slide. And this is a schematic view of where we are. We've been doing quite a bit of work in South Africa in preparation for our first-in-man. And the game plan here is very simple. We want to go to file the U.S. IND within the next year or so, already having meaningful data set from humans. So we're relying on South Africa's large disease burden, largely untreated patients who present with advanced disease, in partnership with the government, and we'll present these results and compile the data for us to be able to file a robust IND with the U.S. FDA to allow us to prepare for global trials. And of course, what happens after the first 5 assets are taken to first-in-man. We have a pipeline of quite a number of other targets that we believe are equally as difficult and will be quite a pleasure for us to target with our VHH antibody program.

And then lastly, we have a validated modality. We're not experimenting with the unknown, a proprietary discovery engine that ensures that we derisk our assets upfront and have a greater chance and the likelihood of success. We're leveraging our computational powers to break the targets and format ceiling, which has been holding the field back. And then, of course, our claim to fame is where we target those underserved tumor types, which the patients desperately need interventions for. And of course, for the investors, I mean, I've demonstrated this is a highly exitable field based on the numbers that we have seen.

So what comes next is just we'll be going through the next round of prioritization for our pipeline. And then, of course, we have got amazing infrastructure, both at PET Labs and NuMeRI for radiolabeling to do some tox work and then, of course, prepare for IND. And of course, NuMeRI is getting ready to assist us with our first-in-human theranostic study. And of course, since VHH antibodies are expressed in yeast, our infrastructure, which is GLP, we're in partnership with a European company is ready for us to be able to scale up this work.

On that note, I'd like to thank you, and I'll hand it over to you, Paul.

Thanks, Martin. So one of the most exciting parts of our business, I think, in terms of addressing unmet medical needs and treating patients in the future. So I'm going to talk now about helium and LNG and Virginia gas project. And unfortunately, Nick isn't able to be here today a travel problem. So I'll do the whole presentation, but normally, Nick would do half of this with me. So first of all, this is a world-class, very unique asset. We believe it's one of the highest concentrations of helium found on Planet Earth. We believe we see about 3% helium across our gas field. That compares to United States where typically you see about 0.4%. And in Qatar, Middle East, you see about 0.04%. So we had a lot more helium than you would normally get when we're drilling for gas.

We have a first-mover advantage here. We've got the only onshore petroleum production in South Africa. It's a country that's desperate for more hydrocarbons. This has been designated a strategic asset by both South African government and the United States government. Helium is classified as a critical mineral in most countries around the world. And we've got a lot of funding from external parties. We expect to get $0.5 billion of capital from the U.S. DFC and $0.25 billion from a commercial bank. So that's going to help us as well. So this is an incredible asset.

Let's talk a bit now about what helium is used for. So helium is a very, very unique commodity chemical. It is a commodity chemical, but it's one of the few chemicals that you can't replace. There's a finite amount in Planet Earth, and we're using it up at ever-increasing rates. It's chemically and electrically inert, and that makes it really useful for certain manufacturing processes like semiconductors. It has a very low density and being inert and low density means you can use it for lifting certain things in balloons and buoyancy. It's got a very low boiling point. It doesn't form a solid, which is again very unique. And it becomes a superfluid in a liquid. So it has 0 viscosity. And so it flows without the use of kinetic energy, and that is also a very unique feature of it. And as I said, it's viewed as a critical mineral for most countries.

So in terms of the markets that we're most interested in, I think MRI is clearly growing at a GDP type rate, but you can't do an MRI without liquid helium. It's interesting that India right now has canceled all nonessential MRIs because of the lack of helium in the country. Semiconductor is also growing dramatically. You can't make a semiconductor without helium. It's used in multiple steps of the production process. If a fab hasn't got helium has to shut down, it will lose more profit in that day than it spends the entire year on helium. And so it has an incredible ability to pay whatever price it needs to pay to have helium. And if you recall, during COVID, there was a shortage of cars in the U.S. for trucks and cars, and they blamed the semiconductor industry, that was actually because of a lack of helium and not being able to make semiconductors for the cars. So it's used in so many end market industries, which are reliant upon things that use helium.

And finally, rocketry. You can't relaunch a rocket without helium. It's used as a propellant to force the fuel through the combustion engine. And it's interesting that the U.S. government has just signed an order to triple the amount of rocket launches between now and 2030. I think that's going to be a struggle simply because of the lack of helium. And I know Elon Musk wants to launch a Starship a day. Well, every time a Starship launches, it uses entire day's supply of global helium. So that also looks like a challenging ambition. But it's an incredible market. And I say it's irreplaceable in most industries.

This slide here just talks about how the market has evolved over the last 15 years. And you'll see the U.S. strategic reserve, the BLM used to be about 1/3 of global production. That's now minuscule. It's basically been depleted. So the U.S. has exhausted its strategic reserve. And that reduction in strategic reserve, which became the supplier of last resort has resulted in prices going from, call it, $200 per Mcf to above $500 per Mcf. And so we've seen significant price inflation and customers don't have a problem paying these prices for the product.

So in terms of supply/demand, you'll notice that the U.S. or the Americas is broadly balanced in terms of supply and demand. You'll notice that Asia and Europe are not. And actually, recently, myself and the team have made a trip to Asia, and there are some very nervous semiconductor companies out there who don't know where they're going to get their helium from in the second half of the year. To put it in perspective, I'm told 60% of Taiwan GDP is indirectly linked to semiconductor production. And Singapore is close to 15%. It's a major problem for these regions. And there's a lot of very nervous customers there.

What's caused that nervousness? It feels like we're entering the fifth supply side crisis for helium. Earlier on this year, the Qatar processing facilities, which produce about 1/3 of the world's helium were hit as part of the conflict in the Middle East. Some of that capacity is offline permanently or for an extended period of time. Some of it will come back as and when Qatar can return to producing LNG. Russia has introduced an export ban on helium. And so the world is essentially short about 50% helium right now. And that's why these companies are so nervous about where they're going to get their helium from. If Iran wants to start up its LNG plant, you don't just turn it on overnight. It takes a number of weeks, months to cool that plant down to minus 4 -- to 4 Kelvin and then you can start producing. So even if the war stopped today and Qatar started to get comfortable it can produce LNG today, you're probably talking sort of 3 to 4 months before we see any product hit the market.

So we also produce in a very unique location. Shipping time matters for helium. Every day you ship helium, you lose about 1% via boil-off. And so you'll see when you ship from Qatar, the distances are very long. It takes a long time to ship to China and to Houston. Cape of Good Hope is probably the only location on Planet Earth where you can ship to all 4 corners of the earth in less than 20 days. And that means we have less boil-off. And so when the product arrives with the customer, there's more of it and the customers value that quite greatly.

So we also get LNG with our helium. And this is -- I've looked at, I'm going to say hundreds, probably tens of helium assets around the world over the last 10 years. And most of them I couldn't get to make financial sense and to generate an economic return across the cycle. What really benefits this project is, first of all, the concentration of helium you have is truly unique. And secondly, we produce LNG in a country which is desperate for energy and desperate for hydrocarbons. Much of the hydrocarbons entering South Africa are due to stop in the next sort of 24 months or so. They're going to try and fill that hole by doing coal to gas. And then at the end of the decade, companies are hoping to build more LNG ports on the coast and bring more LNG. But what it means is that we have a very valuable byproduct, and that makes our plant even more profitable.

So this is our reserve. How did the gas get here? Well, this reserve was formed about 2 billion years ago. And it's quite unique in that 2 asteroids hit Planet Earth, exactly the same spot, one 3 billion years ago and one 2 billion years ago. And these asteroids created a lot of the geology you see on the African continent in terms of mineral availability. But the second asteroid had a uranium and thorium core. And that material is now about 5 miles beneath the surface. It's not minable. It's probably the most concentrated source of uranium on earth, but it's not really minable given its depth or economic at current prices. But it does, it goes under radioactive decay producing helium and that then gets trapped in the Karoo and the Wits layer. And we're able to then drill fairly shallow wells and remove that helium and natural gas together.

Our Phase I and Phase II uses about half of that yellow polygon you see in the middle of that area. And that area marks a total area, the black outline marks our production rights. And our Phase I and Phase II uses about half of that yellow polygon. So there's plenty of capacity to build a Phase III, a Phase IV, a Phase V and so on. And this kind of just demonstrates the size of our reserves. Our 1P helium reserves are about the same size as the U.S. federal helium system. So it's a vast reserve, and it's a generational asset. There's generations of production potential here. So we have 1 asset, 2 products and 4 markets. So we drill wellheads out in the field. We connect those wellheads via a gathering system to an LNG and helium processing plant. And then we sell either hydrocarbons for gas to power, industrial or transport industry. And then helium is predominantly used for the export market. There will be some domestic production.

So Phase I should hit nameplate capacity during the second half of this year. We started the plant about 2 or 3 weeks ago. We've just hit the temperature we want about 4 Kelvin. We expect our first product to go before the end of September. That should produce about 70 Mcf a day of liquid helium and about 2,500 gigajoules a day of LNG. And for those in the United States, a gigajoule is approximately equal to MMBtu. So what does that mean in terms of revenues and profits? Because I know analysts like to turn things into revenues and profits. So full production for the year at kind of current prices. And again, I don't have a crystal ball. I can't tell you where prices are going to be in the future. But current kind of prices we're contracting out, that's probably $25 million to $30 million in revenue, probably $5 million to $10 million in gross profit. We're signing contracts right now. Contracts are between 5 and 15 years, take-or-pay contracts. And they've got inflation escalators at PPI included within them.

So it's very -- and we've so far sold out about 75% of the LNG and 15% of the helium. We'd expect to contract the balance of Phase I for the LNG and helium between now and the end of September. LNG, we look to contract 100% of the LNG, and we'll look to contract between 50% and 75% of the helium, and we'll sell the balance of the helium at spot.

Phase II is 13x the size. We'll start construction of that during the second half of the year, 900 Mcf a day of liquid helium, 34,000 gigajoules a day of LNG. It's truly a monster. When operational, this plant should be capable of generating over $300 million in revenue and over $250 million in gross profit. And again, we're looking to contract most of that this year. So we aim to have half of that fully contracted by the end of this year. Phase II benefits from $0.5 billion of capital or should benefit from $0.5 billion of capital coming from the U.S. government, the DFC and $0.25 billion from a commercial bank, Standard Bank. And it should take about 44 months to build.

Now one of my jobs is to manage the risk of this project. I've seen many $1 billion projects turn into $5 billion projects and 4-year production -- 4-year construction times to 10-year construction times. And so how do we manage that risk? Well, we're actually getting a kind of a turnkey contract from one of the world's most experienced and best cryogenics facility builder. And so they will give us a contract to build the plant at a fixed price on a fixed duration. And this is all they really do. So we're very confident in their ability to get that plant done on time.

Other risks are obviously financial risks and market risks. Financial risks is that we've got 2 very supportive funders in terms of the U.S. government and Standard Bank. And in terms of managing market risk by contracting a large proportion of the plant on 5- to 15-year contracts with price escalators related to PPI. We're doing our best there to lock in the economic returns of this project before we even start to build it. So that's an exciting project to come.

And then this just how we get from Phase I to Phase II. We should expect Phase II to start production in the 2030 time frame with 2031 being the first full year of production. And just to summarize here, this is a very rare, very unique opportunity. There's nonsubstitutable demand for this product. Customers will pay whatever they have to pay to get it. Given where we're seeing prices go right now, many investors ask me how is the market going to respond to it, but it's going to be pretty simple in that some industries will probably cease to exist in the next sort of 6, 12 months as the market runs out of helium. So for example, helium balloons, scuba diving, welding, will have to find alternatives because they simply won't be able to afford the price they have to pay in order to keep going. I say we're scaling up right now, and this is a long-duration asset with years of growth ahead of it.

So that leads me now to hand over to Natalie, who's going to talk about the electronics side of our business. Obviously, helium is a large part of our electronics business. So Natalie, over to you. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Paul. Welcome, everybody. Very happy to be here today. So I'm Natalie Grancharov Camacho. I joined ASP recently earlier this year. Prior to that, I've been in the semiconductor industry for about 25 years and most recently, I was at Intel actually for 22 years, and my team delivered the 18A technology node before I left. So that was very exciting for us.

Okay. So let's nerd out a little bit on chips here. So this -- speaking of Intel, this is the Intel Xeon server chip. So -- if you guys have never taken apart your computer or built one, this is what it would look like inside. If this is a quantum tip, it would look almost identical, very similar size and packaging right now.

I'd love to be holding a quantum chip that is supported by qubit, but the reality is it's really materials. That's one of the hard stops for us getting commercial quantum computing. And so one of the key bits for that is silicon-28, which I'll get into a little bit more, but when we look at engineering and where we are, especially with the semiconductor industry, we're not as bound anymore by the engineering piece, right? We have machine learning. We have very strong AI. We can virtually model anything.

But when it comes to actually having the materials and then being able to physically produce something, this is where it gets -- it gets a little tricky. So -- the gaps that I'll speak to today are really the choke point. So isotopically pure silicon in the form of silane, which is Si H4, which is what ASP produces. This is what quantum computing companies want. They want it in the form of silane, which is Si H4. Really, the only availability in the world right now is in the form of Si H4. There's countries in Asia that produce these kind of sticky supply chains. But ultimately, when you remove the fluorine out of that, you no longer have the purity that you need to support the qubits and I'll get into that a little bit more. And then Paul spoke a little bit that helium, obviously, supply chain was heavily disrupted this year and so were some of the electronic gases like tungsten hexafluoride as well. So the good news for us in the electronic side is we already own a lot of these pieces for the supply chain, right? We have the enrichment technology at commercial scale -- we have a good feedstock in Africa, and we have our own gas field, right? So -- and we're listening to what our customers want.

