Energy Fuels Aktie

Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Inc. Australian Investor Day. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Ross Bhappu, President and CEO of Energy Fuels. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Justin, and thank you all for joining. I appreciate you taking the time to hear about Energy Fuels and learn a little bit more about our company. Again, my name is Ross Bhappu, I'm President and CEO of the company. Energy Fuels is a U.S.-based company. I live in the Denver, Colorado area, we're based here, but we are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, New York American -- sorry, the New York American Exchange, the Toronto Stock Exchange. And now with the addition of ASM were listed on the ASX, which is fantastic, under the ticker EF2.

So I've had -- over the course of my career, I've had a lot of experience and a lot of -- spent a lot of time in Australia. It's certainly a tremendous country when it comes to mining. Early on in my career, I spent time at the Mount Isa smelter, the copper smelter, where I learned about copper smelting, I'm a metallurgist by background, learned that technology and then we use that ISASMELT technology here in the United States. And so my exposure and time with Australia has gone for many, many years. And so it's great to be on the phone with all of you.

So Energy Fuels is a company that is growing. We've grown quite significantly over the last few years. It's a company that started out as a uranium company, and I'm going to walk you through a little bit about how we've advanced from uranium mining and processing through the rare earth and heavy mineral sands and today, we are really truly a global diversified and vertically integrated critical minerals company. So the first slide, of course, I've always got to go through -- sorry the second slide is always about the forward-looking statements and I will be making forward-looking statements. So please be aware of that.

So if we go to the next slide, Energy Fuels started its life probably from 45 years ago. And as we kind of advance through this, the first set of inputs here will show you kind of where we started with uranium. And you can see all of these blue boxes represent our uranium assets. We have up here 7 different uranium mining assets. We're operating 2 of them. The key here is the White Mesa Mill, the yellow box in the middle. The White Mesa Mill really is the kind of the gem in the crown of Energy Fuels assets. It's the only licensed and permitted operating mill for treating conventional uranium ores in the United States today.

We are currently the largest producer of uranium in the United States. We'll produce close to 2 million pounds this year. So by global standards, I would say they're not massive. We're not massive in uranium standards, but by U.S. standards, we are the largest and very significant. Probably about 6 years ago, we started experimenting with other things that we could do with that mill, and recognizing that all rare earth minerals have some level of radio activity with them, whether it's uranium or thorium.

We started working in the laboratory first and experimenting with utilizing our solvent extraction experience to process uranium -- to process rare earth ores. That led us to building a pilot plant. And then 2 years ago, a little over 2 years ago now, we built a commercial operating facility to treat rare earth minerals. And specifically, we treat monazite and now also MREC materials. And once we discovered that, we've been purchasing monazite ore from -- monazite concentrates from Chemours in Florida and Georgia.

But we also decided pretty early on that we wanted to be in the business of producing our own feedstock. And so we added a host of heavy mineral sands operations, and the first one would be -- let me try to get this. There we go. The first one would be the Bahia Project in Brazil. The second one is a joint venture with Astron for the Donald Project right in Australia. And the third one is the Vara Mada project, which is in Madagascar. So about 2 years ago, almost 2 years exactly, we acquired Base Resources was based out of Perth. Base Resources was operating and just at the tail end of operations of the Kwale project in Kenya.

And so interestingly, the Base has gone through -- kind of going from feasibility study through construction, through operations for some 13-odd years, and now reclamation and closure. And so a fantastic experience. We've retained all of that experience, of course, in our Perth office and so today, we are advancing on the Vara Mada project. We have the Donald Product joint venture that we're hoping to be in a position to make an FID on as quickly as possible.

More recently, probably in January of this year, we made an announcement that we were acquiring ASM, Australian Strategic Materials. And ASM has the Dubbo Project. So with that, we've acquired the Dubbo Project. in Australia, of course. And equally importantly, the Korean Metals Plant, which is a metallization facility. It's it takes oxides, rare earth oxide and converts them to metals and alloys. And as part of that, ASM and now ourselves have been planning on also replicating that plant in Korea and building a sister facility very similar to it here in the United States, and we're referring to it as the American Metals Plant. We're still working on the exact location.

But on the back of announcing the ASM transaction, again, that goes back in January, we were contacted by all the major rare earth magnet manufacturers about providing and entering into either offtake agreements or joint ventures, partnerships. And so we started exploring opportunities with different manufacturers, and that led us to a company called Vacuumschmelze. Vacuumschmelze is a German-based company. They have operating assets in Hanau Germany. So that's just outside of Frankfurt. They have assets in Finland, Slovakia, Malaysia and China. But importantly, they've just completed construction on a beautiful new state-of-the-art facility in Sumter, South Carolina. And so with that facility, we have great capabilities in producing magnets.

So you can see that column on the left side of the screen, we currently have the capacity to produce 3,500 tonnes per year of magnet production. Our mill capacity is 10,000 tonnes per year of monazite and that equates to about 1,000 tonnes per year of NdPr. And then we have, as I mentioned earlier, we produced about 2 million pounds of uranium annually. So with these assets and once we build out all of those different facilities, we have the ability to grow the magnet production from 3.5 to -- sorry, to 13,500 tonnes, so expanding it by 10,000 tonnes per year of magnet capacity. So it's really a tremendous capacity increase.

And with that, we would expand the mill, that takes us to 60,000 tonnes per year of monazite and that equates to about 6,000 tonnes per year of NdPr. And then we also have the ability -- the mill is licensed and permitted to produce up to 6 million pounds per year -- sorry, it was designed for 6 million pounds per year, we licensed for 8 million pounds per year, and we could likely go to about 5 million pounds per year annually of U3O8 of yellowcake. So really, it provides a tremendously diversified portfolio of assets.

And I'd just mention that, again, Australia has been vitally important over the years. the Vara Mada project is a very important part of our growth plan. ASM is very important. Our Donald joint venture. So to put it in perspective, over the last 2 years, we've invested in and committed over AUD 1 billion into Australia to acquire these assets or to build out projects. So Australia, again, is extremely important to our future.

If we jump to the next slide, we really do believe we have this fully integrated rare earth mine to magnet platform, and we're a leading uranium producer. Of course, to get there, we also -- because we chose monazite and MREC, we've gotten into heavy mineral sands. So today, when you look at what is Energy Fuels, we're the #1 producer of uranium in the U.S., we're this expanding rare earth magnets and advanced materials company. We announced just about 3 weeks ago that we've started construction of a heavy circuit. So we are building the capabilities to produce terbium and dysprosium oxides, with the ASM acquisition, we can produce metals. So neodymium iron boron alloys and metals as well as samarium cobalt. And then with the addition of all the heavy mineral sands, we're also a major producer or will be a major producer of titanium and zirconium minerals.

So really, it's very much a fully integrated platform and is quite diversified across all -- a number of critical minerals. I guess the one thing that I would say that everything that we're doing has in common. So when we look at uranium, rare earth, vanadium, titanium, zircon, it's all that these minerals contain radioactive elements. And so they contain uranium and that really gives us a tremendous competitive advantage when we're processing these minerals.

So just if we look a little bit at the demand side of the equation on the next slide, we feel like when we look at our position, our strategic position, we think we can be -- and we are going to be the supplier of choice. We're a leading global player in this space. We've got tremendous scalability. We're going to have industry-leading returns. And when you look at the growth that we're seeing in this sector, data center is growing at almost 30% per year.

Nuclear energy has been growing at around 4% per year. But when you look at the small modular reactors and the growth in nuclear power restarting things like Three Mile Island, and other nuclear facilities, we think it's going to grow at a higher rate than that. Of course, on the automotive side, with electric vehicles growing at almost 20%. We see a tremendous opportunity on the rare earth side, the uranium side, the titanium side. An area that's really exciting for us is robotics. We're looking at compound annual growth rates of over 50% on robots and especially humanoid robots, which are massive consumers of rare earth minerals.

So we have a competitive advantage because of low-cost operations, the Vara Mada project tied with the White Mesa Mill will make us one of the lowest cost producers of rare earths in the world. And that includes our Chinese counterparties that we deal with and that would be our competitors. We have tremendous technical capabilities. We've got now this fully vertically integrated platform, mine to magnets. We've got very strong government support and we believe we've got very good sustainable solutions.

So as we look at the next slide, the demand outside of China, I mean, I find this really interesting that the 2 bar charts on the right -- sorry, on the left show that, there's -- between 2025 and 2035, there's going to be a 50% increase outside of China for these magnets -- for magnet demand. And when we look at where that's going to come from, we need a 2x increase in the mining. We need a 4x increase in refining and separations, and we need to see a 6x increase in magnet production and we think we can be a very important part of building this out and being a part of the solution here. Importantly, we're going to see about $60 billion of investment over the course of the next 10 years to fill that need.

So when we look at the next slide where Energy Fuels is, we feel like we're uniquely -- to be a fully vertically integrated producer. If we start from the left, we've got the mining operations, HMS mining projects as well as purchasing of MREC. So we've got the Donald Project that we hope begin to make an FID on very soon. We've got the Vara Mada project in Madagascar, which is -- we've got a feasibility study that we announced earlier this year and we're hoping to move that into construction as early as late next year. We've got the Bahia project, which is a little behind both of those. And then we've got our Chemours offtake agreements and then other monazite and MREC offtake agreements. And then, of course, the Dubbo Project, which now we've acquired through the ASM acquisition.

So that's on the mining side. When you look at our processing and separation capability at the White Mesa Mill, we do have this capability today, again, about 10,000 tonnes of monazite capacity, and that allows us to produce oxides of NdPr, Dy, dysprosium, terbium, samarium, europium, and gadolinium either separated or individually as oxides, and then everything else including yttrium and other minerals and metals. So then with the addition of ASM, that gives us that metalization and alloying capability. That's the Korean Metals Plant and soon to be the American Metals Plant. And then with our announced acquisition of Vacuumschmelze, that will allow us to produce multiple grades of magnets including samarium cobalt and that's the operating facilities in Germany as well as the United States as well as Finland. So we have operations for all of them.

And that gives us that full vertical integration to supply into the automotive industry, the robotics sector, of course, data centers and energy demand and then consumer goods. And I think people don't really realize that these magnets are prolific. They're used in everything from your iPhones, to your earbuds, to your electric vehicles, importantly, in defense applications with fighter jets, but also just commercial jetliners require a massive amount of these rare earth minerals. And so again, it gives us a tremendous capability.

When we look on the next slide at the advancement where we are today. Today, we have the White Mesa Mill with the 10,000 tonnes per year capacity. We have our existing magnet facilities that we hope to close on later this year with Vacuumschmelze and that gives us the 3,500 tonnes of magnet production. We're hoping to move the Donald project, as I said before, into construction and operations. That will be sort of the first mine that we develop off the rank in terms of heavy mineral sands and monazite production.

We have the ability then to expand and what we announced about, 2 or 3 weeks ago, we announced the expansion of the White Mesa Mill to include heavy separation, which is dysprosium, terbium, samarium, europium and gadolinium and that will be operational by late next year. We hope to have the Donald Project up and running by 2028. We have announced earlier this year a feasibility study for the Phase II expansion of the White Mesa Mill. That's what I mentioned earlier that would give us the 6,000 tonnes per year of NdPr capacity. And then around the same time, 2029 or 2030 we're hoping to have the Vara Mada project up and running, supplying monazite feed to the White Mesa Mill. And then, of course, on the mining side, we have the Bahia project. We have the ability to expand Donald and we have the ability to expand Vara Mada.

So you can see that on the mining side, we have a number of projects coming on the milling side, at the end of Phase II, we'll have complete capacity and facilities to process all of that monazite ore. And then with the Vacuumschmelze acquisition, somewhere the Sumter plant in South Carolina was designed for expansion. It's a beautiful new state-of-the-art facility and can expand in multiples of 4,000 tonnes per year. So we can take it up to 12,000 tonnes per year total. So quite aggressive, but not reckless as my predecessor, Mark Chalmers would say, in our growth plans, and we're quite excited about the opportunity we have there.

So on the next slide, I think the question people ask is, well, are you funded for all this? And we have -- we're in a great position. We have about $1 billion in liquidity today. Most of it sits in T-bills here in the U.S. Our near-term growth CapEx requirements are going to be between USD 400 million and USD 450 million. And those are to build out the Donald Project, to expand the White Mesa Mill, and to build the American Metals Plant, the replication of what we have in Korea. And so we have government funding that has been announced of roughly $300 million for those projects, and that comes from EFA, from OSC, which is the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital, and that's via loans and grants. And so that requires about $100 million to $150 million of additional equity from Energy Fuels.

More medium term, we have needs for, again, the Phase II expansion of the White Mesa Mill, which is the one that takes us to 6,000 tonnes of NdPr, the Vara Mada project, the Bahia project and then the expansion of Donald and that would require between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion. And we again have government funding sources that we are in discussion with for part of that, which is committed, part of that is still yet to come of between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion. So that requires an additional equity requirement of $400 to $500 million.

So very achievable. We have -- in addition to this, we have the closing of Vacuumschmelze, which we hope will occur later this year or early next year and that's a $700 million cash payment as well as some shares being issued. So if we just go to the next slide, when we look at have sort of the fit and it kind of comes back to why did we choose Vacuumschmelze over any of the other magnet manufacturers? And it was because if you look at the left-hand side of this page, between the White Mesa Mill Phase I, so where we are today with 10,000 tonnes of monazite producing 1,000 tonnes of NdPr, we can produce 15 tonnes per year of Tb of -- terbium and another 50 tonnes per year of dysprosium.