So let's go forward. So talking about silicon-28. So why is it important for quantum computing specifically? So Quantum chips don't use 1s and 0s like a traditional transistor. They're what we call spin qubits, and they are in the state of 1 and 0 at the same time simultaneously. This is called superposition. This is what makes quantum computing so powerful, right? I know if you guys have heard I saw a recent article that said, like Quantum computers could break bitcoin is essentially 9 minutes. And that's because they're not switching back and forth. They're actually in a state of a 1 or 0 constantly.

But in order to stay in these states, they need to be in a perfectly good environment that essentially has no noise, right? So we call it magnetic noise from non-zero spins, which is not isotopically pure materials or anything else. This just causes decoherence and the qubits no longer function. And this is why in the industry, quantum computers, the qubits function for about 200 milliseconds, then they get decoherence and they no longer function appropriately.

So this is why our customers are very interested in our isotopically pure silicon-28 for this. And then -- so that's our road map for us. But looking at the path finding, right, what else could be on the road map for us. So our isotopally pure carbon-12 is very powerful for power electronics actually. So diamond has always been a very good material and you've probably heard of CNTs or carbon nanotubes as well.

But looking at power electronics, right, they have a very high thermal connectivity, a wide band gap. And what this means is for devices that are using a lot of power, such as electric vehicles that have DC motors that switch from DC to AC in order to drive. These are those materials where we want the most thermal efficiency.

The other piece we're looking at is carbon-12 for thermal insulation materials. So when we look at a chip, we want to -- when it's operating, right, it gets hot. We want to draw that heat away from it as efficiently as possible. So the industry is looking at a lot of different materials for that. And one of the materials is a thermal interface materials.

So looking at some collaborations to see if our carbon-12 could be a viable option for TIM materials and advanced packaging. So again, this is just pathfinding, but some exciting, I think, opportunities are ahead of us, too.

And then let's talk a little bit about the bridge to modern fab processing. So this is, of course, the near and dear part for me being in the fab for so long. So this is purely just for our own entertainment to look at this is a 200-millimeter wafer. But our customers are seeking our silicon-28 as I said, and they're using it in quantum computing in the form of qubits. We also have customers that actually make wafers and they're wanting it in the form of silane also to make silicon on insulator wafers. The cool thing about this is these SOI wafers, silicon on isolated wafers, are produced in 300-millimeter fabs by foundries that already exist and are already producing the leading technology nodes. So the silane gas that we use can be used in any standard epi deposition tool or a thermal processing tool that would deposit silicon on its own. So this is a good news for us on our customers.

So I'll talk just briefly a little bit more on the helium and fluorinated gas and some of the other things for the -- I think the core business where we have and then some of the foundations we want to grow on. So Paul did a great job of talking about helium for us, and I mean I cannot underscore how important it is for the semi industry, and he gave some very good examples for that. I think that semi industry worldwide uses maybe 20% to 25% of all of the world's helium. It's a massive quantity. There's really no substitute for helium.

There's really no other inert gas that can function the way helium does for the industry. So if we don't have it, it's a huge burden. And so again, the great part and what our customers are very pleased with at this point with helium is that we have our own helium fields and we can ship directly to the customers, as you guys saw earlier as far as the pathways.

And then fluorinated gases -- this is a cool one because our customers, they like our helium and they said, "Hey, can you supply us with other gases? What about fluorinated gases?" And so this is an exciting project for us because ASP actually has quite a few individuals on our team that are fluorination experts. They've studied it. They've built these plants, they have PhDs in it as well.

And so for fluorinated gases for semiconductor industry, so tungsten hexafluoride, this one is used to, as a precursor gas to make tungsten interconnects and most recently, this summer, actually, about 1/3 of the supply to the industry was disrupted when Japan stopped producing.

Actually, they stopped producing, I believe, in 2 of their plants in July. There were some feedstock issues because they got some of their feedstock from China and then some other environmental issues. But this was just -- the semi industry, they knew some of this was coming, but it's still quite a shock for the industry, and there's still some scramble to be able to get that going.

And then also germanium, tetrafluoride is another one. And antimony pentafluoride also is another one that our customers have asked for. So we're -- the goal here is to be able to build these bespoke fluorination plans, almost at point of use for our customers so that we can fulfill the demand that they need and also close a big gap that I believe is in the supply chain here not pricing it hard enough.

Okay. So all the markets that we're selling into are growing. I think you guys are probably well familiar with the semiconductor industry, which if you heard anything about like AI and all of this, this is what this industry is. And I think we've heard trillion-dollar industry by 2030. I don't doubt that, that might happen.

And we've heard Elon actually is building Terrafab because he said fundamentally, TSMC and some of these companies, they can't really even supply the number of chips that we need. So I'm going to build an additional factory right in Texas as well. So -- we see the growth there and complementary to that are the semiconductor gases. Now I talked about tungsten hexafluoride. If the industry went away from that gas and used another material like molybdenum for that purpose, that would still need to be in a gaseous form.

So either way, we're in a win position supporting like especially fluorinated gases. The helium market, I don't think I need to tell you guys anymore on that. And then the quantum computing market, I mean, again, these are estimates, but I think the quantum computing market, especially if you look for a lot of countries, it's actually a matter of natural -- national interest, right? Countries want to be able to get a functioning quantum computer before other countries do, right? Again, we talked about how it can like break the Internet essentially very quickly. And what we're also seeing, too, is companies like Dell are doing collaborations with Quantum Labs, right, to look at capabilities for rack-mounted quantum servers.

So you would have a traditional server that would have, for example, your Xeon processors, but it would also have a few quantum chips in there. So when you have very complex processing needs, you would switch over to your quantum chip, and for those lesser, you would go back to your normal functioning chips. And then we also see like Qualcomm is I think -- and Honeywell also did some joint ventures and some investment in quantum companies. So I think we see that this is where the industry is interested, right? They're putting money into it. They're looking at the growth there. And I think with the AI boom, we keep hearing of it stands to good reason that we're going to see more growth there, too.

Okay. So in closing, we have some exciting demand for our silicon-28 from our customers and also some other materials. We have a great road map and some really interesting collaborations that we're working on. So I'm looking forward to seeing where those growth. So thank you.

Thanks. So with that, we'll now pass over to Dr. Ryno Pretorius and Michael Cunniffe who's going to talk about Quantum Leap Energy, our nuclear fuel subsidiary. And the goal is to spin this out as soon as possible. We've been going through a process for quite some time now. It feels like we're getting to the end of it. And obviously, we'll announce more to the market as and when we are able to, but Ryno, over to yourself and Michael. Thank you.

Thank you, Paul. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I'm Dr. Ryno Pretorius. I've spent the last 20 years working in every part of the nuclear fuel cycle to make sure we can achieve the success we aim to achieve with Quantum Leap Energy.

Hi everyone, I'm Michael Cunniffe. I'm Chief Financial Officer. I joined late last year to Ryno build this incredible business and help take us out.

All right. So the nuclear fuel cycle, quite complex. I think everybody is familiar with the beginning and the end, mining uranium and generating power. Unfortunately, you can't just throw uranium into a furnace and generate electricity. We've got to do some very, very complex chemistry and physics to get the best source of power in the universe. So this is really the conversion enrichment deconversion is really where this takes part.

So a chemical process to turn uranium into a gas, do enrichment where you separate the isotopes and then deconversion to produce it in a chemical form that you need. This is where the supply chain struggles, and that's where we will feature as Quantum Leap Energy. Without nuclear fuel, there's no nuclear power. Without nuclear power, higher energy cost for everybody, data centers will suck it all up. And it's becoming more precarious geopolitically due to Russia controlling much of the market.

The U.S. imports over 20% of its nuclear fuel from Russia and that's [indiscernible]. It will kick in on that in the end of 2027. So we really have to move as fast as we possibly can.

And this struggle has real economic consequences as we can see here. What we're seeing translated to in all of the early stages of the nuclear supply chain is dysfunctional economics and increased pricing. This problem has been compounded by concentration of supply in non-NATO countries who are leveraging this to their commercial advantage, but also redirecting supply to their domestic programs at the expense of our own. All of this is quite compelling, but there's been a lack of supply side intervention in our domestic supply chains, which is why QLE focused on delivering domestic capacity and conversion, enrichment and deconversion.

All right. So what is Quantum Leap Energy. At a glance, we have 2 enrichment technologies proven out by our parent company, ASPI. I won't go into that. I think that was covered very well by Dr. Ignis. We have some very great commercial partnerships that we'll talk about in detail a little bit later. Most importantly, supplying Terra Power with their HALEU fuel demand in the future from our Necsa facility, working with Fermi America to establish ourselves as a U.S. enricher for large public utilities or energy companies like we've partnered with recently.

Our focus is on 2 isotopes, lithium and uranium. For uranium, we want to get to HALEU and LEU+ as well as the chemical form of UF6 for uranium. In lithium, we're looking at 2 isotopes, lithium 6 and lithium 7.

The commercial market for enriched uranium is a compelling one, but it's currently focused around a commodity product enriched at around 4.8% focused on LEU. But this market is changing significantly as customers are requiring a broader range of assays of products of enrichment levels between 5% and 19.75%. Broadly, these are getting grouped into 2 categories called LEU+ and HALEU, and we're seeing increasing and strong demand signals for these products coming through.

LEU has been driven by the existing reactor fleet shifting to higher enriched materials to advance its life extension programs, but we're also seeing small modular reactor deployment at scale, which is bypassing LEU and jumping straight to LEU+.

A number of advanced reactor programs are bypassing this as well and jumping straight to helium, which is an even higher market. And we're seeing commercial signals come through for all of these at the moment. While a lot of this demand pipeline is quite compelling for the future, it's also time sensitive now. So all of these participants in the market need confirmation that they have supply of the materials they need so they can move forward with their development and deployment programs with confidence.

Okay. So what can the world do about this? We can look at legacy technologies. We can go back in time and look at calutrons or gas diffusion, but the real best option in the world right now is an incumbent technology is centrifuges. Centrifuges are great at producing LEU. They struggle when it comes to high enrichment levels. You've got a relatively low alpha and there's not much you can do about it. You can try to make centrifuges cheaper, but you still need a lot of them, which means it's an enormous capital investment to build these plants. It's a very, very large-scale project that takes a very long time. And these plants are very rigid.

So once you've designed it to produce a very specific level of enrichment, you can't really change that. And we're looking at what that means for HALEU. It means you need an enormous capital investment of billions, roughly 3x more than we need for LEU to construct a commercial facility at a decade or 1.5 decades time lines conservatively of what it would take to build these plants. That's not fast enough. The world needs advanced fuels very, very soon. We're talking 2035. These reactors need to be up and running. And without advanced fields, none of the new reactors can function.

And so that's why we believe our technology approach is the best way to get there. We're deploying -- we're commercializing 2 technologies, which is aerodynamic separation process and Quantum in Richmond. I won't do a deep dive into these because it was covered off earlier in the presentation. But what gives us confidence about these technologies as they apply to uranium and lithium is that we've seen them demonstrated on other isotopic forms in particular, what we anticipate is to see higher alpha selectivity, which will translate into more material over fewer stages of enrichment.

In conjunction with this, we're also anticipating lower economic production costs and also higher throughput, which means we'll have more of the materials that people need at a lower economic price point. In addition to this, the capital deployment will be more efficient through a scalable and modular deployment approach, also faster due to the way we approach this with a smaller factory footprint.

All right. So how is Quantum Leap Energy doing this? All right. So we stand on the shoulders of giants. In ASPI, the CTO, Dr. Hendrik Strydom, did his PhD on the separation of lithium isotopes to separate lithium 6 and 7. On the left, you can see the graph where lithium 6 was increased to a 90% enrichment factor as Paul covered earlier, Ytterbium-176 is in production right now. It's an interesting and very, very, very challenging element to do isotopic enrichment on because once Ytterbium-176 sits in the middle of several other isotopes and getting it out is quite difficult, especially given the temperatures that you need to work at. But that was successfully done.

So if you now apply this to what we want to do with QLE, we've got a 2 isotope system in lithium, and we've got a complex high-temperature system with Ytterbium. We'll take the knowledge that we've gained about how to do that and apply that to how to do uranium enrichment. Luckily for us, we only have to go to a 19.75% enrichment in uranium, which means we can expect much higher throughputs for uranium production.

What's also important about quantum enrichment is that it is flexible. It is not a rigid system. So we can tune these enrichment systems that can expand modularly. We can tune them to produce any range of enrichment for uranium. So everything from 0.72% all the way up to 19.75% and that's really what makes this technology so special and why we think it's the future of uranium enrichment to solve this bottleneck for energy security.

And to speak a little bit about why we're focused on the right products, firstly, to cover up uranium. As we mentioned, the LEU+ market is compelling as the existing reactor fleet moves towards higher enrichment of materials, but it also supports the small modular reactor deployment that we see ongoing now. Having access to HALEU will allow us to support the advanced reactors that are coming online. And again, we're seeing strong demand signals coming through for all of these technologies. Focusing on lithium, however, there's a current market demand for lithium 7, which is used in the existing light water reactor for pH control and regulation and supply of that material is dominated by Russia and China.

So we need a domestic solution for that. This material lithium-7 is also used in [indiscernible], which is pursued by molten salt reactor development, and they will require significant quantities in order to advance their programs. Fusion is focused on lithium-6, which is using it as a feedstock material as the breeding material for Tritium. And as the fusion technology advances around us, we expect a commercial supply chain to build around lithium-6 as well. All of this is -- while the demand is coming in the future, all of this is, again, focusing on why we need a supply chain solution today so that all of these people have to supply the materials they need going forward. This is also coming through in our commercial partnerships, and we're seeing these demand signals translate into meaningful relationships. Focusing first on Terra Power, which is our partnership to supply them with HALEU, not only for their reactor deployment but also for the development of that program as well.