That fits almost perfectly with where Vacuumschmelze is today with their current capacity of 3,500 tonnes per year of magnets. Keeping in mind that a magnet contains about 30% rare earth, the other -- the balance of 65% to 70% of a magnet contains iron and boron. So the 1,500 tonnes or the 1,000 tonnes per year of NdPr equates to about 3,500 tonnes per year of magnet block. More long term when we look at the growth plans, and we add the Donald Phase II at full capacity, we add the Vara Mada project and Bahia, that then gets us to 6,000 tonnes NdPr. And that again equates very nicely to the Sumter expansion to the expansion of the VAC facilities and that gets us to 13,500 tonnes per year of magnets. From our own supply, that would leave about 2,000 tonnes per year for either future expansion or sales to third parties. So again, the VAC acquisition was just a great fit.

And I might just talk very briefly about that on the next slide. It's a tremendous leader in magnets. Vacuumschmelze has been around for over 100 years. They've been producing rare earth permanent magnets for the last 40 years. They -- to give you a sense, they've produced over 1 billion magnets in the last 10 years. And let me repeat that, they produced 1 billion magnets in the last 10 years. So tremendous capability. Today, they have about 1,000 customers. They produce about 2,000 different products and they are applied across all sorts of uses, like again, from smartphone applications to electric vehicles to defense contractors in jet airplanes, you name it, pretty much everything that has an electric motor, they would be able to produce or they are producing materials for it. So VAC is a fabulous company and a clear leader in this space.

So on the next slide, I want to show just a little bit of how we approach this vertical integration. We chose to do it, number one, by some acquisitions. So on the mining side, we acquired Base Resources. We're partnering up and building the Donald Project with an Astron joint venture. We're going to build the Vara Mada Project, and we have that capability in-house. On the separation side, the White Mesa Mill, we have tremendous capabilities for chemical extraction for chemical engineering. And so we've developed both NdPr and dysprosium and terbium separation, which we've announced publicly the production of both of those and we're building out the facility for that.

On the metals and alloy side, we looked around and that's a real pinch point in the industry, and we chose to go into metals and alloys via the acquisition of ASM. ASM is a tremendously successful company in terms of producing these metals and alloys, the facilities in South Korea, they can do rare earth metals as well as strip casting and producing the alloys. And again, we chose to acquire that technology. And then finally, on the magnet side, both on blocks and finished magnets, again, we chose to grow into that space by acquiring Vacuumschmelze, the leading company in the Western world for producing those magnets outside of Asia.

And so we chose to do this vertical integration through a combination of internal growth as well as acquisitions. When I look at Lynas, Lynas took a different approach. They chose to go through separations and then partnered up with Shin-Etsu and other companies to produce the metals alloys and magnets. And that's a perfectly fine strategy. But again, we chose to go a different route.

MP Materials, again, they chose a different route. They're trying to do this organically. They're building up their own metal making and magnet manufacturing facilities. The thing I would say is if you ever had a chance to visit either the Hanau plant outside of Frankfurt, that VAC has or the Sumter facility, you'd realize that these are very highly technical projects to build customer reliance or customer -- what do you call it, where they've approved -- basically qualified -- sorry, qualified your product, it takes a long time to build that capability and again, we chose to go at a different route.

And then finally, USA Rare Earth, they purchased the old Hitachi facility and they're trying to grow it themselves. We chose, again, to do it a different way. And none of them are right or wrong, but we certainly like the path that we're going. I might just finish off here by talking about uranium. And on the next slide, we just show the supply and demand balances of uranium. Again, we're really excited about the future of uranium. It kind of get lost in everything we're doing on rare earths, but we are, again, the largest producer of uranium, and uranium will continue to be a very important part of our equation.

And you can see as we pull out to 2030s and 2040s, the supply-demand imbalance is really incredibly noticeable on that chart. And we very much intend to be a part of that. And if you look at the next slide, we have very high-grade mining operations. We're mining in Northern Arizona and Utah, but we have operations in New Mexico and Wyoming as well as Colorado. So we're scaling from 2 million pounds per year currently and potentially scaling that up.

The White Mesa Mill in the first half of this year produced 1.5 million tonnes. Now the mill is larger than the mines can produce. So we campaign the mill and we ran it for the first 6 months of this year. The mill is currently shut down, while we're building stockpiles of ore to feed later in the year. And then we have growing sales and revenue coming from a combination of long-term offtake agreements with major utilities as well as opportunistic spot sales. So again, uranium is a massively important part of our business and will continue to be.

So just in conclusion on the final slide, I just want to say that we have a well-established business vertically integrated to underpin our growth going forward. We're building a very much a derisked differentiated critical minerals platform. We're doing it differently than others. We feel like we have a very unique processing and integration capability with the White Mesa Mill, and our acquisitions of Base Resources, ASM and VAC. And then we feel it's very important to be able to capture margin across all aspects of the -- across the supply chain. And so we're creating value across the entire chain.

And then finally, we feel like we're positioned for long-term secular growth in the space that we're operating in. So we really do feel that we are empowering the world's most strategic technologies as a global diversified vertically integrated critical minerals companies. So that is the conclusion of my presentation. And it's a little awkward to just be on this video without any -- a video of me or a view.

So we're happy to take questions. Justin earlier gave you a phone number to dial in to. And I don't know if we have questions, but Justin or Tim, let me know if there are some questions out there.

There are no questions from the phone line at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ross Bhappu, President and CEO of Energy Fuels, for any further remarks.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I'm going to be in Australia next week. I've got a series of meetings that have been set up on Monday and Tuesday in Sydney and Wednesday in Melbourne. I'm really looking forward to being there. Again, I have a strong affinity and a strong -- a long history of spending time in Australia. I always enjoy being there. And I look forward to hopefully meeting some of you in person and answering any questions you might have at that time.

So with that, I'm going to close, and just say, thank you very much for participating.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful rest of your day.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you all for joining us for this Energy Fuels Second Quarter 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's session is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to President and CEO, Mr. Ross Bhappu. Welcome, sir.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. I'm joined today by Nate Bennett, our CFO; and Nathan Longenecker, our Chief Legal Officer. After today's prepared comments, I'll be happy to take questions. Our earnings release and today's slide presentation are available on our Investor Relations website, and a replay of today's discussion will also be available on the website.

Before we begin, I'd like to turn your attention to our safe harbor statements. During today's call, management may use forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are based on current assumptions and beliefs as of today. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. And for a detailed list of such risks, please refer to our Risk Factors section within the 10-Qs and 10-Ks filed with the SEC. Energy Fuels is under no obligation to publicly update forward-looking statements after the date of this call, except as otherwise required by applicable legislation.

Well, it's been exactly a year since I joined Energy Fuels as President and just over 100 days since I became the CEO. Before we get into this quarter's results, I want to take a little bit of time to first share my reflections on the last 12 months. I joined this company because of its unique position with the industry. Energy Fuels has a deep history and foundational strength within uranium. And in the U.S., we're the largest producer of uranium, and we own the only permitted fully operational uranium processing facility, our White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah.

Over the course of our history, the company has also discovered the ability to process both light and heavy rare earth elements. The company has identified and acquired as well as partnered on projects that will supply rare earths to the White Mesa Mill for processing. These projects, the Vara Mada Project, the Bahia Project and the Donald Project, along with our agreements with Chemours were hand selected as the most complementary feedstock sources to the future of commercial expansion of the mill. That was the stage when I joined the company last year, a great portfolio of assets ready for the next phase of growth. I spent significant time with the team to determine how best to deliver on our ambitions from a view both of operational feasibility and the value creation.

As part of our strategic planning process, the picture became quite clear. Rare earth elements are paramount to the future of industry and defense. We have access and ability to mine these critical materials and industry-leading ability to process them into oxides. A major squeeze point in the rare earth magnet manufacturing value chain has long been midstream metallization and alloy making. So we took a hard look at the opportunity set. And in January, we announced the acquisition of Australian Strategic Materials, ASM as it's called, a deal that's advancing well, and we expect to close late this month, only a few weeks away. ASM is a fully operational producer of metals and alloys that will be supplied by our rare earth oxides. Combining these capabilities solves a critical step and a significant pinch point in the value chain, allowing for full integration, which leads to significantly improved economics.

In addition, across the geopolitical landscape, it's become quite clear that the West is very limited in its ability to produce rare earth magnets required for rapidly growing industries, including automotive, data centers, robotics and defense. In fact, there are very few companies with this capability that can do so at scale. The largest Western company with these capabilities is Vacuumschmelze, more commonly referred to simply as VAC. Our due diligence quickly revealed that VAC's robust capabilities and 100-year history of operations, which accentuated the long-term potential when combined with Energy Fuels and ASM.

The company has been producing rare earth permanent magnets for over 40 years and in the past decade has produced over 1 billion magnets. Let me repeat that. It's produced over 1 billion magnets in the last 10 years. Keep in mind that these magnets are not what you experimented with in your science or chemistry class. Rather, these are highly engineered and uniquely made for each customer for each specific application like electric vehicle drive motors, actuators for airplane aileron deployment, smartphones, earbuds, and the list goes on and on. These are prolific in our everyday lives and VAC has over 1,000 current customers producing over 2,000 individual parts.

When we look at where we are and where we want to be in 5 years' time, this acquisition made incredible sense and our respective growth profiles fit like a hand in glove to create a fully integrated mine-to-magnet platform. We expect the VAC transaction to close in early '27, subject to customary regulatory approvals. When that happens, we'll have all the pieces of the puzzle to make us completely vertically integrated, resources, processing, separation, metallization and alloy making and now magnet manufacturing. As we move through the approval and closing processes of these 2 incredible organizations, we are readying ourselves to put these pieces together and realize significant value creation across the supply chain.

Now our story is about execution. As a first step, we announced the commencement of construction on our Phase 1B and 1C expansion at the White Mesa Mill and the addition of a rare earth MREC processing circuit. MREC is mixed rare earth carbonates. Upon completion, the mill will be equipped to process uranium and rare earth simultaneously and at commercial scale. This alleviates the decision point that we currently have today, processing either uranium or rare earth minerals. But importantly, it allows us to readily supply our midstream operations at the ASM facility who will ultimately supply that for its magnet manufacturing needs.

We have a lot to do, but the path is quite clear, and my job is to make sure we continue to execute. We have a tremendously experienced leadership team at Energy Fuels, and we will be joined with an equally talented leaders -- equally talented leaders from both ASM and VAC with the required expertise for operating these key facilities. Mine-to-magnets is a term that gets used quite frequently in our industry. We view ourselves as not just a mine-to-magnets player, but rather a mine-to-engineered solutions provider. I can confidently say that we're on a clear path, and we will be the first company in the West and certainly North America to have operational and commercial scale facilities that will make us truly vertically integrated from mines to magnets.

I will continue to update you on our progress in future calls, but now let's turn to our second quarter results. Q2 2026 was a strong operational quarter for Energy Fuels. To highlight, we announced support from the U.S. government with a conditional $725 million loan from the Office of Strategic Capital. We announced a transformative acquisition of VAC. We progressed on the ASM acquisition, which we anticipate closing at the end of August, subject to formal closing procedures. With the closures of these acquisitions, we'll be the West's leading mine-to-magnet provider. We mined 365,000 pounds of uranium and produced more than 860,000 pounds. We ended the quarter with 2.27 million pounds of uranium in inventory.

From a financial perspective, we have a robust balance sheet with nearly $1 billion of liquidity. And during the quarter, we recorded $25 million of revenue from a combination of contract and spot sales. We achieved an industry low production cost of $23 per pound of uranium. This quarter's financial results were weighed by a few heavy onetime items attributable to transaction-related costs that Nate is going to walk you through momentarily.

I spoke briefly about the clear path that Energy Fuels has ahead of us. As you can see, it's certainly ambitious. However, it's thoughtful and calculated. And as Mark Chalmers, our previous CEO, would say, we're ambitious but not reckless. As we progress through the remainder of 2026 and into the years ahead, we've staged our capacity and production growth across feedstock, processing and separation and magnet manufacturing to ensure our ability to seamlessly integrate our upstream, midstream and downstream capabilities.

When we enter 2028 with a completed Phase 1B and 1C expansion of the White Mesa Mill, we'll be able to source 100% of our feedstock for processing to rare earth oxides. That capacity will be sufficient for 70% of the capacity for use at ASM's metallization and alloy making facilities, which will supply sufficient magnet alloy for over 100% of VAC's 2,000 tons of magnet capacity at their manufacturing facility in Sumter, South Carolina, the largest rare earth permanent magnet facility in the United States.

To put it in perspective, this volume will provide magnets needed for 800,000 electric vehicles or 4 million conventional vehicles or 1 billion smartphones. These are just amazing levels of production. We anticipate increasing our magnet making capacity at Sumter sixfold through 2031 to 12,000 tons per annum, by far the largest planned facility in the West. As we execute our expansions across each of the pillars of our supply chain, including activating rare earth mining projects that are currently in development and additional expansion of the White Mesa Mill, we expect the ability to supply over 100% of our facilities within our fully integrated mine-to-magnet supply chain.