We're doing this in partnership with Necsa at the Pelindaba site in South Africa, which is an IAEA-compliant site, and we believe it's one of the fastest pathways to HALEU on the planet. This partnership combines a milestone development, which we've been recognized recently in our 10-Q filing and also loan facilities to support our commercial scale out of the plant that closer to our home in Austin, Texas. We're partnering with Fermi America and helping them looking at that site, not just as a tenant relationship, but also as a strategic partner to help them with their nuclear deployment as they target 17 gigawatts of power.

This site is unique in the U.S. It has a long, long history of nuclear operations, and we believe that data set will support how a nuclear regulatory permits that we start to see. In addition to that, a large U.S. publicly listed energy company is working with us to provide not only HALEU, but LEU+. So it's moving it to existing reactor fleet over to life extension programs but it's also working on an advanced reactor program, and that's why it needs HALEU. We can't name them because if we talked about that program, we'd be revealing it for them on their behalf. So we can't do that today.

But all of this, I think, speaks to why the commercial market are responding now because they recognize that they need these materials, and they need to find partners in the supply chain who can deliver to their time lines.

Okay. So it's been about a year for QLE trying to address this supply chain problem. What have we done in a year. I think very proud to announce that we fully funded the LEU HALEU production facility by our test bench at Necsa as well as in the U.S. our long-lead items are on the way. And as we speak, our engineers and technicians are working on site to facilitate enrichment. We've got all the paperwork in place to run the equipment to handle the radioactive material and anything that comes off of these materials as well as the relevant containers that we need to transport this enriched uranium globally.

As I mentioned, we've fully outfitted our crews or fully filled out our crews in South Africa to do this. And Terra Power has been incredibly supportive because they need our HALEU for their natrium reactors to be successful. In the United States, we've identified fast track methodologies to enable uranium enrichment in the United States. We're looking at potentially 2 sites in Texas. This includes the Fermi site. We have -- we're doing -- we're making great progress on these designs. We've actually hired some excellent people.

The people in charge of doing uranium enrichment in the United States is led by our CTO, Dr. Nate Salpeter, who was key in designing a lot of the modern SMRs that are leading the way in terms of supplying power in the future. And he's hired some excellent people to help support that effort. We actually have hired some people that have been rich uranium with lasers before. So we're very excited to start producing enriched uranium in the United States. We're making sure that we've got all the appropriate raw materials in place and making sure that we've got all the boxes ticked for uranium enrichment in the United States.

Obviously, this is a very powerful technology. So we need to make sure that we follow all the correct rules to apply this and apply this safely. The United Kingdom is not far behind. We have 2 potential sites identified for enrichment in the United Kingdom. We have partially funded these plants and we've got a great collaboration with the University of Bristol, who are experts in the handling of uranium and the reaction of uranium with different -- in different chemical forms.

And we've got some MOUs in development with large power off-takers or utility off-takers globally as well as some SMR companies in Europe and the United Kingdom. Lithium should not be underestimated. Lithium is not just an interesting isotope, but it is -- it is actually one of the most important isotopes for nuclear power. We've heard about how it can be used, but I think that what is still unsure in people's minds is the market potential for lithium.

We've seen some massive demand signals for lithium, both in terms of lithium-6 and lithium-7. Molten salt reactors require tons of these material -- of this material, tonnes at lithium-7 and they require it in a special chemical form, a fluorinated form.

And the same thing we said for lithium-6. Fusion seems to be moving a lot faster than anybody expected. Let's hope it happens this decade. Let's hold our thumbs for that one. But it looks like they need to start stockpiling.

So the demand signals we're getting from the market is they need hundreds of tonnes of lithium-6 stockpiled soon. And they need to start testing very quickly and they're willing to support us in multiple ways to do that.

So I think in summary on this, we're not really betting on a horse here. I think everybody when it comes to nuclear is betting on a specific horse, we're betting on the race. No matter which form of nuclear power wins or the nuclear supply chain which part wins, we win as QLE. So I think that's a very important point to make. And we've got all the components here highlighted by our 7 Cs of how we're going to achieve that.

Now you've heard the term fluorine and fluorination a couple of times in this presentation. Why is that so important? Well, it can turn one of the heaviest elements on earth into a gas, which is uranium. It also happens to be once you've got fluorine stuck on something, it's very difficult to get it off, which makes it a perfect salt for molten salt cooling, and it's critical for the semiconductor industry.

But for you to be able to enrich uranium with lasers or with fixed or centrifuges like the ASP technology or even traditional centrifuges, you need to do conversion, which is fluorination of this uranium material. There's a 15,000 tonne per annum deficit today in the United States, and that's set to grow to 60,000 tonnes per annum in the next couple of years.

So we've gotten to that early. We've completed our FEL1 study. We're working on a FEL2 study for a 15,000 tonne per annum UF6 as you -- uranium as UF6 facility provisionally in Texas. And we've also looked a little bit further abroad, but also closer to home. So Namibia is the fourth biggest exporter of uranium. Fourth biggest producer in the world. And currently, all of that is going out as yellow cake to countries like China.

We are looking to assist the Namibian government and establish ourselves as a converter in Namibia to export UF6 from Namibia to the rest of the world. And we are in talks with a Fortune 500 company for take off of UF6 from both of these locations.

Very importantly, we've identified a site, had great support from the Namibian Government. And we should start construction on the Namibian enrichment plant quite quickly and imminently sometime soon, and we've got all the crew to do that. I myself have done -- have built several fluorination plants and my lifetime, operated them.

And myself and [indiscernible] as well as Inbanathan Govender, who is our Head of Engineering and South Africa or one of the few PhDs on earth with fluorination experience and practical application of this very, very important technology. So now is really the time to solve this bottleneck beyond the bottleneck, and we're well equipped to do it.

And so all of this brought together is the reason why we believe Quantum Leap is the company in the best position to solve this nuclear supply chain cap. As we highlighted, it's an incredibly attractive market, both LEU+ and HALEU. It is a difficult market to enter because of the proprietary nature of the technology. And the -- there's almost no one supplying this gap at the market. And so that's where QLE wants to be placed, and we're making rapid progress to get there, as you saw -- we believe our technologies are the right technologies to get there, and we have multiple shots at goal.

We've seen them demonstrated on other isotopes of interest, which gives us high confidence for how they can be deployed for lithium and uranium. They're modular and scalable with smaller footprints in the incumbent technology. And so we believe there will be less capital intense than what we see being deployed using incumbent technologies. We also believe they'll be faster to market than what we're seeing there. This is all being validated by commercial partnerships with people who are coming to us early because they want to get access to the materials that we're going to produce, and they're working collaboratively with us to make sure that this happens.

All of this, as you can see, is still moving ahead, and there's work to be done, but we're doing that with a sense of focus and speed because this urgency is real. Without nuclear power, we're not going to be able to drive our economies further without the energy that we need. We're not going to meet the demands of the AI economy that's emerging now, and we won't also be able to support the electrification of the economies that will release the new range of economics that we'll see coming.

Yes. And I think it's a closing remark. We are supported by ASPI, as everybody knows. That combined with our unique knowledge and specialization in fluorination, combined with a good technical engineering approach to building plants and building them fast gives us an unassailable moat. So I think we stand a very, very competitive chance, especially against the new players in the market as well as the incumbent players who are hesitant to adopt new technologies and adapt to the market. Thank you.

Thanks, Ryno and Michael. So now I'm going to hand over to Heather, who is going to give you the financial outlook for the group. And Heather. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Paul, good afternoon. I'm Heather Kiessling, I'm the Chief Financial Officer of ASPI. With all of this great progress and future plans comes the need for financial resources and discipline. We ended the second quarter with $255 million in cash and cash equivalents. This reflects historical fundraising and also the insignificant investment in plants, acquisition, systems and personnel, which I think you can all see reflected here today.

In order to action, the planned future expenditures, additional funds will be needed, and we plan to do that by using non-dilutive project financing, asset-backed vendor finance and also customer arrangements. New projects will be evaluated based on their economical contributions and upon receiving an understanding of the detailed analysis of environmental and regulatory environments and their impact.

Our EBITDA target for 2031 ranges from a low of approximately $300 million, all the way up to $700 million. You can see from the contributions from each of these 4 product categories that each of them are significant -- and how do we -- how do we get there? As mentioned earlier, we are currently planning on seeing the sale of helium before the end of the month. And before the end of the year, the contributions from our first commercial shipments of silicon-28 and Ytterbium and our expected revenues from our existing radiopharmacies of approximately $14 million.

The major future contributors to reaching that target in 2031 includes deployment of additional cyclotrons on a global basis, increasing the expansion of dose production. It also includes building of additional isotope in Richmond plants and expanding into Iceland and of course, the completion of the Phase 2 Virginia gas project. These are all exciting times in our future, and I look forward to reporting them on our progress. Thank you.

So now we're going to move on to Q&A. And I'm going to ask Viktor Petkov, who's our Chief Commercial Officer, to moderate Q&A with, I guess, some questions from the room, some questions online, but I'll let hand over to Viktor now to manage that process.

Thanks very much, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Viktor Petcoff, Chief Commercial Officer for ASP Isotopes, and I'll be moderating today's Q&A session. We've heard a very detailed overview of our strategy and market position by various members of our executive team. So now I'd like to invite our leadership team to take your questions directly.

This is your opportunity to dive deeper into the operations of the company, the growth prospects and the value that we're creating in the isotopes market. So we already started receiving questions on the web. So online. So I'll start with a few of those questions before I open the floor to the audience, if that's okay. There have been several questions around delays to indicated delivery schedules.

Can you comment on those delays and the drivers behind those timetable slippages?

Building any new technology, any new plant, you're building out a map as you build the plant. You don't know what you're going to problems you're going to come across when you're constructing plants. One of the biggest problems we found is often the -- a lot of the OEMs supplied equipment just isn't tough to scratch. It doesn't work for us. We handle process very complex gases, very reactive gases. We found many instances where your OEM supplied valves or OEM supplied molar mass meters or compressors simply don't work.

And so when you plan to build plants, very often, you assume those parts are going to work. And you spend your time worrying about will the cryogenic column work? Will the separator work? Does the core technology even work. What we've actually seen is all of those parts of the plants are fine. The core technology is working absolutely as we expected it to.

The problem we've had is with a lot of the ancillary items. How do we solve that? Well, listen, we've had to go back to basics and design components ourselves and make components ourselves, so we don't rely OEM supply components. I think we had an example is now building our own compressors 5 years ago, I never expected we wouldn't be able to find a compressor to compress our gases. The reality is we can't -- we have to do it ourselves. So they're the kind of things that have caused most of the delays. Ytterbium there were a couple of long lead time items that we couldn't get quickly enough to build the continuous processing vessel.

I think it was an electronic gun heater, which allows us to heat continuously for sort of 2 to 3 months. So they're mainly the reasons for the delays. It feels like that's behind us now. We're certainly going behind us. And I think if you look at the business next year, we've got a pretty robust business with main different divisions, generating revenues and profits, which is something we haven't had this year or last year. So I think that's the main reason.

To add one point. I mean, the important thing is there's been an array of issues that have manifested themselves over the last years. The important point to note in each of those issues that have manifested have been addressed by the engineering department -- by the engineering department -- they have been -- had solutions that have been come up with tested, implemented, retested where they needed to be reimplemented and overcome. And that's happened time and time again. That will continue to happen. That's an important point.

That's great -- thank you very much. We also got a question related to the Virginia gas project. Do you get strong traction from prospective customers given the challenges in the helium global supply chain.

Yes. So we're in an unprecedented time in history, I think, for helium, where you've got about half of the world's supply currently not shipping or not supplying to the international markets. So there are lots of very concerned customers in Asia, particularly as to where they're going to get helium from. We could probably sell the entire plant out right now. We could probably commit -- we could probably sell the entire Phase 2 volumes right now. We're obviously being selective who we sell to, how we contract, making sure we're at the right price, making sure we get the right conditions.

But there are so much demand right now, it's unprecedented. But what's actually really important is that we can't produce helium unless we can sell LNG and to some degree, vice versa. And so we have to contract both the LNG and the helium. It's not just about finding helium customers. We have to find hydrocarbon customers, too.

We're very fortunate that there's unmet demand for hydrocarbons in South Africa and energy right now. And so it's important that we contract all the LNG, which enables us to produce helium. And I think both are looking great right now. And we're achieving prices substantially higher than we expected to. And right now, spot prices are -- prices never seen before, but people are willing to pay it or having to pay it. Otherwise, they can't run. They can't operate.

Great. Thank you very much. We're getting a lot of questions on QLE online. So what are the advanced reactor designs meaning for fuel types? How valuable is the Western supplier that can tailor enrichment profiles to each reactor type? Maybe a question for Michael, Ryno.

Michael and Ryno, maybe you can answer that question, please.

That -- it's a pretty complex question. Obviously, there's a lot of SMR designs out at the moment. I think we're looking at about 187 at last count. I don't know how many would be left in 5 years or at least in -- or even in 10 years, but what we have seen is that there's a complete disruption of the market in terms of fuel supply. Traditionally, your reactors run on uranium dioxide, which is traditional pellet fuel.

The new reactors come in and have a demand for uranium fluoride, uranium is a metal, uranium is an oxide and uranium sometimes is a nitride. And very few of the existing fuel suppliers can actually cater to all of the new chemical forms. I think very fortunately for us, the only thing nuclear and a nuclear reactor is the nuclear fuel, so without a nuclear fuel source, none of these reactors can start up. For some of these reactors, you're looking at up to 60%, 70% of the actual CapEx of the reactor is just the initial full with fuel, especially when it comes to HALEU, and that needs to be topped up regularly.