This is a capital-intensive plan, and we're not shy about that. We've put considerable thought into not only what we intend to do, but also how we can achieve these important milestones. Importantly, our plan is strategically staged and disperses our capital across the next 5 years. We're also starting from a position of strength within our balance sheet with our balance sheet at quarter end of nearly $1 billion in liquidity, as mentioned previously. In addition to our own balance sheet, we have access to multiple government funding sources as well as a term loan facility from Goldman Sachs. This allows us to be tactical in our capital deployment strategy with multiple levers to pull as we assess the financing of each project.

Lastly, a plan is only as good as the team that's leading it. In the past year and also through the ASM and VAC acquisitions, we are assembling a team with deep operational and execution-based experience. This group possesses not only the required technical expertise, but have also been the drivers of transformative projects and acquisitions across our value chain. I'm confident that we have the right people in place to deliver on our ambitious plans.

As I turn the call over to Nate to cover our financials, I'd like to leave you with a couple of thoughts. Before an EV and electric vehicle can move, there's a rare earth magnet. Before a reactor can produce power, there's uranium. Before stronger steel can carry greater loads, there's vanadium and before robotics and advanced technologies, there are rare earth minerals. The world talks about what comes next. Energy Fuels works to deliver on what comes first.

Now I'll hand it over to Nate Bennett.

Thanks, Ross. Before I get into the numbers, I encourage everyone to review today's discussion alongside our Form 10-Q and other public filings as those documents provide additional detail and context around our results, risk factors and disclosures. As we continue to grow and diversify the business, it is important to remember that we manage and evaluate our operations by commodity line. Today, that primarily includes uranium, while our rare earth and heavy mineral sands metals, alloys and magnet businesses continue to advance through development activities and the pending ASM and VAC acquisitions.

For uranium specifically, there are 3 key metrics we discuss each quarter, pounds mined, pounds processed and pounds sold. Those metrics do not always move together in a given quarter and understanding the distinction is important when evaluating our results. Mining reflects the amount of uranium extracted from our deposits. Processing reflects the amount converted into finished U3O8 at the White Mesa Mill. Sales reflect pounds delivered into the market under long-term contracts or spot transactions. Because we strategically build and draw inventory over time, these metrics can vary from quarter-to-quarter while still supporting our long-term operating and commercial plan. With that context, let me walk you through the quarter.

Turning to our financial results. Energy Fuels remains in an exceptionally strong financial position. At June 30, 2026, we had approximately $996 million of working capital and $1.53 billion of total assets, which we believe represents one of the strongest balance sheets in the global uranium and critical minerals sector. During the second quarter, we reported a net loss of $33.6 million. As we've discussed before, quarterly earnings can be influenced by the timing of uranium sales, product mix, strategic investments and transaction-related expenses. Importantly, the fundamentals of the business remain strong.

Our uranium segment generated $25 million of revenue, approximately $14 million of gross profit and a 57% gross margin during the quarter. The segment continues to generate positive operating income while supporting exploration, development and corporate costs, demonstrating that our uranium business provides a solid financial foundation for the company. The losses incurred with our rare earth elements and heavy mineral sands businesses primarily reflect planned investments to advance these projects towards future production, including engineering, permitting, infrastructure development and organizational growth.

We also incurred approximately $10.7 million of acquisition and integration-related costs associated with the ASM and VAC transactions. These expenditures support our strategy of building a fully integrated critical minerals platform spanning mining, processing, separation and downstream magnet manufacturing. Overall, our financial strategy remains unchanged, maintain a strong balance sheet, generate cash flow from our uranium business, preserve commercial flexibility and invest prudently in the growth initiatives that we believe will create significant long-term shareholder value.

Turning to uranium inventories and costs. One of the most encouraging trends we continue to see is the decline in uranium inventory costs, driven largely by the strong production performance and low-cost profile of Pinyon Plain. At quarter end, our finished U3O8 inventory carried an average cost of approximately $33.92 per pound, down from approximately $36 per pound at the end of the first quarter and continuing the downward trend we have seen over the past several quarters. Looking ahead, we expect inventory costs to continue declining as additional low-cost Pinyon Plain production moves through inventory. This is consistent with the operating and economic benefits we have expected from Pinyon Plain, including higher grades, increased production volumes and continued operating efficiencies.

Our uranium inventory remains a significant strategic asset with approximately 2.27 million pounds of U3O8 in inventory at quarter end, we have the flexibility to support long-term contract deliveries, pursue spot market opportunities when market conditions warrant and manage production and sales activities to maximize value. Overall, we believe our declining inventory costs, future production base and substantial inventory position continue to strengthen the profitability and strategic flexibility of our uranium business.

Looking at operations moving forward. The White Mesa Mill successfully completed the current uranium processing campaign during the second quarter, producing approximately 1.7 million pounds of finished U3O8 during the first half of 2026 and achieving our annual process production guidance range ahead of schedule. The mill has now transitioned into a planned maintenance period with uranium processing expected to resume in the fourth quarter of 2026 or early 2027.

Pinyon Plain continues to perform exceptionally well and is delivering the low-cost production profile we anticipated. During the campaign, our average mining and transportation costs were approximately $14 per pound of recovered U3O8, while mill processing costs averaged approximately $9 per pound. Combined, those costs resulted in a total weighted average production cost of approximately $23 per pound of recovered U3O8, which was at the bottom end of our previously communicated cost range of $23 to $30 per pound. We believe these results demonstrate both the high-grade nature of the Pinyon Plain deposit and the efficiency of our integrated mining and milling platform. Our priority remains consistent, convert low-cost ore into reliable uranium pounds, continue to improve efficiency across the system and do so without compromising safety or compliance.

Turning to our guidance. Our uranium production performance through the first half of 2026 positions us very well relative to our full year outlook, and we are maintaining our 2026 guidance. Having processed approximately 1.7 million pounds of finished U3O8 during the first 6 months of the year, we have already achieved production within our full year finished uranium production guidance range of 1.5 million to 2.5 million pounds of U3O8. We also remain on track to achieve our 2026 uranium sales guidance. Consistent with our commercial strategy, we expect a combination of opportunistic spot market sales and deliveries under our remaining long-term contractual commitments to drive sales during the remainder of the year.

Planned maintenance at the White Mesa Mill during the second half of 2026 provides an opportunity to complete improvements that support future uranium operations, continued rare earth element initiatives, including beginning construction to expand our Phase 1 circuits and overall long-term operating efficiency. We currently expect uranium processing to resume in the fourth quarter of 2026 or early 2027. This operational flexibility remains a significant advantage at the White Mesa Mill.

While the mill undergoes planned maintenance, our mining operations remain fully active, and we continue to expect to mine more than 2 million pounds of contained U3O8 in 2026 while maintaining our focus on safe, disciplined execution. We also expect uranium grades to improve during the second half of 2026 as mining advances into higher grade zones at Pinyon Plain. As we have noted previously, grade variability is a normal characteristic of underground mining operations, it is fully reflected in our mine plans, production forecast and annual guidance expectations. Overall, we believe the combination of strong first half production, low-cost performance, continued mining activity and improving grade positions us well to execute on our strategy and create long-term value for our shareholders.

With that, I'll turn it back to Ross.

Thank you, Nate. With that, I'd like to conclude with a few comments and summary about where we are in 2026. First of all, we remain the U.S. largest producer of uranium, a position we intend to hold for an extended period. Importantly, with rare earths, we've piloted both dysprosium and terbium, and that work is complete, and now we've moved on to gadolinium and potentially other heavy rare earth oxides. The Phase 1 rare earth expansion at the mill is underway, and we expect to commercially produce heavy rare earth oxides in late 2027, and that's going to include both terbium and dysprosium. The Phase 2 expansion at the mill is advancing. As you recall, we released our feasibility study results earlier this year and demonstrated a total capacity of up to over 6,000 tons of NdPr, about 300 tons per annum of dysprosium and 80 tons per annum of terbium oxides. Permitting is underway, and we plan on commissioning this facility in late 2029.

The Donald Project FID is expected as early as Q3 2026, so here in just the next few months, including potential offtake in sales and financing options. We continue to pursue permits and government approvals and suitable stability agreements with the Government of Madagascar to support an FID on the Vara Mada Project in the near future. And finally, we've obtained exploration permits in 2025 for our Bahia Project that has allowed us to restart drilling. We hope to have a resource estimate later this year or in early 2027.

So with that, I'd like to thank you for joining the call today. I appreciate your interest, and I appreciate your support of Energy Fuels. And we will now take questions from the audience. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Brian Lee with Goldman Sachs.

And maybe this is semantics, but it sounded like on the Donald FID timing, you mentioned as early as Q3, which is in the next couple of months. In the past, I thought you had kind of characterized it as by Q3. So wondering if there is an update, any incremental visibility on what's happening there in terms of Donald. And then to the extent that Donald doesn't come online as quickly as you'd like, can you give us a sense of what the strategy would be in terms of sourcing monazite and feedstock outside of internal sources?

First of all, Brian, thanks for joining us and always appreciate your questions. So yes, Donald FID has been delayed a bit this year, unfortunately, but I think we're making very good progress. The key for us is financing -- sorry, finalizing our financing program. And I think we've made great progress on that. We continue to work with the financing alternatives that we have there. We're focused on financing it in Australia. I'll be heading to Australia a week after next to hopefully progress that and see what we can do to get it finalized and get that FID off as quick as we can.

If there are delays and we do have backup plans. I would point you to the fact that we have an existing agreement with Chemours, where we are taking monazite from Chemours. And those come from Florida and Georgia, their operations there. So that will continue. We've also announced that we're putting in an MREC facility. That was the announcement we made just last week, I think it was. And that MREC facility will allow us to take feedstock from ionic clay producers. And there's a number of them in Brazil, in different parts of Asia, different parts of the world. So we will source MREC, which is a mixed rare earth carbonate. We'll source that MREC to feed that facility, and that should be operational late next year or early 2028. So we do have backup plans.

In addition, we've had a lot of discussions with different heavy mineral sands producers that have historically either put their monazite in waste dumps or they send it to China because they don't have other options. And again, we have the ability to process that. So we do have backup plans, but we're very hopeful and very confident that we'll be able to finalize our financing and get the FID made here in the next couple of months. So yes, very, very active on that right now.

Yes, that's great. Helpful context. And then maybe just a question on the operations. Cost improved nicely, kudos there. I would be curious, as you near your next processing campaign, is this the sort of cadence we should expect from a cost perspective, process pound increasing quarter-to-quarter and then cost starting out a little higher, but then coming down sequentially? Or is this the new cost level that we should expect kind of into 4Q end of year?

Yes. Thank you again, Brian. Look, our cost base is simple. We're working out higher cost inventory. So our overall cost of sales, cost of goods sold is reducing because we're kind of catching up with the current cost. So the costs have been dropping. I think they will equalize or equilibrate here over the next couple of quarters. We've been very fortunate with the Pinyon Plain mine that we're mining high grades and those result in low-cost operations. So we're confident that at least in the near term, we're going to continue seeing costs sort of in the neighborhood of where we've been experiencing. So yes, it's really a function of very good grades at that mine. And as long as those continue, we'll be -- we'll maintain a low-cost profile.

Look, just one other thing on that is the White Mesa Mill continues to operate very effectively and efficiently. I would just remind our listeners that the White Mesa Mill has a higher capacity than our mines do. So that's why we campaign it. And that's why, as Nate mentioned, we ran the mill for the first half of the year. We're now replenishing our stockpile for the mill, and that's why we're going to start it up again later in Q4. So hopefully, that answers your question, Brian.

Your next question comes from Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities.

Maybe just my first one on the OSC facility, what are the kind of remaining conditions to close? And when would you expect that first disbursement? Just curious on what kind of some of those steps are between now and then.

Yes. First of all, Nick, thanks for joining us. Thanks for the question. We -- I'm not sure exactly what we've disclosed, but there are a number of conditions precedent to drawing down on that facility. We're in the middle of legal work, legal documentation, but there are a few conditions precedent that we've also been focused on. Advancing some of the projects is part of that. I think there's a few different steps that we have. Recall that the OSC financing is meant for the White Mesa Mill expansion that we just announced, so the Phase 1B and C is included as part of that.

The Phase 2 expansion, which we're working on our permitting for that. So we wouldn't draw money down on that until we're further advanced on permitting. And then the third category of use of those funds is the construction of the American Metals Plant, which is effectively replicating what we have in South Korea and building a sister plant here in the U.S. to process metals and alloys. So we need to advance on that as well. So the drawdown of the funds in the near term or the nearer term would be for the Phase 1B and C, which, again, we announced last week, and we'll be progressing on that construction over the course of the rest of this year and through 2027. So to be honest, we don't need the funds probably until early in 2027 when we would hope to be able to draw down on them.

Understood. And maybe just a follow-up. It was good to see the announcement the other day of construction commencing. Have you disclosed just how much capital will be spent across the balance of 2026 versus what would be left in 2027?

No, I don't believe we've provided that. And I'm just trying to think through. Nate, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe we've provided cash flows or capital expenditures.

No, we haven't. But just kind of thinking how you spread it out over the construction period, I mean, it's $104 million. We probably expect about 1/4 of that through 2026 and the remaining amount of that during 2027 as you plan out the project and spend over the construction phase.

Got it. Okay. And then maybe switching gears, if I could. You've talked about the path to roughly 5 million pounds of uranium production. So if we see term prices continue to strengthen, what would it take to bring Whirlwind and Nichols Ranch back both from a kind of capital perspective and then what kind of the timing of that decision would look like?

Yes. So Nichols Ranch, for example, is fully permitted. It's fully constructed. It's sitting really on care and maintenance on standby. To be honest, it will take probably 4 to 6 months once we make the decision to restart that operation. The CapEx requirements are going to be fairly low. I think the bigger issue is getting the crews in place and getting the team in place to get it operational. Whirlwind, I think, is -- it would be a bit longer. So look, I think we're in very good shape if prices start to increase or increase a fair bit, which we anticipate they'll do over the course of the next couple of years, we would bring those back into production fairly quickly.

CapEx requirements, again, pretty minimal for Nichols Ranch. We're talking a fairly low amount, to be honest with you. I don't have an exact number, and I hate to throw one out without having the hard data in front of me. But suffice it to say, it's a fully built ready-to-go project. Of course, it's an ISR project. So as you advance that, you would do further production and recovery wells. So there's a bit of drilling expenses involved with it. But Nichols Ranch in particular, is effectively ready to go once we make the decision to restart it.

Your next question comes from Joseph Reagor with ROTH Capital Partners.

Also, it was very helpful to have the breakout in the slide deck on CapEx spend and timing. As you guys think about all the tools that you guys have to fund the small gaps that exist, what is your preference as far as forms of capital raising as you look out, both the near-term aspect and the long-term ones?

Yes. First of all, thank you, Joe. Great to talk to you, and thanks for the question. So first of all, I think we're sitting on a very healthy balance sheet, $996 million, call it, $1 billion of liquidity, effectively cash for the most part. That puts us in a very healthy position there. And of course, we will be using a good chunk of that for closing the VAC acquisition, which will be later next year -- sorry, early next year. And then we did put in place a term loan facility from Goldman Sachs for $250 million. And that's really there is almost a standby facility for us to use if needed. And we're not sure we're going to need it, but it's nice to have sort of in our back pocket.

As we look forward, I mean, I think there's a whole host of ways that we could look at raising additional money. My goal, Joe, is to minimize dilution to the extent possible. So any time we go back and have to raise money, I'm going to explore every option that I have available without dilution. Now just on that, my view on dilution is maybe a bit different. I mean if it's accretive, I hate to think of it as dilution and think of it more as accretion. But if we do come back to the equity markets, it will be accretive to our balance sheet and developing and progressing on our business plan. But again, I'm exploring all sorts of options that we have available to us to raise money, and we'll continue to explore those. But look, I think we're in a very good financial position today and very confident with where we are. And keep -- sorry, one other thing I just mentioned, keep in mind that we will generate cash flow from the VAC acquisition and from the ASM acquisition as well. So those all get weighed into the equation.

Okay. Fair enough. And then the other question I have is, as you look across the landscape of rare earth projects in the world, do you see alternative potential sources out there if any one of the projects were to be delayed? Obviously, Donald has been pushed back a little bit, but not meaningfully. But are there other potential sources you guys are seeing come forward that might be interest or ways to partner with people to get a portion of a project that say isn't 100% of rare earth project?

Yes. Yes, it's a really good point and something that we think about all the time. Once we make the commitment for Phase 2, we need to make sure we have feed to fill that 50,000 tons or 60,000 tons of monazite per year that we'll be capable of processing. So that is front and center in what we're thinking about. First of all, let me just say, I think we're very confident in our FID for the Donald Project being made.

In the near term Vara Mada continues to advance, and we're confident that we'll have -- be in a position to sign an investment agreement and move that project forward here in the near term. But should those be delayed, should the Bahia Project in Brazil be delayed, we are looking at alternatives. There's a number of heavy mineral sands producers out there that are either not extracting, not processing their monazite, both going into tailings or they're processing -- producing monazite and sending it to China. We would be a much better alternative for those sources of feed. And we're having discussions with a number of those different groups. And look, we'll continue to have discussions, and we want to have access to that offtake.

And then the third source of feed is MREC, the mixed rare earth carbonates. And there's a number of producers of MREC that are out there that are looking for a home. One of the key differentiators is we have the ability to process radionuclides that are always contained in MREC really in any rare earth feed. And so it's a differentiator for us. It gives us a tremendous sort of leg up and competitive advantage as a buyer of those monazite and MREC feeds. So we'll have the ability to process MREC as early as the end of next year. And again, I think there's a number of interesting sources of that out there as well.

The next question comes from Heiko Ihle with H.C. Wainwright.

Most have been answered, but just a few things here. Obviously, the Australian Strategic Materials acquisition should be closing here by the end of the month. Just to clarify, what steps besides the shareholder approval are still outstanding? Or I guess asked differently, what regulatory issues are open and which court cases need to settle for this to close?

First of all, Heiko, good to talk to you, and I appreciate the question. So the ASM acquisition is advancing very well. We've -- there's a very well-defined process in Australia when you acquire the -- I might turn it over to Nathan just to mention -- to talk a little bit more in detail about it.

Yes. Thanks for the question. Yes. There are some steps that still need to take place, but -- and those are in the fairly near term actually. August 12, there's a scheme meeting that's going to take place, and that's where you receive the shareholder approval for the transaction. There's then another court date, August 18, where the court just takes a look at it to make sure that everything is in order. And then August 28 is really the implementation date where the transaction is final and the shares are trading. So that's really the process and really there aren't any -- obviously, it's all subject to the process, but there aren't any things beyond that are major that need to take place. And incidentally, if you or others are interested, you can go on the ASM website and there's the scheme book that's on there, and that has all the dates and things you need to take a look at, but it's all happening fairly imminently.

Got you. Okay. Fair enough. So really just standard stuff and nothing to really even talk about. Okay. And then just a clarification on Donald's. I mean, potentially, you have some money to be spent there over the next period of time. I assume the answer is no, but you guys don't have any sort of hedges. In other words, you're just taking your chances with FX and that's it, right?

We don't have hedges in place. Hedging a lot of these materials, Heiko, it's a very shallow market for hedging any of them. I think instead, what we're focused on is offtake agreements with our end users or customers. And so that's more what we're focused on is offtake agreements as opposed to hedging. But it's a very solid market approach.

But I really meant hedging the currencies for the payments.?

Yes. We do not have active hedging of currencies in place. Certainly something as we make an FID. I think once we make the FID, then we'll look to probably put in some price protection on currency.

Your next question comes from Anthony Taglieri with Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe just on Vara Mada, is there anything new there that you guys could share on pushing that project forward, taking the steps in the development process?

We've -- yes, first of all, thanks, Anthony. Great to talk to you and great to hear from you. We are advancing it. We've -- so earlier this year or maybe late last year, we pulled our teams out of the field just given some of the uncertainty with the new presidential change of power that went on about this time last year, a little later this last year. And just given sort of the uncertainty of what was happening there, we sort of took a step back and waited to see how things unfolded. We have had a very active program now in place. We've -- and we're just putting people back in the field kind of as we speak. We're gearing up a drilling program for borehole drilling for geotech work, but also for water wells for some of the local communities. So we've got a very active program that's ramped up.

I think the big thing there is we want to progress -- we need to progress on the investment agreement. So recall that we have a memorandum of understanding signed with the Government of Madagascar. And so the next step is signing the actual stabilization agreement called the investment agreement. And we hope to progress that here over the next few months. And so we have a team on the ground in Madagascar, and we continue to work very heavily on it.

Nathan, I don't know if you have anything to add there.

Yes. No, I think you pretty much hit it on the head. I mean we do have support, though at the highest levels of government and have regularly been engaging with them with our teams. And yes, look, there's obviously a number of priorities for a government that, as Ross mentioned, has not been there that long. But we do have good support and are looking to move that forward. Our target is very soon. But obviously, there are things that are out of our control and you basically continue to have the meetings at the highest level of the government and move things forward. So we continue to work on it and are quite optimistic.

Okay. Great. Maybe switching gears to the uranium business. I believe you guys have -- I think it was 240,000 pounds of contract commitments left for the rest of this year. First part of the question is, will we see that all in one particular quarter? Or is it sort of spread between the 2? And then secondly, should we expect to see any more spot sales? Obviously, that's dependent on spot price. But is there a particular price level that you feel comfortable selling pounds at?

Yes. Thanks for those questions. So we will have -- we do have some contract sales through the balance of the year. And I don't have the schedule of those in front of me, but we will be making spot sales through the balance of the year -- sorry, contract sales through the balance of the year. We're also sitting, as Nate mentioned, on about 2.2 billion pounds of uranium and inventory. We are going to be very opportunistic about how we sell into the spot market. We continue to be very bullish on uranium prices. And so we'll continue to look for good opportunities to sell into the market. But we -- yes, so we will have some additional spot sales in addition to the contract sales that we have. But we want to be careful and just be cautious on how we sell into the spot market.

Your next question comes from Matthew Key with Texas Capital.

I did have a quick one. I was wondering, does your capacity to process MREC increase once you complete Phase 2? Or is Phase 2 just focused on expanded monazite processing at this time?

Yes. First of all, thanks, Matthew. Great to talk to you. So the answer is that we are putting in this MREC facility MREC capability that will continue through Phase 2. Phase 2 is designed primarily for monazite, but we could expand our MREC capacity or capability with Phase 2 if we wanted to. I think the view is that we just need to see what the availability of MREC is going to look like and how much additional capacity we're going to need. We do -- we have designed Phase 2 really around monazite from our own mines. So we don't own any mines that produce MREC today. It doesn't mean we wouldn't in the future, but we would be sourcing our MREC from third parties where the monazite feed for the mill, especially for Phase 2 is largely going to come from our own captive mines. So that's why Phase 2 is really designed primarily around monazite, but we could potentially feed MREC into that circuit. The key there is MREC doesn't require cracking the way monazite does. And so the design of the Phase 2 facility really allows for cracking of monazite at the front end. So you could see monazite in just after the cracking to the leach phase of that motion.

Yes, that's helpful.

Okay.

And you kind of answered my second question in regards to I was wondering if you would expand it because it just seems like it would add some flexibility in terms of feedstock, but it sounds like you would consider that. Would it be included like if you decided to kind of expand the capacity of MREC, would that cause like an increase in capital expectations for what was disclosed in Phase 2? Or was it included in that number?

I would have to go back and double check on that. But it's the dissolution circuit for putting MREC in the solution that's critical. And I think we would have that capacity or capability pretty well in hand. But Matthew, I'd like to take that question away and come back with an answer on that. But I would say just off the top of my head, I think it would be a pretty minimal cost if we had to expand that circuit compared to the overall cost of the project.

Your next question comes from Noel Parks with Tuohy Brothers Investment Research.

I apologize if you touched on this before, but I just wondered now that we're getting very close to the closing of the ASM acquisition, could you just sort of maybe update us on your thinking about the Korean Metals Plant and sort of after the close with hopefully with the access to your considerably bigger balance sheet and so forth, just sort of what the -- I guess, what the planned next steps would be for that and going forward? So that's my first.

Sure. First of all, thanks, Noel, good to talk to you. So yes, look, I think planning to close later this month. I actually plan to be at the Korean Metals facility here in 1st of September, about 1st or 2nd of September to welcome them to the Energy Fuels family. So we're really excited about that. Look, the facility is operating great. We are in the process of expanding it. We've just added 8 new furnaces. We intend to add to the strip casting capabilities. The facility today, I think, has 1,200 tons or 1,400 tons per year capacity. We're looking to double that. And those -- that equipment has already been purchased. So looking -- it's already started on the furnace side and we'll expand on the strip casting side. So that is all progressing well and is funded. And so we're excited to just get it integrated. We're excited to be shipping our oxide materials over there to our own facility. So I think the integration has gone -- the integration plans are going very well. We think the integration itself is going to be pretty seamless. So we've put a lot of effort into that.

Great. And I just wondered if you have any updated thinking on the Juniper Ore Body at Pinyon Plain. Just maybe what product has been made in sort of the analysis and perhaps the plans for drilling into it?

So we've got a very active drilling campaign going on right now. We've been continuing our works into the ore body. Of course, we're mining the upper zone now and the next phase of mining Pinyon will come from the Juniper Zone. So we're preparing for that. We've just -- I just signed off on purchasing some additional equipment that's going to be needed as we go down into the Juniper. But we do have a very active drilling campaign going on right now to just better define that ore body. Keep in mind that this breccia pipe mining is a little bit more uncertain than big open pit mines in terms of understanding the ore grades that you're going to hit. So, so far, we've I think we've been very happy with how that's gone. But we're really trying to drill it out as much as we can to really make sure we understand what those ore grades are going to look like from the Juniper Zone. So yes, very active campaign going on right now.

That concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the conference back over to Ross Bhappu for any closing remarks.

Great. Thank you very much. Again, I just want to thank everybody for participating. Energy Fuels is on a really exciting trajectory. We have some incredible announcements when you look at Q2, the addition of that, the DOW OSC financing, the Phase 1 and 2 or Phase 1B and C kicking off that construction. This is a company that is very active. It's moving very quickly. We greatly appreciate our shareholders' support, and I think the best is yet to come. So thank you, and look forward to talking to our shareholders as we progress. So again, thank you, everybody.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day.

Hello, and welcome to the Energy Fuels Inc. 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. [Operator Instructions].

Good morning, everyone, and welcome again to the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Energy Fuels Inc. My name is Bruce Hansen. I'm speaking to you from our corporate headquarters in Lakewood, Colorado.