So I would say it's a difficult number to predict exactly, but we're thinking in the high $30 billion over the next decade or so. What's very important here is that also to remember that the existing reactive fleet is going through a life extension plan where they plan to go through -- go into more advanced fuels of high enrichment. So think of [ 5.8 ] to about [ 8.8 ], maybe close to [ 10 ]. And none of these -- there's not really a viable fuel source for that. So that's also a pretty big market where every single reactor on earth or, let's say, 90% of the reactors on earth can switch to a more advanced fuel by switching our pumps and heat exchanges. So we think that, that market is actually quite massive as well. I think that answers it.

Yes. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks, Ryno. So I suggest we take 1 last question before we open the floor to the audience. That's related to PET Labs. You have shown both growth and an expansion plan for PET Labs. Can you separate the 2 for us? What is driving growth in the existing business? And what does the expansion add on top of that?

Yes. So I'll start and I may ask Johannes towards some parts of it we'll see. But essentially, we can buy a radiopharmacy fairly inexpensive that has an old product mix, a fairly historic product mix. And we can then invest in it to turn to radiopharmacy that produces a modern product mix, more designed for theranostics. And so when you look at PET Labs, PET Labs has been growing, but it hasn't been growing substantially for the years prior.

We added a new cyclotron to PET Labs. We added new hot cells. We invested in the people and the infrastructure. And now -- and it takes 2 years putting your capital into when you start to see the growth, but now we're seeing 50% year-on-year growth. And we have -- when you have a strategy that works in South Africa where you can build a radiopharmacy and generate a 75% gross margin you can do that almost anywhere else in the world.

And we just have the people and the expertise to build that -- to build those facilities plants. And so if you look at the United States, we're buying radiopharmacies very inexpensively. And then we're investing in them to give them new molecules, new therapeutics, and that allows them to enter a new market with the infrastructure and distribution already in place. And that's a really fast way of growing. And our return on capital is fantastic. And so -- actually, a lot of it doesn't require our capital either.

We have vendors who have pared to give us vendor financing on extremely attractive terms. I think we actually pay less than the 10-year rate for most of it to allow us to grow those businesses. And so that's really the strategy to grow PET Labs. And then over time, we've become the world's only fully integrated -- vertically integrated radiopharmacy with the security of supply of stable isotopes as well as the distribution of radio isotopes. So that's the main strategy for PET Labs.

Thanks very much, Paul. So I'd like to open it up now for our guests in the audience. So please, if you can. George, go ahead. Just briefly introduce yourself and ask your question, please.

George Gianarikas from Canaccord Genuity. I have a bunch of questions, if that's okay. Maybe to start first with the guidance for, I think, 2031 of $330 million to $700 million. What's your margin assumption there in terms of just how big should the revenue base be and what sort of EBITDA margin does that get you to?

Yes. So just to repeat the question. So the question is about what's the margin assumptions in our 2031 targets. So it varies by business. So for example, that kind of scale, Renergen should be kind of an 80% plus gross margin business. We really have a lot of operational scale there. There aren't actually many input costs because the main input cost is energy, and we're sitting on energy field. So that's kind of for Noble Africa or Renergen.

When it comes to PET Labs, we've seen a pretty consistent kind of 70% plus gross margin in PET Labs. I wouldn't expect that to change. That's quite a heavy SG&A spend at PET Labs, but the gross margin is about 70% say we invest capital in year 0, and we really start to see the growth in 2 years. So we will invest in that business between now and 2029 and we'll see that growth in 2031.

And so you're only really seeing the benefits of the capital we put into the business over the last couple of years now. But actually, about 70% kind of gross margin for PET Labs. And then for the isotopes, obviously, it depends very much on the specific isotopes. We'd expect something like Ytterbium-176 to have around 80% gross margin better margin. Carbon-14 to have a better than 80% gross margin.

Silicon-28 is likely a lot lower gross margin but more like 50%. But those isotopes, there's not been a lot of selling and administration costs, associated with them. We expect them to kind of sell themselves almost. And obviously, QLE, I'm not going to provide my comments on QLE's margin. It's not part of the guidance. And given we're in the S-1 process with the SEC, we can't really make comments on that.

And obviously, for our theranostics, I would -- if that's successful, I'd be surprised if we still in 2031, I suspect someone else will take that project on after Phase 1, I guess.

And then you also highlighted the balance sheet you have, I think, over $250 million in cash. What sort of burn rate should we expect for the company over the next 24 months or so?

Yes. So think about sort of a $40 million to $60 million burn rate across the businesses over the next 12 to 24 months. Obviously, that comes down as revenues grow up. And so should -- you should be able to -- once we spun out QLE and we have some cash generating businesses within ASPI, we expect to get to kind of cash flow -- positive operating cash flow.

24 months or 1 year?

One year for the next 24 months, I'd say. So annually, 24 months.

Thank you very much. Anymore questions from question in the back over there.

Alex in Ocean Wall. The last estimate for the resource of the Virginia gas project was in 2021 with the spool report. When can we expect an update on that estimate? And obviously, very different market conditions. So at what prices, can we expect that to be underwritten?

Yes. So I haven't seen the new spool report yet, so I can't comment on what price is, but I would expect a couple of things to happen over the next 12 months or so. So we've just finished the spool report now translating essentially a previous number, updating a previous estimate into kind of U.S. GAAP. And so I would expect the existing spool report to actually go down a little when we publish our next one simply because of transfer from international financial reporting standards to U.S. GAAP.

We'll publish both so people can see the comparison. And then we're commissioning another spool report over the next few months. And so that will likely get published in Q1 next year, and that will also include the kind of flow rates we're seeing now from the wells as well as potentially new prices if spool reports feels comfortable with new prices into it.

We're obviously seeing substantially higher flow rates versus what we've seen previously. I think with the new drilling campaign we've implemented, we're seeing flow rates of over 10x what we're seeing previously. And we've learned so much about the geology over the last sort of 12 months or so we could see quite a substantial uptick in the spool report for the existing 1P reserves. We would likely commission an analysis for the much larger production area during 2027 and 2028 to update the reserves for the whole resource.

And so that will obviously really upgrade the size of it. It's worth pointing out that we kind of took over the projects a little over 12 months ago. We put our first capital into it. One of the first things we did was replace the drilling team and some of the engineering projects in the exploration, yes. And so the new people we've recruited and hired to do it and contracted to do it are seeing such better results versus previous people conducting it. And so that could have a magnificent effect on our reserves.

Freddie from Sol Rock. I have a question about the helium contracts, specifically the PPI increase that you mentioned is embedded in those contracts. Firstly, is that U.S. PPI or South African PPI because I believe South Africans are a few percentage points higher. And I guess, as an extension to that, to what extent should we be thinking about the gross margins of that business being able to actually improve year-on-year based on, as you said, fixed the input costs being relatively fixed yet the contracted helium increasing of PPI.

Yes. So the actual -- the inflation escalator is linked to South African PPI, which has been substantially higher than U.S. PPI over the last several years. Now when you've got kind of an 80% gross margin business and your prices are going up by 8% or whatever a year, you'd expect to see some margin increases as well because our costs certainly don't -- a lot of our costs don't increase at that kind of rate. So yes, I think that's it. I think was the second part of the question?

So Paul, if you think about the evolution of SPI from sort of acquisition of Henrik's technology to where you are now spinning off QLE, spinning off Noble. I mean here today, Natalie Talk and Martin talk and PET Labs, how do you see the evolution of ASPI in the next 4 to 5 years. Do you see yourself as a top co spinning off lots of assets? Or do you see more sort of acquisitions yourself or steady as she goes? What do you see the evolution of ASPI?

So outside of PET Labs, I wouldn't expect any more acquisitions. We'll continue to roll up radiopharmacies either by doing partnerships or total acquisitions. So they're small. Very, very small. I wouldn't expect any major acquisitions. And we will do whatever makes it shareholders will get the best return for shareholders. And many investors tell me that our business is undervalued under some of the parts analysis and I'm not going to comment on valuation. That's for investors to decide upon.

But if that's the case, and we believe they're right. And there's absolutely no reason why we can't spin certain businesses out to realize the full sum of the parts value. And so we've said with QLE, but when we started QLE up, if you remember, Nick, 3 years ago, we always said we're going to spin this business out because it has no synergy with nuclear medicine or electronic gases. Actually, it gets in the way of us running a nuclear medicine business.

So we've always said we're going to going to spin out Quantum Leap Energy. I think by listing Renergen as Noble Africa by a reverse merger, we're going to own 89% of that and that be 10% to 11% free float. And where we're raising additional capital to increase the free float or not, we'll have to wait and see.

We've got a lot of customers wanting to have ownership stakes in that business as well or to put some prepayments in to help fund accelerate certain projects. But having a listed helium business is, I think, really unique. I spent last 20 years looking for a listed helium business that is revenue generating and commercially viable just because I've always found helium as the most interesting commodity chemical on planet earth and by creating that we're giving investors the opportunity to invest in a pure-play helium business, which I think is really, really unique.

And then obviously, our prefernostics. We may have, I think, a really advanced theranostics business going into Phase 1 next year, but I bet you we haven't got a single biotech investor on our cap table. And actually, most of our revenues today come from PET Labs and radiopharmacies, and I bet you we haven't got a single health care investor on our register. So again, by being able to allow those investors to access just those parts of the business, I think we'll find quite a receptive audience for that.

But the next 4 or 5 years is going to be really interesting. The last 5 years has been about developing the technologies, building kind of proof-of-concept plants, but now when you think about it next year, I know everyone treats it as a -- everyone assumes we're a nuclear business, nuclear technology company for nuclear fuel cycle, and I'm guessing a lot of our investors are our nuclear fuel investors. But when we spun out Quantum Leap Energy next year, what we're left with is a business that's doing radiotherapies, radio theranostics, LNG and helium and then electronic gases and isotopes. That's a very, very different business mix to being a nuclear enrichment -- nuclear technology company.

And so it will be interesting to see how the shareholder base manages and transitions through that period.

One remark watching Natalie and Johannes and Martin present today and showcasing that side of the business, I think, is only a good thing to realizing that value.

Yes. I'm looking forward to getting Martin and Mike around New York and Boston meeting the biotech investors in the early part of next year.

Yes, I didn't mention exitable twice. -- he mentioned exitable, twice. Yes.

So I think we have time for 1 more question. Go ahead Joe?

I have a question for Natalie. I'm just curious, what made you choose ASP Isotopes?

Yes. Yes, I'll just come -- actually -- well, it's an interesting story. So yes, I mean, I was at Intel for a very long time and predominantly I did technology transfers. I was in the fab for a very long time. And actually, what triggered was I went to the Intel Quantum lab about a few years ago, and I saw it, and it's a completely different world than what I was working on with my team.

And I don't know, I just had a twinkle in my eye for doing something new, and I've just seen that technology kind of took me back to -- I mean I grew up with pagers and big cell phones. And seeing that, it just kind of took me back to, is this -- could this be maybe where we were 20 years ago and seeing how it could grow. And so -- and then I knew about ASP, and it just kind of seemed like a right fit for me.

So I'm really excited to be here and being able to do a little bit on that quantum side, that was.

Natalie is very closely involved with the team. We speak to Intel and other companies in terms of the teams they think they're going to need in the future and how we try and solve those problems for them.

Thank you very much, everyone, for your participation. It's been a nice and active discussion, which is what we'd like to see going forward with our investors and stakeholders. So I think I will pass back to Paul for some concluding remarks. But thank you very much, everyone.

So I guess just to conclude with, I think what you've seen today is an exhibition of all the expertise we have at ASP isotopes, the people we've built, the teams have built. This is a really exciting part of development of new technologies that will enable many of the technologies that we want to see in the future to improve patient outcomes in cancer, make faster computers and so forth. You've also probably noticed that we've got many divisions in isotopes and critical materials touch many different industries from nuclear medicine to semiconductors to nuclear fuels and -- our job is to make sure that we maximize the shareholder value from those different divisions.

As I said in response to Nick's question earlier, the company is really going through an incredible transition now over the next couple of years. I said we have the perception is that we are a nuclear -- a developmental nuclear technology company, and that's perhaps been right over the last 4 or 5 years. But I think if you look at the business in 12 months' time, what you're going to see is a company with some of the world's leading radio nuclei production for hard-to-treat cancers and for other diseases. It would be a revenue-generating profitable business.

And I think you'll see one of the only suppliers of helium to the world that doesn't come from a challenging geopolitically challenging area. And again, that will be a profitable business. It's generating quite substantial gross profit. And then we'll have an electronic gas is an isotype business that will also be generating some revenues and profits as well. And so having taken the company from just a concept that Robbie and I had 5 years ago, sitting at Thanksgiving in Florida, I think it was in summer in Florida to where we are now it's been an incredible journey.

But now is the time to scale. For the next 5 years, we need to grow this business into some -- to become a world leader. And the great thing right now is that we have the capital to do that. We've built the balance sheet to do that. And so now is the time to deploy that capital to grow these plants to become a world leader in isotope production. It won't will be a smooth ride. There'll be speed bumps along the way. There always are. But we'll get over those speed bumps and the goal is to grow into a huge business.

So before I finish, I just like to thank all of you in the room and online for your interest in the company. I'd like to thank all of the employees, the ASPI employees without whom we wouldn't be able to do this. I'm just really the band conductor. I have my musicians here, musicians there, musicians here. And my job is just to make sure they all act together and play together and we maximize the value of each part of it. So I'd like to thank them.

I'd also make a special thank you to Sebesta. He's done an incredible job organizing this. This is our first Capital Markets Day. And I'd like to -- frankly, it's an incredible job organizing our first Capital Markets Day. We're doing it in London this year because we -- it's the World Nuclear Association meeting in London everyone, anyone nuclear is in town, and so we decided to coincide with that conference. But with that, I'd like to thank Sebesta now for an incredible job well done. I wouldn't be here. And so I think now we'll conclude.