I serve as the Chair of the Energy Fuels Board of Directors, and I will act as Chair of this meeting. Corporate Counsel and Corporate Secretary of the company, Julia Hoffmeier, will act as Secretary of the meeting.

Also with us today are Ross Bhappu, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Curtis Moore, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development; Nathan Bennett, Chief Financial Officer; Nathan Longenecker, Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Government Relations; Kim Casey, Director of Investor Relations; and [ Brian Sheed ], KPMG Audit Partner. I would also like to acknowledge our Board of Directors, many of whom are in attendance with us today.

Finally, I'd like to pay special recognition to 2 directors that have chosen not to stand for reelection this year. That includes Birks Bovaird, who joined the Board in 2006 and served as its Chair from March 2007 to June of 2025, a period of more than 18 years in his notable 20-year tenure with Energy Fuels. Birks strong leadership, sound judgment and balanced perspective have helped support the company through numerous challenges, opportunities and successes.

Our longest-standing director and a member of various Board committees. Birks has a wealth of institutional knowledge and has brought to the Board a vast range of relevant experiences and have been invaluable in bringing us to this point of growth and transformation.

His expertise clearly cannot be easily replaced. The other director is Alex Morrison and has been a valuable member of the Board since 2019 and has acted as Chair of the Audit Committee since mid-2021.

And he has been a member of various other Board committees as well. A financial expert and an experienced member of numerous public company boards, Alex has contributed significantly to the company's risk assessment framework and cybersecurity program and has also provided critical oversight of Energy Fuel's internal and external audit procedures, including its internal controls over financial reporting.

Alex, as a Board member has also significantly contributed to the Board's strategic and general business guidance. I want to personally thank both Birks and Alex for their years of service and dedication to the Board and to the company. We at Energy Fuels wish them all the best. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Ross Bhappu, our President and CEO.

Thank you, Bruce. Hi. This is Ross Bhappu. I'm President and CEO of Energy Fuels. I'd like to first welcome you all to this year's meeting which we're very pleased to be holding virtually so that you, our shareholders and guests can meaningfully engage with us from the convenience of your own homes and offices.

We welcome your participation throughout the meeting, and we may pause intermittently to accommodate questions on matters before you today. After the official business is concluded, I invite you to stay on for my presentation, which I'm pleased to share with you on our year-end review, and that will include notable accomplishments, strategic priorities and significant pending transactions designed to position Energy Fuels as a globally relevant critical minerals platform. With that, I'll turn it to Julia.

Thank you, Ross. This is Julia Hoffmeier, Corporate Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Energy Fuels. This meeting is held in accordance with the Ontario Business Corporations Act, which permits shareholder meetings by electronic means.

Under the act, this meeting is deemed to be held in Toronto, Ontario as that is where our registered office is located. [Operator Instructions]. Please note that in the interest of all shareholders, we will only address those questions that are pertinent to the business of the meeting.

If you are eligible to vote at this meeting and have already voted your shares and do not wish to change your vote, no action is required at this time. If you are eligible to vote at the meeting and have not yet voted or would like to change your vote, you may do so by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen.

Only shareholders and proxy holders who have been provided an 11-digit control number located on the form of proxy you have received or obtained from your broker are entitled to vote at this meeting.

If there are any registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders who have inadvertently logged into the meeting as a guest, but intend to vote by online ballot during the meeting, please log back into the meeting as a registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder as per the instructions provided to you.

Thank you, Julia. The 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Energy Fuels will now come to order.

To make best use of our time, certain shareholders have been asked to move and second the resolutions to be considered here today, which are set out in the notice of the meeting. This will allow more time for voting as well as any questions and comments later in the meeting. We welcome shareholders who have logged in by using their control number to submit questions as they arise though we may address them at a later point in the meeting or on a private basis, depending on the subject matter.

We will pause periodically throughout the meeting to review questions directly related to any of the motions of the meeting during which you may experience brief periods of silence. Subject to time constraints, general questions related to the company's business and operations will be addressed after the CEO's presentation, which follows this meeting.

Duplicate or similar questions may be consolidated and paraphrased when read aloud to minimize repeat answers. Any guests in attendance today who have questions may also submit them through our Investor Relations team via e-mail at [email protected]. We will conduct the votes on the matters before us by a poll.

In this format, every shareholder or proxy holder who has been provided an 11-digit control number is therefore entitled to vote on the matter and has 1 vote in respect to each share entitled to be voted on the matter and held by that shareholder. If you previously voted by proxy, please note that voting in the poll will void your previously cast votes, and any votes submitted here will govern.

We note that the proxies received to date indicate that the company has sufficient votes to pass all matters in accordance with the recommendation of management. The poll will be open for all resolutions at the same time. This will allow you to vote either on each resolution immediately or to wait until the conclusion of the discussions on all resolutions prior to casting your vote on any of the resolutions.

Your votes may be changed until voting is closed just prior to the termination of this meeting. Now Equity Trust Company, LLC will act as a virtual scrutineer of this meeting to report on the shareholders present virtually and the number of securities represented virtually and by the proxy at this meeting and by any adjournment thereof to compute the votes cast by proxy and by the poll conducted at this meeting or any adjournment thereof and to report to me on these matters.

The notice of Internet availability of proxy materials was mailed to all registered shareholders and was also mailed or notice was delivered in accordance with the notice and access requirements to all nonregistered shareholders in accordance with Rule 14A-16 of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Accordingly, the company is also in compliance with Canadian National Instrument 51-102, subpart 9.1.5, which allows compliance with SEC notice and access rules. The affidavit of mailing has been duly filed, and I direct that this affidavit be attached to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule.

If you're entitled to vote at the meeting, you may address the meeting when there is a call to discuss a motion before the meeting. Should a shareholder or proxy holder entitled to vote at the meeting would like to address the chair or other speaker on any motion, please type in your question or comment in the questions box at the right-hand side of your screen.

Subject to timing constraints and the applicability of the matters discussed, the secretary or another speaker may read the question aloud and provide a response during this meeting or as previously noted, duplicate or similar questions may be consolidated and paraphrased when read allowed to minimize repeat answers. Now a quorum for the transaction of business at this meeting of shareholders is at least 2 persons present.

In this case, virtually, each being a shareholder entitled to vote at the meeting or a duly appointed proxy holder or representative for an absent shareholder so entitled. I will now ask the Secretary to report on the attendance at the meeting.

We are pleased to report that there are 126 shareholders holding 124,183,126 common shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting. This represents 49.74% of the 249,649,039 issued and outstanding common shares.

Thank you, Julia. I declare that the requisite quorum of shareholders is present and that the meeting is properly constituted for the transaction of business.

I direct that the final scrutineer's report on attendance be annexed to the minutes of the meeting as a schedule. Now our first item of business is the presentation of the financial statements of the company for the year ending December 31, 2025, together with the auditor's report thereon. Copies of the financial statements have been publicly filed and mailed to all shareholders who have requested them. Are there any questions concerning the financial statements?

This is Curtis Moore, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you, Curtis. As there are no further questions, receipt and presentation of the financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, is hereby acknowledged.

Now our next item of business is the election of directors. It is proposed that 7 directors be elected at this meeting. As described in our proxy statement, the company has adopted a majority voting policy that provides for individual director voting by the shareholders.

Under this policy, if any nominee director receives a greater number of votes withheld than votes for election, such nominee will tender his or her resignation for consideration by the Board of Directors following this meeting.

In addition, the company's bylaws require that shareholders submit a notice of director nominations at least 35 days and not more than 65 days prior to the annual meeting.

No notices of nomination were received by the companies within this specified time period. May I have now a motion to nominate the individuals recommended by the Board of Directors?

This is Ross Bhappu. I nominate for election as directors of the company for the ensuing year, the following 7 persons whose nominations have been authorized by the Board of Directors: Ross R. Bhappu, Benjamin Eshleman III, Barb Filas, Bruce D. Hansen, Jacqueline Herrera, Dennis L. Higgs and Michael Stirzaker.

Great. As no other nominations were received by the company in accordance with the advanced notice provision of the company's bylaws, I now declare the nominations closed.

All of the nominees have signified their consent to act as directors of the company. May I now have a motion in respect to the election of the nominees as directors.

This is Ross Bhappu. I move that the individuals who I nominated be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of the Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you, Curtis. As there are no further questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting.

All persons are eligible to vote and may enter the votes by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen at this time. You may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting.

Now the next item of business is the appointment of auditors as described in our proxy statement. Management is proposing that KPMG LLP, an independent registered public accounting firm located in Denver, Colorado, be reappointed as the auditors of the company for 2026. I now ask someone to please make a motion to this regard.

Bruce, this is Ross Bhappu. I move that KPMG LLP of Denver, Colorado, an independent registered public accounting firm, be appointed as auditors of the company until the next annual meeting of the company at such remuneration as shall be fixed by the Board of Directors.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

As there are no further questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All persons eligible to vote again may enter their votes by clicking the Vote My Share tab on the right of your screen at this time.

Again, you may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting. The next item of business is a vote on a nonbinding advisory proposal to approve the compensation for the named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. I now ask for someone to make a motion.

This is Ross Bhappu. I move that the following resolution be passed. Resolve that the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers as disclosed pursuant to Item 402 of Regulation S-K, including the compensation discussion and analysis compensation tables and narrative discussion is hereby approved.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you, Curtis. As there are no further questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. Once again, all persons eligible to vote may enter their votes by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen at this time.

And again, you may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting. The next item is a vote on a nonbinding advisory proposal regarding the frequency on which shareholders will vote on say-on-pay proposals in the future known as say when on pay as detailed in the proxy statement.

The Say Win-on-Pay vote consists of 4 voting options denoted by the ability to vote in favor of a 1-year frequency, a 2-year frequency or a 3-year frequency or to simply abstain.

Each voting option is mutually exclusive, meaning that shareholders can only vote for 1 of the 4 options and should vote against or abstain on the other 3 options. Abstentions will effectively count as votes against that specific Say Win-on-Pay proposal.

Failures to vote will not have any impact on the Say Win-on-Pay proposal. It is the recommendation of management that shareholders vote for a 1-year frequency. I will now ask someone to make a motion.

This is Ross Bhappu. I move that the following resolution be passed: Resolved that the shareholders of Energy Fuels Inc. determine on a nonbinding advisory basis that the frequency with which the shareholders shall have an advisory vote on executive compensation set forth in Energy Fuel, Inc.'s proxy statement for its Annual Meeting of Shareholders beginning with the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is every 1, 2 or 3 years.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this specific motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

As there are no further questions, I will call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All persons again, eligible to vote may enter their votes by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen at this time.

If you have not entered your votes for all of the motions put forth at this meeting, please do so now. Now we'll pause for approximately 20 seconds to allow all shareholders to complete their votes before we close the polls.

[Voting]

The polls are now closed. And based on the preliminary scrutineer's report, proxies were received from a significant number of shares relative to the total number of votes cast at the meeting.

Such that I declare the following: With respect to the election of directors, I declare the motion carried and confirm that all nominees have been elected as directors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed.

Each of the nominees for director received more votes for than the number of votes withheld. And accordingly, each of the directors has been duly elected, and none of the directors is required to tender their resignation under the majority voting policy.

With respect to the appointment of KPMG LLP of Denver, Colorado, an independent registered public accounting firm, as auditors of the company until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders at such remuneration as shall be fixed by the Board of Directors, I declare the motion carried.

With respect to Say-on-Pay, the requisite majority resolved that the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers as disclosed pursuant to Item 402 of Regulation S-K, including the compensation discussion and analysis, compensation tables and narrative discussion is approved.

With respect to the Say Win-on-Pay, a 1-year frequency received the most votes in favor. And as a result, the shareholders resolved on a nonbinding advisory basis that the frequency at which shareholders shall have an advisory vote on executive compensation set forth in Energy Fuels, Inc.'s proxy statement for its Annual Meeting of Shareholders beginning with the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is every 1 year.

I hereby now direct that a copy of the scrutineer's final voting results be annexed to the minutes of the meeting that a report on the voting results be filed on SEDAR in accordance with Section 11.3 of National Instrument 51-102 continuous disclosure obligations and that a Form 8-K in accordance with Item 5.07 be filed on EDGAR pursuant to the filing requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

This concludes the scheduled business of this meeting. Is there any other business that anyone entitled to vote at this meeting would like to bring to the attention of the meeting?

This is Curtis Moore. There is no further business to be brought before the meeting.

Thank you. As there is no further business, I declare this Annual Meeting of Shareholders formally adjourned. However, I most certainly invite you to stay online to hear from our President and Chief Executive Officer, Ross Bhappu, on Energy's last year in review and I think a very exciting strategic outlook for the coming year.

Thank you, Bruce. Please note that this statement -- sorry, that this presentation contains forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations, and they're subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

Please refer to the slide addressing the forward-looking statements in this presentation as well as to Energy Fuels filings with the SEC and the Canadian regulators for a discussion of these risks. We undertake no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law.

With that, I'd like to do a quick presentation about the state of Energy Fuels, where we are. As I'm sure everybody is aware, we've been very active for the last number of months. And certainly, in the last 5 or 6 days, we've made some very, very important announcements. But I wanted to start with this slide, the title slide that I think talks to a little bit about where we started, where we are and where we're going.

I think it's an important slide and important to talk about the fact that we came from a history of uranium mining. Today, we're the largest producer of uranium in the United States. It sets us apart. I think it really creates a fabulous foundation for us as we advance into other parts of our business.

Importantly, we've expanded from just being a uranium miner and processing company to take that uranium expertise and advance into rare earths with the knowledge and expertise of rare earth separation and our choice of rare feed being monazite that's moved us into heavy mineral sands mining.

And now with our announced acquisition earlier this year of ASM and more recently, the announcement yesterday of our planned acquisition of Vacuumschmelze VAC, it moves us into metals, alloys and magnets.

I want to reiterate though, and I think this is really important that by no means does this mean we're giving up on the uranium side of the business. In fact, uranium will remain very important to us as we go forward with the execution plan.

So this is, I think, just a helpful slide to sort of set the stage. I've already discussed the forward-looking statements, so please be aware of those. On this next slide, I think the important thing that I'd like to share with you is that we are executing on our strategic plan. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the strategic planning process here in just a minute. But what's really defined the year is we've set a clear path to an integrated supply chain model, especially on the rare earths. We've started the execution of that. We've been very disciplined across core initiatives. We've progressed on M&A activity that I think is vitally important.

And I'll talk more about the M&A activity here shortly. But I think the important thing to remember on the M&A activity is these are not easy processes to get involved with organically. There is a lot of expertise, a lot of know-how, a lot of just years of experience that go into metal making, alloy production and then certainly magnet manufacturing. So with the acquisition of both ASM and VAC, we're buying existing companies, existing operations, existing EBITDA and cash flow that I think is vitally important.

And again, tremendously separates us from others that are operating in this space. So where are we headed? We're headed to be a global leader in the rare earth supply chain. We want to be a strategic partner to those OEMs, to those electronics companies, to missile -- or sorry, to defense contractors, other industries that are finding these rare earth minerals critical.

So we want to be a valuable partner to them. We also want to be a vertically integrated operator. Again, the acquisition of VAC and ASM really allow us to be self-sufficient and operate across the entire value stream and more importantly, allows us to capture margin across that stream. So the bottom line is Energy Fuels has strengthened our foundation, and we've outlined a very clear path to long-term value creation. So how did we get here? And how did we come up with our mission and vision? You can see on the slide there that we have developed a mission statement. Why do we exist? We want to responsibly produce the critical minerals that make clean energy and advanced technologies possible. That's why we exist.

And so how do we achieve that? We want to be or we will be the leading global producer of critical materials, enabling resilient supply chains and creating sustainable value for our customers, our people, our investors and our communities. We don't take these statements lightly. We spent 3 days. We took the top 16 leaders of the firm to an off-site, a 3-day offsite where we sat down and we really talked about what is our goal as Energy Fuels, what is it we want to try to achieve.

And as a group, we developed these mission and vision statements. We took them to the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors signed off on and agreed with this strategy and this workflow. And so on the back of that, we also created values. And the values, I think, are really important. It is what does it mean to work for Energy Fuels. And the 5 values that we came up with, which I think are vitally important and what we live by every day is certainly safety and environmental stewardship. It's working with integrity. It's respecting your fellow workers, the environment, the communities we work in and the cultures that we're dealing with in the various geographies in which we work.

It involves teamwork or includes teamwork. And I think that's vitally important. I think if you would have seen in the background the work that went into announcing our VAC intent to acquire VAC, you would have seen an incredible team effort that just exemplifies the teamwork that we have put together.

And then finally, operational excellence. We intend to deliver to the highest standard with financial discipline. And I would just reiterate that with financial discipline is an important part of that statement. So these are the values, the mission, the vision. And I'd say together, these really define the direction that we're going. So as part of that off-site strategic work that we did, strategic planning work, we really identified 4 key priorities. One is developing an operating model that will define how we're going to execute on this strategy.

The second is defining and advancing the projects and permits to allow us to achieve what we're doing. That means advancing the White Mesa Mill, the Donald project, the Vara Mada project, advancing on ASM's acquisition and the AMP development, AMP being the American Metals plant, development of our radioisotope program, advancing on the Bahia Project and advancing on the development of Roca Honda.

The third priority was financing and offtake, and that's securing agreements to support the development and profitability of the business going forward. We've certainly achieved some incredible milestones over the last year, starting probably with our convertible note offering in October, raising $700 million there. And then, of course, announcing last week the $725 million agreement with the U.S. government with the Office of Strategic Capital to help finance the activities we have going on with the White Mesa Mill and with the American Metals plant.

The fourth and final key priority is the people strategy. And you can't underestimate the need for and the importance of having the right people. I mentioned that one of the priorities is putting the operating model together. We have identified that operating model, now it's incumbent on us to put together the people that are going to drive that operating model.

And we have some incredible people in Energy Fuels. We're going to continue deepening our bench and making sure we have the right people as we grow and as we continue. So let me just talk about a few of the accomplishments that we've had in 2025 and '26.

First, projects and approvals. We got final regulatory approval for the Donald project. We've got a support letter from the Export Finance Australia EFA to help finance it. We've rebranded our Toliara project to the Vara Mada project, and we published the feasibility study. That was an incredibly important and value-accretive change, just the rebranding alone.

On the White Mesa Mill, we issued our bankable feasibility study for the Phase 2 expansion. We've also released information about our Phase 1B and 1C decision. Those 2 Phase 1b allows us to process the heavy rare earth minerals. Phase 1C will allow us to process MREC or mixed rare earth carbonates. So really important accomplishments from the project and approval side of the business.

On the rare earth supply chain side, we've produced our first dysprosium oxide, a critical milestone and Dy, that dysprosium passed all the initial purity and QA/QC benchmarks.

We also produced our first terbium oxide. These are both done at pilot scale levels, but very excited to have produced significant or substantial quantities of both Dy and Tb. POSCO, the manufacturer of neodymium, praseodymium into commercial scale rare earth permanent magnets and standard electric vehicle motor blocks was advanced, and we actually saw NdPr from our facility converted into magnets and being used in commercial applications, which is a fantastic milestone.

We signed an MOU with Vulcan Elements. And on the uranium side, within the uranium side of the business as well as our capital and portfolio, we have announced the VAC and ASM acquisitions. The Pinyon Plain Mine has continued to operate very successfully. We've exceeded our uranium guidance for fiscal year 2025. We've already met our full year production guidance for uranium by mid-2026.

As I mentioned earlier, we raised $700 million via a convertible note offering in October. Just last week, we announced the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital, the OSC provided a conditional $725 million financing commitment. And of course, yesterday, our big announcement of the VAC acquisition, which was negotiated and announced.

On the leadership and alignment side, I can't tell you how grateful I've been working with Mark Chalmers. As I think you all are aware, Mark retired on April 15. Mark remains a very important consultant to me personally, but to the firm as well, just a tremendous person.

And so that transition has now occurred, and I've taken over as CEO as of April 15. We did issue our sustainability report earlier this year. I think it was a fantastic undertaking. I think by all measures, everyone would agree that, that was a really very well done, not just a report, but a very well-done execution on our sustainability program.

The organization was outlined into 3 major business segments. And I haven't really talked about this before, but as part of the organizational model, we've defined 3 operating units, each with their own P&L. That will be the heavy mineral sands and rare earth mining segment. That includes the Vara Mada project, the Bahia project, Donald. It would include Dubbo as it advances.

Then we have the uranium, both mining and uranium and rare earths processing division that includes the White Mesa Mill, plus our 6 or 7 uranium mining operations, the Pinyon Plain Mine and La Sal in particular, which are operating. That's the second business unit.

And then the third business unit is the metals alloys and now, of course, with the announcement of VAC magnets. So metals, alloys and magnets will fall into that third business unit. So excited about implementing those changes. They've already started, and we're advancing on them quite well.

And then, of course, advancing on our top priorities that I mentioned earlier. So let me just talk a little bit about our announced acquisition of VAC. I think everyone should have or would have heard a lot about that yesterday. There's been a lot of press on it. VAC is an amazing company. It's in advanced magnetic materials, magnetics.

I think the key metrics are there at the bottom, 2025 adjusted revenue of almost $369 million. VAC has about 4,000 employees. They've been in operation for over 100 years, and it's amazing when you go to their factory, their facilities in Hanau, Germany. You can see this juxtaposition of this factory site that's been there for over 100 years, but with this incredible modern state-of-the-art equipment in it.

The company has over 1,000 customers, and they have over 400 patents all tied to this incredible work that they do. When you look at the sites that they have, they're headquartered in Hanau, Germany. For those of you that aren't familiar, Hanau is just outside of Frankfurt. That's their global headquarters and R&D center.

They have facilities in Finland, in Slovakia, in Malaysia, in China. But most importantly, they now have this new facility that they're developing in South Carolina at Sumter. It's a state-of-the-art facility, fully robotic. It's truly an impressive, impressive facility and one we're very excited about. It's got a capacity today of 2,000 tonnes per annum, but we've got line of sight to eventually getting that to 12,000 tonnes per annum.

So it's an incredible facility. When we look at the acquisition, what it does for us, first of all, just a few of the key terms of transaction values about this slide is $1.8 billion. I think we've said $1.9 billion in our materials yesterday. We've provided cash consideration of a little over $700 million to our partners and stock consideration of just under 66 million shares.

Additionally, there is a preferred security consideration of up to $135 million subject to certain conditions. There are conditional -- sorry, customary governance standstill lockup provisions for our partners, but they will have the right to nominate one member to the Board of Directors, and we're very excited for that individual to come on our Board.

The transaction is expected to be completed in approximately 6 months, but early 2027. And really, the key there is getting those regulatory approvals. And look, I think the important aspect of this is the value creation drivers. It provides full vertical integration from the mines to the magnets. It gives us that full vertical integration. It's got very complementary capabilities. It combines Energy Fuels, rare earth processing and extraction capabilities with VAC's magnet manufacturing expertise and their advanced technologies.

It broadens our customer reach. So when we think about customers, the customers knowing that there is a security of supply of raw materials to make their magnets, I think, can be understated or can't be overstated. We believe that it's going to create a re-rating opportunity for the company. We're going to enhance our cash flow and margin profile.

And again, very excited by what that means for our shareholders, for all of you as our shareholders. And then finally, the supply chain resilience. Again, I think that can't be just overstated. It is just so important to have control across the entire supply chain, and I think that's going to lead to much higher profitability and margins as we look forward. I'll talk just very briefly about the ASM acquisition. We've already spoken a great deal in the past about that.

Just a snapshot, we're paying AUD 1.60 per share. That equates to 0.053 Energy Fuels shares plus a $0.13 cash payment as well. The implied equity value is about $447 million. That will provide ASM shareholders with just under 6% shareholding -- pro forma shareholding in Energy Fuels prior to the VAC announcement.

The strategic fit, I think it accelerates our downstream rare earth capabilities. It provides us with an additional arrow in our quiver with the Dubbo project. It enhances our separations capabilities by having an additional feed source. It allows us to move directly into metals and alloys through their Korean metals plant, and it really positions us to being a leader in the Western mine to now magnet production profile.

The Korean metals plant is extremely valuable. Again, it's in operation today. We're expanding it as we speak. It improves margin capture, and it broadens growth pipeline through the Dubbo and the planned American Metals plant going forward. I don't want to, again, understate the importance of uranium to our process.

The picture that you see on the right is from the Pinyon Plain Mine and our valuable workers at the miners that are making that happen. So when we look at where we are from a market position perspective, the market demand remains as strong as we've ever seen it.

The rare earth demand continues to grow. We're excited about being a completely U.S. controlled source of rare earth supply to meet that growing demand. But we're also seeing incredible growth in the uranium sector. And so again, a very favorable backdrop for uranium.

When you hear about and listen to all the activity going on with regard to SMRs, small modular reactors plus the restart of new uranium facilities, nuclear facilities plus new additional nuclear facilities coming online, you can't help but be really excited about the future of uranium.

We are a relevant producer of both uranium and as we look forward, rare earths. So we are a relevant operator. And now we need to execute on a few of our projects. So projects like Donald, like the Phase 2 project like Phase 1B and 1C.

So I am just excited as I could ever be about Energy Fuels, where we are and where we're going. And with that, I'd love to open it up for any questions you might have, and I thank you for participating.

Well, thank you, Ross. This is Curtis Moore. There are no further questions at this time.

Great. Thank you, Curtis. Well, with that, I'd like to conclude our 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I'd like to thank everybody for attending, and we look forward to your participation again next year. Thank you.

Thank you for your participation in today's meeting. This does conclude today's call.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you all for joining us for this Energy Fuels proposed acquisition of VAC. [Operator Instructions] And to get us started with opening remarks and introductions, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to President and CEO, Mr. Ross Bhappu. Welcome, sir.

Thank you, Jim, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We have some really exciting news to talk about, and I'm excited to be here with Erik Eschen. Actually, Erik is in Germany, but he's joining me online and we'll be making a presentation together to tell you about this great news.

So if we flip to Slide 4. Yes. First of all, I just want to, again, thank everybody for joining. Today marks a very important milestone for Energy Fuels and rare earth supply chain security. With the acquisition of Vacuumschmelze, also known as VAC, we're realizing our vision to become the only really true Western mine-to-magnet platform. This culmination of years of effort to build a world-class portfolio of upstream, midstream and downstream mining assets that comprise a uniquely vertical -- sorry, unique vertically integrated rare earth supply chain.