I think it leaves us some drinks and canopies and other soft drinks, whatever next door. And we're around to answer your questions you have. So feel free to come up to the team, asking questions that haven't been answered. So we've got an incredible team here who have expertise in many different parts of the business. They're happy to answer your questions. So thank you very much for your attendance today.

Hello. This is Craig Brelsford with RedChip Companies. Thank you for joining today's event with Noble Africa. Joining us today is Paul Mann. He is the CEO of ASP Isotopes and Noble Africa; and Nick Mitchell, the Chief Operating Officer of Noble Africa. We will begin with a brief presentation in a moment, and then we'll open this event to your questions. Welcome to everyone joining us today on X, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social media platforms. [Operator Instructions]

Before we begin, please allow me to read the safe harbor statement. This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans or prospects expressed by management constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical fact should also be considered forward-looking statements. Of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Paul and Nick, please go right ahead.

Thanks, Craig, and thanks, everyone, for your interest in our company. So today, we'll go through a slide deck of Renergen or Noble Africa as we're calling it. And also Q&A at the end. So the lines have been very busy. There's 3 pages of disclaimers for you to review. If you could just review those, that would be great. And also look at our SEC filings for a list of risk factors and similar kind of events.

Obviously, this presentation will have some forward-looking statements in it. And again, our forward-looking statement disclaimers are in our 10-K and proxy and all the other documents in the SEC filings. So as we announced a few weeks ago, we're going to merge Noble Africa, which holds Renergen with ENDRA Life Sciences, [indiscernible] ticker NDRA. And the plan to do that is when the merger is complete. ASPI will own about 89% of the combined entity. The current ENDRA float and the pipe that we're doing concurrent with this will own about 11% of the company. Exact numbers and shares are detailed in the 8-K that was announced -- we announced this transaction a few weeks ago. So this is what ENDRA does. I will not spend much time focusing on that. These are all fairly noncore businesses. We'll likely transition out of these and just focus purely on Renergen and Noble Africa.

So here's who's talking today. I'm the CEO of Renergen. I'm also the CEO and Chairman of ASP Isotopes. My background is more in finance. I spent 20 years, 25 years or so on Wall Street, investing from Morgan Stanley, Soros and Highbridge. I'm a chemical engineer by background, and I'm a CFA Charterholder. Nick, can you introduce yourself quickly, please?

Hi, everyone. My name is Nick Mitchell, as Paul mentioned, the Chief Operating Officer for the entity and one of the original founders of Renergen. I come with about 2 decades of oil and gas experience, specializing in early-stage upstream development and taking projects across their value chain and cycle. Prior to this project, I have been looking at infrastructure development across the African continent, mainly in the power sector. Outside of that, I happen to chair the Onshore Petroleum Association that represents all of the call it, exploration right holders and production right holders on an onshore basis within South Africa. And in that group, we lobby government for legislation, regulation in order to promote an industry that is what we would call at a burgeoning stage in the country at this moment. Thanks, Paul.

Thanks, Nick. So just quickly a few corporate highlights. So this is a world-class helium reserve with likely one of the highest concentrations of helium you will see on Planet Earth, and we'll explain more about that later on. Drilling is -- Phase 1 is expected to come on stream during 3Q with customers lined up from September onwards. This is a very strategic asset, designated strategic project for both the South African government and the United States. It benefits from a significant amount of funding, about $0.75 billion of funding is anticipated from the DFC, U.S. government and Standard Bank. And it's a very, very scarce resource.

Many people are asking why now. So there's been a significant geopolitical disruption in helium supply chains, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But essentially, right now, 50% of the world's supply is offline. Helium prices continue to hit new highs. There's very limited new supply coming to the market over the next several years. And we're lucky that we get a byproduct, which is LNG hydrocarbons. It's very easy to find a home for that in South Africa. I spent most of my career looking at interesting companies.

When you look at the industrial gas companies, so companies like Praxair, Linde, Air Liquide and Air Products. They are highest return on capital, highest gross margin, highest growth businesses other electronic gases businesses. And the largest part of that is basically helium. And so to have a pure-play helium company out there, I think, is a huge opportunity. And many investors have spoken over the years saying it'd be great to have a pure-play helium company. And I totally agree. I spent years looking for one, and that's one of the reasons why we acquired Renergen about a year ago. So we'll quickly now go over the helium market, assuming [indiscernible] about it. So Nick, perhaps you can just talk through the helium market on this slide here, please.

Sure. Thanks, Paul. So before we get into the uses, let's just look at the unique properties and characteristics. So it's both chemically and electrically inert, nontoxic, has a very low density and an extremely low boiling point. So within its, call it, liquid state at 4 Kelvin or minus 269 degrees, it becomes what we call super fluid and gravity has very little impact on this element. As we look into the usage and we look at this bar chart, the MRI market is essentially where it's used in the medical field. So it's super coolant in the cooling of the titanium alloy magnets that are used in these MRIs. It's used both in the production or fabrication of the actual MRI itself and then in the ongoing usage and operation of the MRI.

Moving into the semiconductor side of the bar chart. The critical element here, it's used in 2 critical areas. One is to make the environment in which the microchips or memory chips are produced, absolutely sterile, given that it's both chemically and electrically inert. And the second is to -- as the super coolant medium to call the lasers that are responsible for the etching of these chips as they go through their fabrication state.

The next interesting segment would be rocketry. And essentially, that would be what we deem helium is used for in space exploration. So if we consider SpaceX and we look at the Falcon 9 rockets, they would use approximately 11.7 tonnes of helium for every single launch that takes place. And if we look at the launch cycles that took place in the month of May, there was almost a launch every day. So we can look at typically what -- the volume of helium and the demand of helium that is coming out of that sort of industry and segment.

What's important to note is the industry is growing at about 5% to 6% per annum, and that's what it's forecasted to grow. We do believe that the forecasts are rather constrained by a supply perspective. And we must note that this also ignores what has been forecasted from a growth perspective in terms of AI prevalence in the new data center that is set to -- or data centers that are set to be developed over the next couple of years.

Thanks Nick. So just talking quickly about what the market has looked like and how it's evolved over the last 20 years or so. You will see that the U.S. strategic reserve, the BLM has gone from being about 1/3 of supply to being almost nothing now. So the U.S. BLM is basically exhausted now. It's kind of run out. And you'll see Qatar has become a much bigger player, about 1/3 of the global market now. And likewise, Russia has become a bigger player as well, about 20% of the market. And prices have steadily increased over the last 20 years. And obviously, prices right now are trading at extreme prices, and there's really a rush to find alternative sources of helium right now from helium buyers.

This chart here just kind of shows the supply-demand picture. So you'll see the Americas is broadly balanced. Obviously, Europe and Asia are not balanced. And so it's likely that these regions will see the real knock-on effect of the shortages we're seeing in the world right now. So if you look at the news, we're probably entering the fifth helium supply side crisis over the last 20 years. Nick, maybe just quickly talk through the supply side crisis and what's going on right now in the Middle East to the best of your knowledge.

Great. Thanks, Paul. So as has been widely reported with the Middle East conflict, the helium facilities in Qatar have been impacted. The full extent of the impact has not yet been fully detailed and quantified, but it's estimated that we will see a prolonged outage on several of the Ras Laffan trains. Over and above that, there was recently an announcement unrelated to the conflict, but still impacting the Ras Laffan plant is that an explosion during a commissioning exercise of an LNG facility related or gas facility related to the supplier of feedstock to one of the helium trains has also been impacted. That train has been out since December, was not widely reported at the time. But this leads us to believe that over and above the direct missile impacts, we are going to be seeing some significant, call it, further delays that will constrain the market.

Over and above that, we've also seen that Russia has announced export controls and restrictions in terms of helium exports. It is looking to constrain that helium within the country. And then approximately 2 or 3 weeks ago, we saw an impact from a drone strike as a result of the Ukrainians targeting some of the Russian helium facilities. And this will see a further impact of some helium into the market. And all of these constraints, we are led to believe that will kind of suffice and see the market impacted for an extended period of time.

If we consider the long nature or long lead nature of some specialist equipment, what we've seen in the past in terms of similar impacts is that a helium facility like this could be impacted on the long term for anywhere between 3 and 4 years, while these repairs, insurance and claims processes all kind of manifest themselves into a scenario where the facilities are then restored and back into an operational state where they can produce. We anticipate that it's probably a constraint that probably looks at about 20% of market in terms of total supply for that extended period of time. But as the news develops, we'll obviously inform shareholders and investors accordingly.

Thanks, Nick. So just first, this is a truly unique reserve. I'll run through the geology in just a moment. But when you're drilling for gas in the Middle East, typically you find about 0.03% helium with it. In the United States, you get about 0.3% helium with it, whereas here in South Africa, we got about 3% helium. That's what we've seen so far. So we're seeing helium concentrations 10x what we see elsewhere in the world. And that means as the helium market grows and the market needs more supply, we are the lowest -- we're likely the lowest levelized cost of incremental production volume in the world. And that makes us a very unique asset and that we can bring new capacity on faster and cheaper than anyone else can. These reserves are vast, perfect location. We've also got the lowest carbon footprint of any other company in the world. And I say we've got demand for the energy that we get from this resource. So Nick, maybe if we could talk about how this [indiscernible] got it because it's pretty unique field, one of a kind.

Thanks, Paul. So if we look at the image that's on the bottom right-hand side of the screen, you'll see an impact of -- well, a snapshot of a crater that's been created. This was a crater that hit the world -- hit the earth about 2 billion years ago. The asteroid that -- well, the body of the asteroid was made up of uranium and thorium. Over time, that undergoes radioactive decay, and that is really the source of our high concentrations of helium. If we then look at the -- on this image, you've got a very bright red and purple highlight towards the bottom left of that crater or the rim of the crater. That's essentially our production and exploration rights overlaying on the impact of this crater.

So if we look at that sandy shaded area that emanates out from the pink epicenter, that would be the fruit ball that's created and the rim of that fruit ball would be exactly where we are located. What that means and why it's important is that our geology in that area has become highly faulted, highly fractured, naturally fractured as a result of both the asteroidal strike, but also tectonic forces in plates and movements in those tectonic plates that have created an upward thrust in that area to overturn the [indiscernible] section and essentially turn that vertical obviously being quite a brittle piece of geology has created a naturally fractured segment of geology. Why that's important is because our proven reserve is currently chasing a fractured play. We have to drill approximately anywhere between 400 and call it, a kilometer to intersect these pathways. We can drill deeper. We've proven that. But the idea is to drill anywhere between those sort of ranges, and we create the preferential pathway for this commingled natural gas and helium to come to surface.

The reason that's important is because our drilling costs are significantly cheaper given the depth. The fact that it's low pressure means that we don't need a significant amount of, call it, BOP equipment on surface or Christmas tree, which would be required to regulate both flow and pressure. And the uniqueness of this gas, given the high concentrations of methane within this natural gas and the fact that we have 0 sulfur, no NGLs in the gas itself means the fact that we have to process it or purify it at, call it, wellhead in order to ensure the safe protection of equipment is eliminated. And that means the overall cost for running the upstream side of the system is relatively cheap compared to most competitors worldwide.

If we look at this image here, what we're seeing in the image is at the bottom, the Dominion group, that's essentially the body of that asteroid, the Dominion group where the uranium and thorium sits. It's creating that radioactive decay where the helium is then migrating to surface, moving through that [indiscernible] layer. The [indiscernible] layer is essentially the fractured layer that I spoke about that then comes to surface. And what's important is we have now cap that off with a Karoo sandstone layer above that. And in the most recent campaign, we've announced that we had targeted a sandstone body. That body has never been quantified before in any of our resource statements. We're now looking at the full extent, and we'll be working through the assessment of what that represents as a unique and completely separate reserve or reservoir that will be quantified by our independent specialists in due course. Paul, you're on mute?

Maybe let's talk about how this is -- how vast the reserve is and what we will be using for Phase 1 and Phase 2.

Yes. Thank you. So if we look at the image on the right-hand side of the screen, the black polygon outline represents the production right. That spans approximately 187,000 hectares or close to 500,000 acres. Our proven reserve of -- has been quantified over the bright yellow polygon in the center of the field that represents approximately 15% of the acreage. And why this is important is because we have essentially not explored the contingent and the prospective areas, as you would see, represented by the light shaded yellow and the light blue areas. And this represents significant upside and opportunity for further phases and development.

If we consider the proven reserve and what we're planning from a Phase 1 and Phase 2 perspective, Paul, if you can go back one, if you don't mind, the Phase 1 and 2 project would consume approximately 50% of the gas that's been discovered and deemed to be proven in the bright yellow polygon area. So if we looked at that as an acreage scenario, it would be approximately 7% of the acreage that we can see covered by this production right itself. And that means that we've got significant opportunities for further phases of development within the proven reserve itself and then obviously, significant phases of development over, call it, multi-decades, multi-generations in line with any global discovery of significant, call it, significance.

If we move forward, Paul. Here, we look at the proven reserves based on our previous assessment in 2021. What's important here, and we've highlighted it, the 1P reserve sitting at 7.2 Bcf of helium. Why this is important is the United States Bureau of Land Management, Strategic helium reserve was quantified at approximately 6 Bcf at its height and full capacity. And we can already see that our 1P reserve here is much larger than the BLM. If we then consider our 2P, significant opportunity for additional supply and volume. And what's important to note here is that the BLM has been the provider of helium to the world as a last resort or first resort in a few instances for several decades. And that's what we see in terms of the natural benefit of this resource and the geology.