I'm now going to walk you through how all these pieces fit together, starting with the VAC transaction. So just starting on Page 5. VAC is a leading advanced magnetics company headquartered in Hanau, Germany. This transaction coming on the heels of our planned acquisition of ASM puts us on a path to create a fully integrated mine-to-magnet rare earth platform, combining Energy Fuels low-cost upstream rare earth element mining projects and existing separation capabilities with VAC's world-class downstream rare earth magnet manufacturing expertise.

Together, we will be in a better position to serve customers across North America, Europe and high-growth sectors, including the automotive, aerospace, defense, robotics, data centers, electronics and industrial automation sectors. The cash and stock consideration for the company includes $718 million in cash and 65.85 million shares. Based on Energy Fuels closing share price of $16.12 as of Monday, June 22, the transaction implies an equity value for VAC of approximately $1.9 billion.

The transaction has been unanimously approved by the Energy Fuels Board of Directors, and we expect the transaction to close in early 2027, subject, of course, to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of applicable regulatory and government approvals. Accounting for the planned completion of the ASM acquisition, Ara Partners is expected to own roughly 19.9% of Energy Fuels following the closing of the VAC transaction.

The stock element of the transaction keeps Ara invested in the long-term value creation opportunity of the combined company. Ara will have the right to appoint one director to the Energy Fuels Board and will be subject to customary lockup and standstill restrictions. The acquisition of VAC will be immediately accretive to our earnings and cash flow, and VAC's legacy business generated $27 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2025 and has experienced more than 20% year-on-year growth in its order book for 2026.

VAC's Sumter facility is expected to generate approximately between $65 million and $75 million worth of annual run rate EBITDA once its production reaches its current capacity of 2,000 tons per annum. VAC is the only commercial European and U.S. permanent magnet producer that's operating magnetic facilities in North America, Europe and Asia with a commercial spectrum of relevant customer-qualified Neodymium Iron Boron and Samarium Cobalt magnet grades, including energy dense, high cohesivity magnets required for mission-critical defense and aerospace applications.

So if we turn to the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about what VAC is. VAC has more than 100 years of production expertise. It has over 400 patents and more than 1,000 long-term customers globally. Over the last decade, VAC has produced and shipped more than 1 billion -- let me repeat that, 1 billion rare earth permanent magnets. VAC employs approximately 4,000 people across several locations. These facilities include Hanau, Germany, Ulvila, Finland, Horná Streda, Slovakia and Sumter, South Carolina.

VAC state-of-the-art Sumter, South Carolina facility, the largest permanent magnet plant of scale in the United States is constructed and it's able to produce 2,000 tonnes per annum of Neodymium Iron Boron magnet block and has a pathway to scale up to 12,000 tons per annum.

Moving to the next slide. There continues to be a surge in demand for Neodymium Iron Boron magnets in North America and Europe, and we expect it to grow by over 50% over the next decade based on estimates from the International Energy Agency. Bridging the Western supply gap requires significant investments, including more than $60 billion by 2035. That supply gap is concentrated in the most technically challenging and underinvested parts of the value chain, which is exactly where VAC adds critical downstream capability.

Next slide, let me explain why we've opted for the acquisition to create this Western mine to magnet platform and what that market is looking for. We see strong evidence that buying gets us to where we want to faster and with more capability compared to our peers. Energy Fuels has built a strong foundation across rare earth feedstock, processing and separation with planned metals and alloys capabilities being added through the ASM acquisition. Strategically, this transaction is about accelerating the rare earth value chain we've already been building over the past several years.

The VAC transaction paves the way for us to become the only company with geographically diversified commercial capabilities across every critical step of the rare earth value chain. It also expands Energy Fuels participation in higher-value downstream markets, where customer relationships, technical capabilities and supply chain reliability are increasingly important. I'd now like to hand the floor over to Erik Eschen, CEO of VAC, who will discuss VAC's established platform, customer relationships and differentiated capabilities. Erik?

Thanks, Ross. It's very exciting to be here with you and present this outstanding deal. So quickly, my name is Erik Eschen. I'm the CEO of VAC. I'm with the company for 10 years now and happy to provide a little bit of background information what we are doing. VAC is a more than 100-year-old company with a lot of experience in producing soft magnetic materials and permanent magnets. We have about 1,000 customers where most of our products are spec-ed in, which means we develop it with them. It's very sticky to these customers.

At the same time, we are highly innovative. More than 20% of our revenue is usually with products. We just implemented in the [indiscernible] market the last couple of years. Also for that, we have an outstanding relationship with our customers on average more than 30 years, some of them 100. But also saying that we have a lot of start-ups because we have the full mix of whoever is in the innovative world works with us. And most important, we are the only producer, as Ross already mentioned, on permanent magnets in the Western world.

Saying that, we are fully DFARS compliant, and we serve the military in the United States and obviously, with the allies for many, many decades and have a significant differentiated IP portfolio. How do we manage our business? Because with our revenue of nearly $400 million, we are quite diverse. We separate in soft and hard magnetic magnets and hard magnetic magnets, these are our permanent ones. At the moment, this is our smaller business. But as Ross stated, with a lot of demand out there. And if you look at our financials, we make a gross margin of $68 million and EBITDA of $28 million as we speak with whatever we discussed before.

On the R&D side, I think that's very essential for that deal as well, and everyone was looking into that. We have 150-plus FTEs in our R&D. We have 420-plus patents, a lot of process IP, and we serve with the high-end markets, automotive, it's not only EV, but mainly that's where we're coming from. The whole automotive industry, we have a very strong aerospace and defense and drones, the solar industry for our soft magnetic market. And on the permanent magnet market, we have a lot of requests and demand and customers in the robotic sector, aerospace, defense, data centers, obviously, is one of the major industries right now and also the whole automotive industries, as I said before, on both sides, on the electric as on the combustion engine.

If we look -- take a look on the following side, and this is the most exciting or a very exciting part that also I'm pretty sure Ross was attracted right from the beginning. We just completed our facility in Sumter, South Carolina. I'm on Page 10 now. So we got asked a couple of years ago to build a facility on U.S. soil. We just completed that in a very short time frame. It was outstanding what the team could achieve. We are fully commissioned and in production. We are in Sumter, South Carolina. It's close to the shore Airbase, whoever is familiar with that area.

We can, at the moment, produce 2,000 tons per annum on block material. And we designed the factory that we can very quickly expand the capacity to 4,000 tonnes without interruption of the current production. So we already thought ahead when we designed the first phase, and we can easily expand to 12,000 tonnes. We have secured the space around and are ready to go that route over the next couple of years. So in the deal together also with Energy Fuels and also with ASM, we are ready and want to integrate the value chain steps before, especially metal making and strip casting, where ASM has great experience, and we are so excited to work together.

And also, we are waiting, obviously, to get the material from Energy Fuels and we can fill the whole facility with the materials we will get out of Energy Fuels. And you can see the growth potential with the expansion of that sector in Sumter, South Carolina. And yes, we are just excited the whole team. It's just here. And we are looking forward to work with Energy Fuels very, very close and happy to have you, Ross and your team. And I hand it over back to you.

Thank you, Erik. And we're very excited to be working together with you as well. So this combination brings together very highly complementary capabilities across the value chain, and it pairs Energy Fuels upstream and midstream rare earth platform with that downstream magnet manufacturing expertise. VAC's Sumter facility will be the end destination for the feedstock produced across Energy Fuel's integrated supply chain.

In its first phase, the Donald project in Australia will produce monazite that's expected to be processed into separated rare earth oxides at Energy Fuels existing processing circuits existing at the White Mesa Mill in Utah, just outside of Landing, Utah. That's where upgrades are expected to be completed by the end of 2027. The separated oxides are expected to be converted into rare earth metals and alloys at the Korean metals plant part of the ASM acquisition, and these in turn will be used to make permanent magnets at the Sumter facility.

Energy Fuels planned Phase 2 expansion at the White Mesa Mill is expected to increase the mill separation capacity up to 5,200 tonnes per annum of NdPr oxide and approximately 240 tons per annum of dysprosium and 70 tons per annum of terbium oxide by mid-2029. Energy Fuels will feed this expansion with monazite from the Donald project and Energy Fuels for Amada project and our Bahia heavy mineral sands projects, which are currently in their permitting and development stages. We'll also feed the mill through market purchases of monazite and mixed rare earth carbonate as required.

Oxides produced as a result of the Phase 2 separation capacity are expected to be converted into rare earth metals and alloys at the Korean metals plant and the American Metals plant, both of which facilities are expected to be expanded. The mill's Phase 2 expansion is expected to provide more than enough rare earth alloys to support a full 12,000 tonne per annum scale up at Sumter, as well as VAC's current European rare earth permanent magnet facilities, subject, of course, to demand for the permanent magnets. By integrating feedstock, separated oxides, metals and alloys and finished magnets, we see opportunities to improve the value of supply chain security, capture more of the value across the rare earth value chain and strengthen structural margins over time.

Next slide. We see a significant customer opportunity with over $2 billion of annual customer revenue pipeline that can support Sumter's expansion case over time. The value creation opportunity comes from vertical integration, customer access, margin capture, supply chain security and participation in higher-value downstream segments of the rare earth market. VAC's permanent magnet customer pipeline includes EV and non-EV automotive applications, data centers, power tools, robotics, aerospace and defense, semiconductors and other industrial applications.

By combining Energy Fuels upstream and midstream rare earth capabilities with VAC's downstream magnet manufacturing platform, we can capture more of the margin across the value chain. Vertical integration gives us the opportunity to eliminate third-party markups, internalize input costs and create a more structurally advantaged cost position over time. It also gives the combined company greater flexibility to serve customers at variable points -- multiple points in the value chain. That includes oxides, metals and alloys or finished magnets depending on customer needs.

For customers, that means a more complete supply chain solution supported by secure feedstock, Western production capabilities and DFARS compliant production. For Energy Fuels shareholders, the transaction creates a clear path to margin uplift and long-term value creation as Energy Fuels captures more economics across the entire value chain, and that includes both rare earth and magnet supply chain.

On Slide 14, the combined company brings together operating assets, developing projects and long-term expansion opportunities across rare earths, uranium and critical minerals. VAC adds immediate downstream scale and customer access to Energy Fuels existing upstream and midstream platform. Energy Fuels feedstock and processing capabilities help derisk VAC's supply chain, while VAC's magnetic expertise helps accelerate monetization of Energy Fuels rare earth production.

The result is a broader, more balanced growth profile with assets at multiple stages of maturity and multiple paths to long-term value. Now I'd like to walk through the intended pro forma of the company, the growth initiatives, which we expect to be supported by government funding that's existing, conditionally committed and in discussion across the United States and Australia. As we announced last week, Energy Fuels has received a conditional commitment for up to $725 million from the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital in the form of a 20-year loan to accelerate the planned expansion at the White Mesa Mill and construction of the American Metals plant.

Energy Fuels and its joint venture partner, Astron, are also making progress on discussions regarding an AUD 220 million lending package to support the development of Phase 1 of the Donald project from Export Finance Australia. In addition, VAC has received USD 220 million in total funding to support the scale of Sumter. [ VAC ] governance and project level support is expected to help derisk capital deployment and support execution across key growth projects, including White Mesa, Donald's, the American Metals Plant and Sumter.

Now let's talk about the value to shareholders. The benefits of the long-term growth, innovation and value creation catalyzed by the acquisition of VAC will be experienced by all our key stakeholders. For Energy Fuels stakeholders, shareholders, the transaction creates exposure to fully integrated Western mine-to-magnet platform with significant value creation potential through enhanced margin capture and downstream growth.

For our customers, the combined company enhances product capabilities, supports more resilient Western supply chains and provides DFARS compliant production. The combined company will also be better positioned to serve as a secure and trusted supplier of critical rare earth materials and magnets supporting customers whose supply chains are increasingly tied to national security, industrial competitiveness and resilience. VAC will retain its branding and historic identity. Recall, it's been in business for over 100 years with its technology-based engineering expertise and manufacturing footprint remaining critical to the success of the combined company.

Our focus now is on completing the transaction, engaging constructively with regulators and stakeholders and continuing to advance our broader rare earth strategy. I'd like to close by summarizing where this transaction positions us. We're creating a fully integrated mine-to-magnet rare earth platform, combining Energy Fuels low-cost upstream rare earth mining projects and existing separation capabilities with VAC's world-class downstream rare earth magnet manufacturing expertise.

The acquisition results in a significant margin uplift and long-term value creation as Energy Fuels captures more economics across the rare earth and magnet supply chain. We will be better positioned to serve customers across North America and Europe in high-growth sectors. We will win market share by offering a more complete supply chain solution supported by secure feedstock, Western production capabilities and DFARS compliant production.

Combined company growth plan is expected to be supported by government funding that's secured conditionally committed and in discussion across the United States and Australia. We're very excited about the opportunities ahead and confident in the long-term potential of the combined company. And with that, I'd like to open the floor up to questions that you might have. So I'm going to turn it back to Jim for polling questions.

[Operator Instructions] We'll hear first from Nick Giles at B. Riley Securities.

Ross, congrats to you and your team on this transformative deal here. So maybe just on the first side, touching on VAC's growth. I was wondering, Erik, if you could just walk us through the CapEx for Phase 2. What kind of savings would you see just given the kind of front-loaded investment? And then how should we think about CapEx ultimately to that 12,000 mark?

Ross, should I take it immediately? Or do you want to start?

No, go ahead, Erik.