Great. So I'll take over this next slide here. So shipping helium is not easy. So you're shipping at about minus 270 degrees C and you lose about 1% in terms of boiler each day it's shipping, it turns into a gas. And therefore, the duration of the shipping is important. So Cape of Good Hope or South Africa is an exceptional place to ship from around the world. We can likely get to customers faster in short distance of time than almost any other port. And that matters to the customer who's typically paying for ex-factory gates and paying for the shipping. And so that's an important -- many customers have recognized that in our discussions with them.

So talking about Phase 1 and Phase 2 now. So this is a fairly straightforward petrochemical plant as petrochemical plants go. We have a number of wellheads out in the field, a gathering system, and that feeds an LNG and helium processing plant. This plant essentially cools the gas down. It cools down to minus 170 or so and the LNG comes out of the liquid, then minus 270 and the helium comes out of the liquid. Phase 1 is almost complete. It's when we're starting up. We completed the drilling in May. The plant has been completed. It's produced liquid helium already. And we're in the process of connecting the wellheads to the plant now, new wellheads, and that will then get us to nameplate capacity.

We expect to start Phase 2 during the second half of the year. And the main industries we're servicing obviously gas to power, industrial, transport and helium end markets. So let's talk a bit about the size and magnitude of Phase 1. So Phase 1 is expected to produce about 70 Mcf a day of helium, about 2,500 gigajoules a day of LNG. And for those in the United States, a gigajoule is about equal to an MMBtu. So we expect to reach nameplate capacity during the third quarter and start shipping product to customers by September. We'll then move on to Phase 2. Phase 2 is substantially larger, about 900 Mcf a day in helium, about 34,000 gigajoules per day of LNG. And we expect to benefit in Phase 2 from about $0.5 billion of funding from the U.S. government and $0.25 billion of funding from the Standard Bank.

Phase 2 will take about 44 months to build. Now in terms of what is it like in terms of revenues and profits, that's what most people are likely interested in. 12 months ago, we'd have looked at selling helium about $400 per Mcf and LNG at sort of $13 to $14 per gigajoule. But right now, the helium prices are looking more like sort of $600 or even greater than $600. Our last contract was priced over $600 -- so if you assume sort of $13 to $14 per gigajoule for LNG and $600 per Mcf for helium, Phase 1 is about $27 million in revenue and about $10 million to $11 million in cash gross profit ex D&A.

Now obviously, I can't predict where gas prices are going or helium prices are going. But obviously, every dollar on the revenue -- on the price drops straight to the bottom line. So you can run that math yourself. In terms of Phase 2, assuming again $14 per gigajoule and $600 per Mcf of helium, that will be about sort of $370 million in revenue, about $300 million in cash gross profit. So this is a substantial project. This is a very, very large project. We expect to come online sort of 2030, 2031 for Phase 2. obviously, we get a byproduct when we produce helium. We're very fortunate that our byproduct is LNG, and we can find buyers for this LNG around South Africa very easily. I've looked at many helium projects over the last 2 years. This was my favorite, mainly because of the LNG, the price we get for LNG and the ability to be a real contributor to the bottom line of the P&L. So Nick, maybe just quickly talk about the natural gas sector and the users of it, please.

Thanks, Paul. So right now, all of South Africa's natural gas outside of what's produced by Renergen does come through the ROMPCO pipeline from Mozambique. It's produced in the Pande and Temane fields by Sasol. Sasol have indicated that from 2028, there'd be no ability for them to continue supplying into the external market and that we can expect to have a supply gas cliff. That means that in order for the South African industry that's connected outside of Sasol, we would need approximately 65 petajoules of natural gas to service the current demand. If we include Sasol's needs themselves, the requirement will step up to approximately 185 petajoules per annum.

And then if we consider South Africa's not only experiencing a gas crisis, but also has an existing electricity crisis. The forecast for gas to power as driven by the government's gas master plan is forecasted to be approximately 870 petajoules per annum by 2032. If we then break down our Phase 2 project, we will produce 12 petajoules per annum in that project. And what we are demonstrating here is that at all points, even in the most conservative scenario, the demand for natural gas far outstrips what we can supply within this project. That means there's no silver bullet for any of the solutions that the government is looking to entertain. We essentially need several onshore natural gas fields to come online. We need several offshore natural gas fields to come online, and we do need imported LNG to come on stream as well in order to avert the crisis that the country will have for the next foreseeable future. And that does bode well for all right holders and project developers that are looking to supply into this scenario.

Well, I think you've covered that slide already. So let me run through just the key milestones. So 2026, the goal is to hit the name capacity on Phase 1, start shipping product to customers and commence basically Phase 2. We expect Phase 2 to be completed through '27, '28, '29 with the commissioning starting in 2030 and the first full year of commercial revenues during 2031. I think it's worth pointing out, obviously, Phase 2 is a very large project, about $1 billion of CapEx over 44 months. The main risks I see with that are -- the main risks I see are basically obviously the construction risk and the market risk and also financing risk.

So financing risk, obviously, we've got 2 very supportive financial partners, DFC and Standard Bank. For the construction risk, where we're basically getting the leading LNG supplier, where we're expecting to get a turnkey contract. So that will mitigate risks of price creep, delays, what have you. In terms of market risk, most of our product will be sold on long-term take-or-pay contracts. So Nick, let me talk about the take-or-pay contracts that we're negotiating with customers right now.

100%. Thanks, Paul. So on the LNG side, we are pricing -- well, we're packaging our contracts for a 5- to 8-year contract tenor period. in that mechanism, we include an annual price increase or inflator. It is set at South African producer price index, and essentially, if we look back historically over the last 5 years, that has averaged over 5%. So if you needed to build any models out, you would probably be using that as the backward-looking position to provide your inputs. Over and above that, when we move into the helium side of our business, we tend to typically look to longer duration contracts, anywhere between 10- and 15-year agreements. We do include the same price increase or inflator set with the same mechanism, essentially South African producer price index. And as I mentioned, for the last 5 years has averaged over 5%. That would typically be the long-term position that we -- or trend that we do anticipate moving forward.

Great. Thanks, Paul. Sorry, the one key thing is that all -- both those contracts do come with take-or-pay mechanisms and they're set at a threshold of approximately 80%.

Great. Thanks, Nick. So let's summarize before we move to Q&A, this is a very valuable resource, probably one of a kind in the world. The highest grade of helium, we've seen a very profitable very, very profitable. It's not substitutive demand. You can't substitute helium in the production of semiconductors or MRIs or launching a rocket. It's a really unique gas. Obviously, as an urgent need to find new suppliers of the gas, given the supply shortages we're seeing right now. Say we intend to derisk Phase 2 with solid contracts, both on the construction and on the selling of it.

So I guess, Craig we will stop there and we'll take Q&A.

Thank you, Paul and Nick. [Operator Instructions]

There are a number of other exploration right holders in South Africa aiming to develop helium and natural gas operations, why Renergen, or Noble Africa over these other assets?

Nick, why don't you take this?

Sure. Yes, absolutely. There are several early-stage explorers that are all looking to develop similar opportunities around helium and natural gas, all following on the, call it, path that Renergen has laid out over the last, call it, 19 years of development. What I think is important here is that South Africa does have quite a complex regulatory and legislative regime. A lot of hoops and hurdles to jump through. But then more importantly, if we look at any, call it, development of a resource, extractive industry resource. These mechanisms do take time. And you have to go through a qualified exploration program that is measured in order to fully quantify what you're dealing with from a resource perspective, but then move into your production state.

And in each phase of these licensing regimes you will need to go through specific authorization permits or licensing requirements for each set of activities. The typical licensing or permitting activity time lines can take anywhere between 12 and 36 months depending on what application you're looking for. So there's no quick path to success in this scenario, even if someone has lays the trail before you, there's still a significant window of time, passage of time that takes place. And I think the major advantage that Renergen offers is that we have a fully permitted, call it, Phase 1 operation. We are almost finalized with our Phase 2 permits and authorizations, having started this many, many years ago, and from a timing to market perspective and the best bang for buck in terms of investment dollars, this represents the closest opportunity to see real scale production in order to unlock that return.

Your guidance for ASP isotopes in 2031 is for greater than $300 million in EBITDA. Based on current helium prices and your projected volumes for Phase 2, doesn't that guidance look rather conservative?

Yes, I'll take that one. So listen, I don't have a crystal ball. I can't tell you where helium prices are going to go over the next sort of few years or few months. So I think being conservative is probably the right thing to do. Also we haven't signed contracts yet for Phase 2. I guess, let's wait and see where the contracts of Phase 2 come out at. I think we probably look to the contract, 50% to 75% of Phase 2 out before the end of this year. And that obviously given 5- to 15-year nature of those contracts and the take-or-pay nature of those, that will allow us to give maybe some more definitive guidance as to what things look like we've done that. So we'll update best when we get more clarity on exactly how things look. I'm not giving you the formula how to work out to change that helium price up or down and see how it affects P&L.

What makes an onshore helium and LNG asset in South Africa strategically interesting?

Nick, do you want to answer that?

Yes, sure. So I think given our location, and I'll talk LNG first, within an energy constrained environment in South Africa. Obviously, it means that our molecules can be consumed locally. So that's a reduced cost to market, not having to -- and reduced impact on, call it, global shipping and logistics lines. So a very simplified operation.

If we then think about the strategic location from a helium perspective, it goes back to the map that Paul had on locations, shipping times to market. South Africa was originally established and discovered with the Cape of Good Hope was originally established as part of the, call it, the trade route by the Dutch for a very good reason, proximity to all corners or all areas of the globe in reduced time and format. So I think its positioning from that perspective is very strategic. And we're also somewhat removed from any significant geopolitical tensions and I think that becomes a very interesting, call it, solution for our key customers that are super reliant on a sustainable and reliable supply of product into their businesses and we can't afford these type of prolonged disruptions from that perspective.

So I see a couple of questions here. It's difficult to read the Q&A questions, but I see a couple of interesting questions here that are being asked by viewers. So will current ASPI shareholders get a percentage of Noble similar to the QLE spinout and what's the rationale for this merger?

So we're not intending to spin out any of Noble to shareholders. I view is a highly strategic asset. And I love the asset. It produced an incredible amount of free cash flow when it's up and running and it's full capacity. And it's one of a kind, like in the world. So we don't intend to pay it out. We intend to maintain a very large proportion of it. And on the spin out the float will be about 11%.

And then I see another question here about -- is there an opportunity to have strategic investors or nonvalue to financing into the opportunity?

Well, as we go through Phase 2 contracting, a number of those potential customers that express an interest in potentially investing in this asset in due course. And so obviously, those discussions will happen as and when we go through the Phase 3 contracting. We expect it between now and the end of the year. But in the briefing here is that ASPI's balance sheet is extremely strong. Noble has raised about $50 million of capital now in this listing. And so we're very well financed for at least the first part of the project when we combine the expected loan from the DFC and from Standard Bank.

Looking down the list. Some other questions on helium 3 production. So we've been talking in this presentation about helium 4. We have not really measured the load of helium for helium 3 yet. Now it's possible we have higher levels of helium 3 than we would see normally in the world. It's possible we don't. I expect us to analyze the helium over the next several months and form a conclusion there as to whether it makes sense to try and extract the helium-3 from this helium source. And we'll report back to investors as and when we get closer.

Maybe a question here for you, Nick. Are we tied to the previous contracts of Linde to Phase 1, 75% of 200 Mcf. Can you elaborate on Phase 2 or 3 contracts?

Yes. So no, we're not tied to those historic agreements at the original pricing that's been all that was originally set in. So given the passage of time, we now have the ability to rebaseline and realign new contracts more commensurate with current trading conditions. We previously announced approximately 3 or 4 weeks ago that we have concluded a new offtake agreement at pricing greater than $600 per Mcf. I don't think I could say more than that, but what we're anticipating doing is essentially locking up most of Phase 1 helium molecules at some of the pricing to that. And the idea is then we'll move into the Phase 2 allocation and contracting strategy as well. And we look to price at similar levels to what we see currently.

Given the, call it, medium-term forecast that there is going to be a prolonged shortage, we don't see that scenario changing at least for the next 24 months. So it's, from our perspective, at least the strategy to move forward as we are currently predicting.

Great. Another question I see here, Phase 2 rigs ground in 2028 earliest. Is there any way to accelerate that into late 2027 given all the demand points you've presented?

We're doing our best. We'll move as fast as we can. Let's stick with the projections that we've presented so far. There may be ways to modify Phase 2 as well to bringing certain parts to move forwards. So we'll update investors as and when we get more clarity and certainty on that. But for now, you should assume 2028 breaking ground and have a 2030 completion or commissioning in 2031, first full year of revenues. I'm lost on this Q&A now. So, Craig, maybe another question from yourself, if you see it's been sent in on email.

Absolutely. Why create a dedicated publicly listed helium platform rather than keeping Renergen inside ASP Isotope?

Yes. So I mean there aren't any pure-play helium companies out there that are commercially viable right now or close to commercial scale. As I said earlier, the fastest-growing, highest gross margin -- highest return on capital businesses of the industrial gas companies is typically their electronic gases business, which is principally helium to be able to sell a product like this on 5 to 10 to 15-year take-or-pay type contracts is really unique. Many investors have told me they'd love to be able to invest in pure-play helium company. I completely agree and so let's create that company for people to invest in. We're going to run the majority of it. That's for certain. But happy to have a free float out there to value this asset as it should be valued at. And we'll let the market tell us where they should be valued at. But it's just very unique.

I see a question here. Is there any recoverable uranium or folium in this field?

The uranium is about 5 miles below the surface. So it is probably the most concentrated source of uranium that exists on planet or discoverable planet, but it's not really economically viable to mine in net common prices. So don't expect us to mine any uranium or folium from this location. Craig, any more questions from the e-mail, please?

Yes. What will the combined company be called? And when does it begin trade?

The combined company will be called Noble Africa, and it will begin U.S. trading today. It's trading today under the ticker, NDRA. Now the merger will complete after a few things have happened. We need to file a full S-4, first of all, with the SEC. I'd expect that we file that during the early August kind of time frame, August kind of time frame. And then it will be reviewed by SEC. There'll be some comment periods, that kind of stuff. There will be a shareholder vote for both sides.

Obviously, the Renergen side is ASPI. So you should expect they're going to vote in favor of the transaction. And obviously, at the end vote shows we will need to have a shareholder vote on their side. And then the merger can happen after that. So I'd expect probably during Q4. We'll try and bring it into September, but that feels like a push. So probably during Q4 is my guess. But obviously, a lot of that time line is out of our control. It depends on when the S-4 takes to the SEC and that kind of stuff.

Paul, we are now 3 minutes after the top of the hour. We can end whenever you wish. If you'd like to take a few more. Of course, there are dozens of questions out there.

Yes. There is a lot of questions there. It's 11:00 p.m. for myself and Nick, but we're happy to go on for another 10 minutes or so given there's a lot of people interest in this and other questions. So yes.

Sounds great. Okay. How constrained for supply are semiconductor companies for helium? How well covered are they for inventory?

I'm not sure we really want to comment on behalf of the semiconductor companies. I think if you look on the Internet, the Intel CEO made some comments on helium impacts on their business or potential helium impacts on their business a few weeks ago or a few days ago. So you should look for those on the Internet. But Nick and I went to Southeast Asia about a month ago, that trip wasn't on our calendar 4 months ago, 5 months ago. And there's some pretty urgent meetings with semiconductor companies who want to talk about alternative suppliers of helium. And in many cases, it's not about price or finding a cheaper source of helium, it's about finding a more diversified supply chain because without helium, you can't produce semiconductor. When you think about it, over 60% of Taiwan's GDP comes from semiconductor manufacturing, I think it's at 15% for Singapore. So this is an important -- it's a big issue for those countries and for the manufacturers.

In terms of their inventories and their supply, this isn't the easiest product to store. So I think you probably got to ask them what the inventories are. I'd also note that a few semiconductor companies have come to South Africa to visit our facilities. And that trip wasn't on their schedule back in February either. So there is some urgency, I think, for new supply in this marketplace.

How is the infrastructure for helium handling and export developed in South Africa? Will this be a constraint to get product out when Phase 2 is at 100% capacity?

Nick, I'll let you answer that question.

Sure. So the supply chain is fairly simple in the sense that helium is exported in 40-foot ISO containers. These are containers built into 40-foot ISO shipping frames. So provided you can truck your ISO container to the nearest port you then have a readily or ready-to-go export requirement without any specialist port infrastructure. Any containership is in a position to carry that cargo and export it to the, call it, target destination. As we know and previously indicated on the slides, given the establishment of South Africa from a global trading perspective. We have several ports in the country. We've -- I think we've got about 7 or 8 that are within 8-hour, call it, trucking distances from our facility. And that means that we really can ship either south through Cape Town, East through, call it, Durban and Port Elizabeth or through the West Coast, if required. So there's a lot of optionality that comes with that.

Okay. The question here says, so been seeing this presentation for the best part of the decade and the only thing that changes is the time lines, what makes this time different and when will customers take delivery of helium?

So I think we first started talking to Renergen 4 years ago actually, and I -- it was a project I absolutely loved. And we got involved in obviously about sort of 15 months ago. And what Renergen lacked was access to capital and the ability to really scale their workforce to bring the project up to speed quickly. And so we injected a lot of capital. We're able to get more drilling people out there. ASPI has got 40 or 50 chemical engineers who can help solve problems in plants and that kind of stuff.

So I think the 2 forces together really brought a lot more -- we bought a lot more infrastructure to bear that would accelerate this project. So now the Phase 1 has finished, the construction of the plant is finished. The plant has shipped liquid helium already. It is shipping LNG today. We are in the process of connecting the wells to the plant by gathering system. And then we expect to start producing helium during the third quarter. We have customers ready to take products in September. And so we'll update you all as and when the plant start up and commissioning starts assuming it's happening in August. And we'll go from there. Nick, anything I missed there or was that kind of reasonable answer?

No, I think that's a fair assessment of where we are, Paul. The capital constraints have certainly impacted the ability to deliver but I think that's been resolved, and we're now looking forward to embarking and delivering on the commitments for shareholders' benefit.

Another question here. Where is your largest client based, Asia or Americas? And have they signed to take most -- take on most of Phase 1 helium output via take-or-pay contracts?

So the first contract we've signed with was an Asian customer, it's about 15% of Phase 1. I'd expect most contracts are about a similar size will enter contract out sort of 75% to Phase 1 and about 50% of Phase 2. The only constraints in our -- in the DFC financing is that will not allow to sell product to China, to North Korea, to Iran and the usual list of suspects basically. That's the constraint in that DFC package that regarding product location.

Craig, another question from yourself, please.

How should sector-agnostic investors think about this opportunity in the context of other comparable opportunities available today?

Well, we're the management team of the company. We tell you what we're going to do. I kind of think it's up to investors to decide what price they pay for what the valuation should be and how they compare to other comparable companies. But I guess, we are very small version. This is a very small version of the fastest-growing part of the industrial gas companies, quite frankly, that's what we're doing selling helium, LNG. But I met more for investors to decide upon rather than us to give an opinion on.

Question about Andra. Why is a helium and LNG business combining with a medical imaging company?

Yes. So we would insulate a company to merge Andra and to accelerate the speed of the go public opportunity. And the great thing about Andra is that they had a very, very clean cap table. There is no kind of nasty preferred shares, very few warrants. It's a very straightforward cap table, no debt on it, very few employees, no long-term leases, no long-term liabilities. Businesses that we can divest very quickly or spin out very quickly or just shut down very quickly without costing us much money. So it's almost a perfect shelf as to merge this with. We actually put over $3 million into the shelf to keep it alive as this was being delisted prior to this merger. And so that obviously gave us a bit more incremental more ownership of the entity. That's the main rationale for it.

And when we do these mergers, after doing too many in my career, you want a clean cap table, clean structure, no big assets or fixed assets or legacy assets or legacy businesses or lots of employees in infrastructure you wouldn't want. It's a very clean shell with an operating business that can be divested, sold, and shut down very quickly.

And we have time for one more question for you. Yes. How do you think about helium demand drivers over the next decade, including semiconductors, space, medical and quantum computing?

I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't predict the growth rates of those 3 industries, but all would appear to be growing much faster than GDP. And so I would therefore expect the helium demand, if it's available, we'd also grow at greater than GDP. But there may not be enough supply to allow all the customers to grow. You may -- in theory, if we see the supply side shortages remain for a long period of time, some customers may have to get curtailed or some industries may have to stop using helium more or what have you. So we'll see.

Nick, any thoughts on that if we see a real supply-side squeeze what industries would have to curtail or have to stop using helium or just not exist anymore?

Yes. So obviously, my opinion here and not necessarily something that we can completely bank on. But I do see the balloon market and lifting markets taking the first hit. I think that will disappear quite quickly. I do see the welding market potentially being impacted next. And as we start to make our way through it, it will essentially be the markets that can't afford the significant price inputs or increases that will naturally fall off the table from a supply perspective. And that will be chewed up by the industries that can afford to pay the premium and sustain that pricing as it moves forward.

The one closing point I'd like to make there is if we look at the forecasts that come through in order to meet that supply and demand balance and forecast. If we consider that this is an extractive industry, the discovery is around helium opportunities, should have been made approximately 10 to 15 years ago, if we are going to see them starting to supply in the next 5 years into the market. And that means that based on what we've seen and what we can see that's publicized in terms of new project development is we certainly have a lack of project development taking place around new helium projects. And I don't anticipate that, that timing can be accelerated as a result of funding. I think it's a typical exploration program that follows suit. And that does come with a, call it, 15 to 20 year development cycle from asset identification to scale production.

I mean, I would add, this should be viewed as a typical commodity chemical business. It's a very unique commodity chemical. So there's a supply-demand curve. And so when supply exceeds demand, the price will set at the marginal producer there. And when demand exceeds supply, those industries that can't afford to pay that price would be the ones that don't get the volumes is my guess. So you'll see, it'd be interesting next few years.

And, thank you very much, Paul and Nick. For more information about Noble Africa, reach us at 1-800-RedChip or e-mail us at [email protected]. Please watch small stocks, big money, RedChip's program featuring exciting small-cap companies on CNBC every Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern and on Bloomberg U.S.A. every Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. U.S. Eastern. And finally, join our next webinar with Venue Holding Corporation tomorrow at 4:15 p.m. U.S. Eastern. Register for tomorrow's webinar and for all RedChip webinars at redchip.com/events. Thanks to our many participants today. And thank you, Paul and Nick.

Thank you for your interest.

Thank you, everyone. Goodbye.

Good day, and welcome to the ASP Isotopes business update call. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Shveta Dighe, Head of Investor Relations. Shveta, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining ASP Isotopes business update call. I'm Shveta Dighe, Head of Investor Relations at ASP Isotopes. Joining me today are Paul Mann, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Heather Kiessling, Chief Financial Officer; and Dr. Ryno Pretorius, Chief Executive Officer of our Nuclear Energy subsidiary, Quantum Leap Energy. Our remarks today include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today.

We encourage you to view the forward-looking statements disclosures included on Slide 2. Additional information on relevant risk factors is described in our filings with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Paul.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Here is how we will structure today's call. I'll begin with a corporate overview and our key themes for 2026. I will then walk through each of our product and business segments. Heather will cover our financial performance and capital position. We'll close out with our upcoming milestones and EBITDA outlook before opening the line for questions.

We are transitioning from a company that has built infrastructure to one that will be delivering commercial products across multiple high-value end markets. Over the past 4 years, we've built 3 enrichment facilities in South Africa using our proprietary aerodynamic separation process and quantum enrichment technologies. These technologies span nuclear medicine, electronics and nuclear energy. Let me walk you through our 2026 plan.

First, we expect first commercial shipments of Silicon-28, Ytterbium-176 and Carbon-14 this year. Each of these products serves a different critical end market, electronics, nuclear medicine, nuclear fuels and each is a limited global supply. Second, on radiopharmaceuticals, our business continues to grow, and we're expanding operations beyond South Africa into the United States and other jurisdictions to meet increasing demand for radiotherapeutics.

Third, our helium and LNG operations at the Virginia Gas project are progressing towards nameplate capacity with drilling now complete approximately 4 months ahead of schedule. This positions us as a meaningful contributor to global helium supply at a time when approximately 25% to 30% of the world supply is offline. And fourth, Quantum Leap Energy continues its path towards becoming an independent public company with the contents S-1 submitted. The key takeaway here is that we are no longer a development stage company with our critical materials platform with revenue potential across all business lines.

We have built one integrated critical materials platform serving 3 multibillion-dollar end markets. In each one, supply chains are constrained, geographically concentrated or strategically vulnerable. And each one, no credible Western alternative exists at commercial scale today. That is a position we have built is what makes this platform differentiated. In nuclear medicine, we are at an intersection of 2 powerful trends, the global shift towards targeted cancer therapies and a critical shortage of isotopes that make those therapies possible.

Ytterbium-176 is the feedstock for Lutetium-177, a medical isotope used in targeted therapy for neuroendocrine tumors and prostate cancer. That supply runs predominantly through Russia. We are building a Western alternative. Carbon-14 is a separate but equally critical market, a regulatory requirement in pharmaceutical drug development globally with an acute supply shortage. And through radiopharmaceuticals, we closed the loop producing isotopes and delivering finished doses direct to patients across South Africa and the United States. On electronics, we're building a next-generation electronic gases company. Supplying a semiconductor fabrication facility means delivering a full suite of high-purity materials, Silicon-28, helium and fluorinated gases.

The semiconductor industry has exhausted what traditional silicon deliver. The next generation of chips requires isotopic materials for superior thermal conductivity and quantum computing requires them for qubit stability. There is no commercial supplier of Silicon-28 at scale anywhere in the world today. We are at with 3 signed purchase orders. And every semiconductor fab on earth needs helium to operate. We own the most concentrated helium resource in the world.

Nuclear fuels through Quantum Leap Energy, nuclear power is back on the global agenda, but the fuel supply chain is not ready. HALEU, LEU+, Lithium-7, the materials next-generation reactors depend on have no secure Western supply chain. QLE exists to fix that. Let me take you through our near-term milestones for each segment. Let me start with our nuclear medicine update, beginning with our first quantum enrichment plant.

This plant uses our proprietary laser-based quantum enrichment technology and is currently producing Ytterbium-176. Ytterbium-176 is the feedstock for Lutetium-177, the active ingredient in Novartis' Pluvicto, one of the most important radiopharmaceutical therapies for metastatic prostate cancer. Demand is growing rapidly. Supply today runs predominantly through Russia. We are building the credible Western alternative at commercial scale. We shipped our first Ytterbium-176 sample in September 2025.

In October 2025, we experienced a brief operational pause, which has been fully resolved. The plant is back in operation and enriching product. We believe our plant is capable of reaching approximately 1 kilogram per year with approximately 2 kilograms of indicated customer demand. We're entering this market with demand ahead of our initial capacity. We expect first commercial shipments around midyear or third quarter 2026.

Our carbon plant has been enriching Carbon-12 and building operational confidence throughout its time in service. Science is not in question. Carbon-14 is our near-term commercial priority for this plant. Carbon-14 is used to trace how drugs metabolize in the body. It is not operational. It's a regulatory requirement in drug development. Global supply is acutely constrained.

We've signed a take-or-pay contract with a North American customer, minimum $2.5 million per year, potential upside to $5 million or more, contracted recurring revenue. The feedstock has now shipped out of Canada and is being processed in the United States. We expect delivery to South Africa by the end of this month. The concentration of Carbon-14 in that feedstock will determine our revenue timing. At 0.5% concentration, we expect to book revenue in Q3. At 1% or higher, we book in Q2, and we'll know once we receive it.

To be direct, this is a timing issue, not a science issue. The plant works, the contract is signed. PET Labs is our radiopharmaceutical platform and a business that is scaling fast. Revenue grew from $3.9 million in 2024 to $5.7 million in 2025, driven by capacity expansion and favorable pricing. Our first electronics at peak utilization, and our second came online in July 2025.

South Africa is no longer a proof of concept. It is a fully operational radiopharmacy delivering record doses. And the playbook we built there is exactly what we are replicating in the United States. On U.S. expansion, we acquired East Coast Nuclear in Florida, our first U.S. entry, a spec focused initially with PET capability planned for 2027. The company acquired a second site in North Carolina, now delivering spec services for PET expansion planned 2028.

We have an active pipeline of additional radiopharmacy acquisition targets in due diligence. 2026 revenue target is $10 million or more, roughly double that of 2025. Now let me turn to Silicon-28 and where we stand on commercial delivery. Isotopic Silicon-28 is a key material in the development of solid-state quantum computing and advanced semiconductor architectures. By removing the nuclear spin noise present in natural silicon, enriched Silicon-28 provides a pristine environment for qubits, dramatically improving coherence times and overall device performance.

This unique material advantage is crucial for building scalable, fault-tolerant quantum processes that can operate reliably at industrial scale. We have signed 3 purchase orders, one with a major U.S. semiconductor company, one with a large global industrial gas company and one with a large U.S. buyer. We shipped first enriched samples in August 2025. Emissions is tracking exactly in line with our original calculations. Technology is working precisely as designed.

Two customers visited the plant in October and November, and those visits were constructive and collaborative. We jointly agreed to make modifications to the plant for safety, operational efficiency and long-term plant robustness. We intent with them because we want this plant to run reliably for years, not just for the first batch. We expect to ship the first Silicon-28 product during the second quarter of 2026. We completed the Renergen acquisition on January 6, 2026.

Let me explain why helium is central to our strategy and why the timing of this acquisition matters. We own the most concentrated helium resource in the world. Qatar averages 0.05% helium concentration. Russia is 0.06% and the U.S. averages 0.35%. Our 3 state wells average over 3%, and we have seen concentrations as high as 12%. Now Phase 1 status, well drilling is complete, 4 months ahead of schedule with flow rates up to 16x those of earlier wells.

We're ramping to nameplate capacity expected in the third quarter of 2026. At nameplate, Phase 1 produces approximately 2,500 gigajoules per day of LNG, 1 gigajoule is approximately 1 MMBtu and 58 Mcf per day of helium. 60% of Phase 1 LNG is already contracted, and we expect positive operational cash flow before year-end 2026.

Phase 2 is the transformational step, 34,000 gigajoules of LNG per day and approximately 895 Mcf per day of helium, representing roughly 7% of projected global supply. Phase 2 financing benefits from $750 million of committed debt, $0.5 billion from the U.S. DFC and $250 million from Standard Bank, unlocked by a $170 million capital commitment. The U.S. government has designated this facility as critical to national infrastructure.

Quantum Leap Energy is our nuclear fuel subsidiary. I want to note upfront, we are limited in some of what we can say today because QLE is in the S-1 registration process with the SEC. Our comments will be consistent with publicly disclosed information. The comp S-1 was submitted in November 2025. The QLE spinout is a 2026 event. I'll ask you to watch for update as we work through the SEC process.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Heather.

Thank you, Paul. Good morning, everyone. I'll walk you through our key financial metrics for the year ended December 31, 2025. At this stage, we consider our key metrics to be revenue, cash and our capital position. Total 2025 revenue was $23.8 million compared to $4.1 million in 2024, an increase of 480%. This reflects our full year of radiopharmacy operations in 2025 and the investment in Skyline, which is comprised of $5.7 million from specialized isotopes and services and $18.1 million from construction services, which is from Skyline.

Looking at just product revenue, 2025 was $5.7 million from our radiopharmacies, an increase of 46% compared to the $3.9 million in 2024, reflecting our growth in radiopharmacy operations and expansion into the United States.

As of December 31, 2025, ASP Isotopes had cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of $333 million. During 2025, the company significantly strengthened its balance sheet, raising over $345 million in total capital through the issuance of common stock and convertible notes. This included $199.7 million in net proceeds from a stock issuance in October 2025 and $42.2 million from a private placement of Quantum Leap Energy convertible notes in November 2025. We are well positioned for executing our plans.

With that, I will hand it back to Paul.

Thank you, Heather. Let me walk through our 2026 milestones. The company expects the first enriched Silicon-28 product to ship in the second quarter of 2026. The company anticipates initial Carbon-14 commercial shipments around midyear, contingent on the timing receipt of feedstock from our Canadian supplier. And the company expects initial commercial shipments for Ytterbium-176 around midyear or the third quarter of 2026.

The company expects to obtain helium Phase 1 nameplate capacity during the third quarter of 2026. And for radiopharmaceuticals, we expect continued growth of the radiopharmacy operations, and we expect to advance 4 pipeline assets into Phase 1 human clinical trials. Today, we are sharing a segment level range of how we get to a greater than $300 million EBITDA target in 2031. Starting with electronic gases, we're targeting between $150 million and $300 million. This is driven by Silicon-28, helium and a broader enriched electronic gases portfolio that is building behind them.

Demand here is structural, not cyclical. It grows as chips get smaller, data centers scale and quantum computing moves towards commercialization. There's no credible or western supplier of Silicon-28 at commercial scale today, and we are building that. Natural gas contributes between $100 million and $200 million. This is the LNG that comes up alongside the helium in the Virginia Gas project.

Our wellhead costs of $0.35 per MMBtu, the economics are compelling. This is not our core business, but at this cost structure, the returns are exceptional. On medical isotopes, this should contribute between $40 million and $100 million, Ytterbium-176 and Carbon-14. Both products address acute supply shortages in their respective markets. Ytterbium-176 supply today runs predominantly through Russia, and Carbon-14 supply is equally constrained. We are building the Western alternative for both.

In Radiopharmaceuticals contributes between $40 million and $100 million. PET Labs, a business that's already generating revenues is growing and expanding internationally. It delivered greater than 40% revenue growth in 2025, it's targeting $10 million in 2026. Taken together, these 4 segments get us to greater than $300 million in EBITDA in 2031.

Let me close with a few brief remarks. When we listed on NASDAQ, we made a set of commitments, build the technology and prove that it works. We have done that. Our science works, our customers are engaged and our milestones ahead of us are defined and achievable. The world needs what we are building, but the platform, the capital and the team to deliver, I'm confident in what this year holds.

Thank you all for your continued interest and support. Operator, we're ready to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question, which comes from the line of George Gianarikas from Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe first set of questions just to focus on quantifying something. So for 2026, you talked about operationalizing several of your assets. So can you help us at least understand a range of revenue that we should expect for the firm for the full year, particularly as you're bringing to life, as we said, helium, natural gas and a few of the isotopes? And also as an add-on to that, the $300 million in EBITDA that you discussed, just to be clear, does not include anything regarding QLE.

Thanks, George. So I'll take, first of all, the range of revenues for the firm for full year 2026 and then regarding the $300 million guidance and QLE. So it's quite challenging to give you an exact guidance for 2026, given we don't know exactly which month or which quarter that the plants will start up and start shipping in. So let me kind of give you an idea of what the annualized number may look like.

So for Silicon-28, it's going to be -- my guess is low single-digit millions of dollars. But again, it depends on when it starts up and demand. As I said, we've signed 3 contracts with customers. There's lots more customers potentially interested. We haven't signed those contracts yet. So a number of uncertainties for Silicon-28. As I said earlier, we'd expect over $10 million for PET Labs this year. For Carbon-14, we said annualized, the contract is about $2.5 million a year. And perhaps they might want as much as $5 million a year. So depending on exactly what month we start up in, you can even pro rata that number for the year.

And for Ytterbium-176, we've kind of said that we think that plant can do about a kilogram a year at about $20,000 a gram. So that would be $20 million of annualized revenues. I don't know if we think that plant is starting up around midyear, that kind of time frame, Q3. So again, you can pro forma that for the year. And importantly, as we start the plants up and we ship our first commercial production, we can tell you that date and then you can pro forma those numbers.

For LNG and helium, we said LNG is about 2,500 gigajoules per day. And I would assume a price of $13 to $14 per gigajoule. So annualized, that would be about slightly over $12 million a year. And then liquid helium, we said 58 Mcf per day. Now the price there is clearly right now, we're seeing extreme tightness in that market. So if you had asked me 3 months ago, I would have said assume maybe an average price will be a mixture of spot and contract, call it, $400 per Mcf, and that gives you kind of $8 million in revenue.

But right now, if we're signing contracts, we could be signing well over $1,000 per Mcf, and that's more like $25,000 or $20,000 -- $20 million a year. So -- and obviously, our costs are fixed on that business as well. So $1 of incremental helium revenue drops straight to the bottom line. So there's a lot of operating leverage there. And then yes, just to confirm, the $300 million EBITDA target for 2031 excludes any contribution from QLE, which we expect to spin out this year.

And maybe as a follow-up, I want to ask about your helium business. Any thoughts on -- I know you just acquired it, but any thoughts on potentially monetizing that or highlighting the value to the market in the future?

Thanks for the question. Yes. So it's a very good time to be involved in the helium market. We've actually had customers fly to South Africa from Asia to visit us to try and secure helium. That ship to South Africa wasn't on their travel plans 3 months ago. We've had a lot of interest from investors who would like to invest specifically in the helium business.

I've always said that our look is this is -- there are 4 verticals here and helium is one of them. And so it's obviously they may find time for us to try and extract some value from that helium business and also they put a market value on that. So we would certainly look to doing a market debut or listing or a spinout or whatever the right terminology, is the right phrase is for that helium business. I think a lot of interest from investors in it right now.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Alex Fuhrman from Lucid Capital Markets.

A lot of exciting milestones that you're hitting this year. I wanted to ask about the first commercial shipments of Silicon-28 that you have coming this year. It sounds like some of these customers have already been testing your silicon. Can you give us a sense of what they're doing with it and potentially what the time line might be for these to turn into larger orders?

Great. So thanks for the question. So we shipped some samples of Silicon-28 to customers or to a customer, arguably it was representing 2 customers, but to 1 customer to test that Silicon-28. There aren't many labs in the world. We think there are probably only 2 that can measure Silicon-28 to the kind of purity we need to measure it to. We have one, that particular customer has another. And so we tested it.

The samples looked like they were -- our measurement -- our analytics and their analytics measure exactly the same measurement, which is exactly what we wanted. You can't buy a standard for Silicon-28. So we're having to invent the process as we're doing it. And so that confirmed, first of all, our analytics were correct and that the enrichment was going exactly in line with our theoretical calculations. That was encouraging as well.

Right now, we've signed 3 contracts to customers, and -- but we had a lot of interest from other customers. The customers we signed right now are more for the quantum computing side. So looking at 99.995% isotopically pure. There's a lot of interest as well from lower enriched products, maybe 99.9% or 99.99%, more for normal computing or next-generation semiconductors, so faster semiconductors, semiconductors that can transmit heat better than current semiconductors can.

So we'd expect as we go into production to get more interest in those -- from those customers. I would expect quantum computing to remain very much a niche market with lower levels of enrichment for advanced semiconductors to be a much larger market. But we're in discussions with all those customers today. Some of them have -- many of them have flown out to visit our plants in South Africa, and we're very excited to be -- to service them.

Okay. That's really helpful. And then, Paul, if I could ask about Ytterbium. Nice to see there's a lot of demand there. It sounds like particularly you indicated pretty strong demand in non-Russian supply. Curious if you're seeing non-Russian Ytterbium starting to be contracted at a premium price. And then it also sounds like you've got line of sight to production of 1 kilogram, but potentially demand for 2 kilograms or more. Is there a strategy to get production up to that 2-kilogram level?

Yes. So we're actually -- there isn't a clear spot price or market price for Ytterbium. It's all done customer to customer. So you can't log onto your Bloomberg screen and see a forward curve or a futures curve for Ytterbium or what the market is paying for it. So we're told in the marketplace that typically, Russian Ytterbium-176 trades between $20,000 and $35,000 a gram. Our plan is to try and charge $20,000 a gram. So actually priced at a slight discount to Russia.

And we would like to be a reliable, low-cost supplier of these very valuable isotopes. And we still pick up an exceptionally high gross margin. So the geography of the customer as well as the price never comes into question with the customer. And then in terms of the second part of your question as to expanding the plant from 1 kilogram to a larger quantity. So right now, we are procuring the equipment for the continuous vessel. We've got one item left to procure. We're expecting that to arrive during the second quarter. And then we can start increasing the processing and throughput for the plant.

Right now, processing for about sort of 3 hours a day, 3 to 4 times a week. That's not how you produce a commercial large quantity product. So the continuous vessel should allow us to process 24/7 for about 3 months, and that's where we get to really large scale. I'd expect us to build a second vessel and a second plant straight away, and we're already procuring equipment for a second plant. So we can expand our capacity from 1 kilogram to 2 kilograms, and that's work in progress right now.

And that concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Paul for some final closing remarks.

Thanks for your interest in our company. 2026 is a transformational year for the company. It's a lot going on, a lot to happen. And we look forward to reporting on these events as and when they happen over the next several months and becoming a major supplier of isotopes and critical materials to the world by the end of this year. So thank you all for your interest. If you have any questions, please contact our Investor Relations department, and I'll be sure to answer them. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's ASP Isotopes business update call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.