So obviously, we built our first Phase 1 in record time with a CapEx of $0.5 billion. We assume there will be some savings for Phase 2 for 2 reasons. First, some of the infrastructure is already there. We don't have to start from scratch. We also -- even we have been close to perfection, we learned a little bit out of first one like you do in every project.

And I'm sure the team will get better out of that. So in that range, minus 10% to 20% for each 2,000 is a ballpark, I would assume. Saying that, if we then further build immediately from not step-wise, but the facility by 4,000, you can have another discount on the overall CapEx. So that's how I would see it and would do my calculation on that.

Thanks, Erik.

Nick, I hope that answered your question, and good to talk to you.

Yes. No. And sorry, if I don't have it in front of me. Just what was the -- what would be the gross dollar amount just on that basis for ultimately reaching Phase 2?

Erik, I don't know if we've published that number. I don't believe we have...

For Phase 1, it's all a little bit forward-looking, so I'm a little bit more careful. But 2,000 tonnes, depending then on the final magnet because not every magnet is the same. You can assume $250 million up to $400 million depending on the complexity of the magnet with a very, very healthy margin as you have seen in the presentation. So you can make the math. The payback period is pretty attractive. And what we usually do, we are looking for firm contracts for a period also to secure the investments.

Understood. Ross, I wanted to really just ask you about capital allocation at the back of this deal. You have a nice bit of cash on the balance sheet, but some of that -- the majority of that will go towards the deal here. So just how do you think about capital allocation to your other growth projects? And what do you think about kind of funding needs from here?

Yes. Look, I think the government support that we announced last week has a huge impact on our cash position on our funding capabilities. Clearly, we are using a fair bit of our cash to get this deal done, but we are exploring how to I guess, explore other alternatives for funding the rest of our activities.

So Nick, we've got -- as you know, the White Mesa Mill feasibility study came in lower than we had anticipated. We've got our Phase 1 expansion going on. And so I think we're in good shape, but we've also put in place a loan from Goldman Sachs that will help support our cash flow, and that's a term loan. So I think we're in good shape to manage our cash and our capital requirements.

We'll move next to Noel Parks at Tuohy Brothers.

I guess with Energy Fuels doing this transaction at this particular time, I wonder if you could just sort of talk about your assessment of sort of the risk reward of this additional step in the integration. I'm thinking about it does represent additional operational complexity for the parent company. And I assume that was somewhat balanced against your faith in rare earths market and sort of the ability to see the critical minerals at the moment. So can you just sort of talk about how you assess that and how that affects the timing?

Sure, Noah. And thanks for the question. Look, I think from a risk-reward perspective, we chose VAC because it's existing, because it has over 1,000 existing customers. It is an operating company. It's been in operation for 100 years. So from a risk perspective, we're not developing new technologies. We're not building a new plant. They've already got existing facilities in place. So we think it's the lowest risk way for us to vertically integrate.

It's a tremendous opportunity for us. The fact that Ara chose to work with Energy Fuels, we chose to work with them and acquire this company, I think, is sort of a testament because there were certainly other suitors, and I don't know specifics about that, but I'm sure there were other suitors for VAC. And so I think this is just a tremendous match between the 2 companies and the lowest risk way for us to get into the magnet business as opposed to trying to develop the path on our own.

Got it. And if you could just sort of talk about where the ASM piece and the Korea processing sort of fits into the puzzle. I'm just curious, I guess, first of all, would this would not have made sense without the ASM piece? And I'm just wondering if you foresee I have a real opportunity of being able to arbitrage cost structures in the marketplace. Now you have these different -- I mean, with your various monazite sources and [indiscernible] sources long term, is that a big piece of it? Or does it really just boil down to the efficiency and the customer opportunities?

Well, look, I think the acquisitions of both companies provide this full vertical integration. I think that had we not acquired or been acquiring -- in the process of acquiring the Australian entity, I think we would want to get into the on alloy making regardless because that's a missing piece of the value creation matrix.

And so having the full vertical integration, I think, is vitally important. Would we have done VAC without them? I don't -- I think, of course, we would have certainly thought about that. But I think not being reliant on a third party to supply metals and alloys gives us a tremendous leg up on anybody else operating in this space. So I do think it's just that whole vertical integration makes incredible sense.

We'll move to Joseph Reagor at ROTH Capital.

I guess first question is just on VAC. What was their production rate last year that resulted in the $29 million of EBITDA?

Yes. I'm not sure that that's been publicly disclosed. Is anyone here know of it -- we disclosed that amount.

And by the way, we don't have a production rate because we have facilities and so many different products. There's not one production rate. So nothing to disclose on that hand and just like Ross said.

Okay. Fair enough. And then, Ross, should we expect Energy Fuels immediately post closing of this transaction to provide investor guidance on what you guys expect revenue run rates and EBITDA margins to look like on the combined basis?

So yes, we will -- we have put out guidance in the past. We will continue to put out guidance. I got to tell you, it's not my favorite thing to do because we're in this massive growth phase. We've got all these exciting things happening. And it's hard to judge us quarter-to-quarter, but we will certainly do that. I think the long-term value creation is where people need to be focused on with Energy Fuels with these acquisitions.

Okay. And then one other one, if I could. Just on the $1.9 billion valuation, is there any way from Energy Fuels side that you can kind of break down how you guys got to that number as a fair value to acquire it given the EBITDA was only $29 million last year?

$29 million last year, but historically, it's been much higher. And the growth profile that we're looking at is -- and the value that it brings to the combined entity, I think the calculations were pretty easy to zero in on that sort of number. And we worked with our advisers. I know Ara worked with their advisers. And jointly, we came up with a number that was appropriate for both parties and accretive certainly to our shareholders.

And we'll take a follow-up from Nick Giles once more at B. Riley Securities.

I was just curious, Erik, if you could maybe walk us through your current feedstock. Obviously, it will be replaced by Energy Fuels at a later date. But if you could just walk us through where you're currently sourcing your metal today?

Yes. That's a fantastic question. That's why we are so excited. So traditionally, our feedstock for permanent magnets, and I'm only talking about that side of the business because that's I assume you are referring to. Most of that feedstock traditionally comes out of China. We have a supply chain outside China for 15, 20 years, mainly for military, but also for customers who were asking for that, where we use material from outside, but that's a small volume, and this is where the Western world is struggling. The capacities there from the mines to the midstreams are not sufficient, and we are the only producer for permanent magnets in the Western world.

And therefore, we are excited to get as quickly and as much material out of the mines from energy fuels. And we will replace that. It's highly cost efficient as well competitive. I think there are great opportunities also from the margin on all -- on each and every step there and we will replace as much as possible. And the first year, it's more like how much can we get. At the moment, just to say that and make that clear, we cannot fulfill all the demand because we need more raw materials. And therefore, it's -- for me, it's a merger made in heaven to have Energy Fuels now on our side.

Great. I really appreciate that. And then maybe just there was a slide, a nice slide on kind of your soft magnetics contribution versus that of permanent magnets. I was wondering if you could just touch on the margin profile between both of those segments? And then how do you ultimately see the margin profile expanding as you go from kind of Phase 1 to Phase 2 and Phase 2 to the 12,000?

Yes. So historically, our margin profile is pretty stable over the 2 businesses. We have a few points lower margins on permanent magnets. Just recall, we are the only competitor to the Chinese dominant. And therefore, the competition there is very, very strong. But with our innovations we are having on that side, we could make an attractive margin. On the soft magnetic side, we have a lot of products where we single source. The competition is a little bit less intense and most of our competitors, by the way, come out of Europe and the U.S.

So it's a complete different competitive profile, and therefore, the margins are a little bit higher. What we see right now is there's a lot of political efforts in North America as well as in Europe to source more out of the Western countries. what might change the overall picture. So I'm just with Ross, and we haven't calculated it through with the whole process yet. So this is what we are going to do in the next couple of months and weeks. It's difficult to make predictions. But I am very positive we can further improve there, if we are working together.

Great. And then just while we have you, I'll sneak in one more, if that's all right. Magnet qualification cycles are not short to my knowledge. So how far along is Sumter in that process? And how do you kind of see that time line shrinking? Or can it shrink as you ramp further and you get more products in the hands of these customers?

That's an outstanding question. So we produce these kinds of permanent magnets for more than 40 years when they got innovated. So we have all the qualifications you need if you work for automotive, for aerospace and defense. This takes usually years to get. As we are doing it, we are just having that. We could bring our experienced team from Europe to Sumter. And actually, most of the workers, really the shop floor workers and obviously, the whole management team, we trained up to 18 months here in Germany in our facility, brought them over to Sumter and they are trained the trainers. So we are fully operational and qualified.

And that's one of the huge advantages, I think no one in the industry -- or wait, not in the industry, actually, industry observers are not aware because you are looking on the mine and process technology, and this is all key where we are leading and -- most of our technology we installed in Sumter, we changed and developed ourselves. That's why we are still here and the others all failed against the Chinese competition. By the way, we never made a loss in permanent magnets over the last 40 years. I just want to say that here as well.

And getting these qualifications, this is completely overseen by everyone. It's pretty harsh because you have to produce, you have to produce for months, if not years, to get qualified, we have it. And just imagine, you cannot send a magnet into a fighter jet or into a commercial plane if you are not fully compliant with all the regulations. And they are audited, they are tested, and they are tough to get, as you can imagine, and it takes ages to get them. And just to repeat once more, we are already there.

[Operator Instructions] And we have no signals from our audience remaining. Mr. Bhappu, I'm happy to turn it back to you, sir, for any additional or closing remarks that you have.

Thanks, Jim. I appreciate that. Look, I want to just reiterate that this is a transformational acquisition and merger with -- for Energy Fuels. It's extremely value accretive just in a long-term strategic position for our shareholders and for our company. This is going to allow us to capture margin across all stages of production, and I can't overstate the value of that. What we're taking on with VAC is a very dedicated workforce, very capable workforce. Energy Fuels has the same. We have a dedicated, very, very successful and extremely valuable workforce, and I can't help but think that combining the 2 is going to be extremely valuable. I can't overstate the value of acquiring the capability that VAC has.

As Erik just mentioned, developing this capability have organically -- is extremely challenging. You can't just start a magnet manufacturing facility and get qualified and get your magnets into production at the OEMs or defense contractors overnight. It's a long, long process. And that's what really drove us to the attraction of this partnership with VAC. So just I want to close by saying we're extremely excited about this acquisition. I think this combination is extremely powerful. It should make us the most valuable rare earth company outside of China, and I'm very confident when I say that. So thank you, everybody, for listening. We're excited about this and look forward to answering more questions in the future.

Thank you, Jim.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's Energy Fuels Inc. conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines. We hope that you enjoy the rest of your day.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you all for joining us for this Energy Fuels Q1 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's session is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to President and CEO, Mr. Ross Bhappu. Welcome, sir.

Thank you, Jim. I appreciate the intro. And thank you, everybody, for participating today. Look, I want to start by thanking Mark Chalmers. Mark recently retired from Energy Fuels after almost 10 years with the firm. Mark has done just a fabulous job putting together a great group of assets, putting a great team together. And as I look forward to my new tenure here as the CEO of the company, I'm just thrilled to be taking the helm and moving the company into the next generation.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. And as I start kind of my tenure in the company, I'm focused on a few things. One is executing on our business strategy. It's ensuring that we have the right team in place, and it's ensuring that we all operate safely within this organization. So that is a key, key area of responsibility.

Look, the other thing that's a heavy focus of mine is being a good neighbor in the communities we operate, and we want to operate at very high environmental standards and be truly a good partner wherever we go. So my focus, as I look forward is to position the company for long-term growth and build stability and shareholder value.

So with that, I'd like to turn our attention to the next slide, which is our forward-looking notice, forward-looking statements. We will be making -- I will be making forward-looking statements today. These statements reflect our current expectations and assumptions and certainly involve some uncertainties. I'd refer you to our 10-Q filing and the latest 10-K and other SEC and SEDAR filings for the risk factors.

So looking at our next page, the first quarter highlights. Look, we had a fantastic first quarter by every measure. And I'm excited to tell you about some of these accomplishments. First of all, from an operational perspective, we mined 425,000 pounds of uranium, and we produced nearly 800,000 pounds in our mill. We ended the quarter with 2.25 million pounds in our inventory, and we released a very positive Vara Mada feasibility study with a $1.8 billion NPV, and that includes over $500 million per year of expected EBITDA. When you think about that and put that into perspective, that takes Energy Fuels to a whole new level.

We also completed our White Mesa Mill Phase 2 bankable feasibility study, and that came in with a fantastic lower-than-expected capital cost at $410 million. We expect $311 million of annual EBITDA when that facility is up and running on a stand-alone basis.

We also announced the ASM acquisition. ASM, Australian Strategic Materials, which I'm going to talk about later, really moves us into a new league and gives us the ability to produce metals and alloys, and we'll talk about that, like I said, later.

Also during the quarter, we produced our first terbium. Terbium is one of those exotic rare earth heavy minerals that everybody is seeking in their magnets, and it really puts us into a different league. So we've gained as a result of those announcements, substantial interest from offtakers as a result of all this news.

From a financial perspective, we have a robust balance sheet of over $950 million of liquidity. We generated $8 million of EBITDA, and we had sales and revenue from both a combination of contract and spot sales in the uranium business.

In addition, we are continuing to work on expanding our Phase 1 facilities. Recall Phase 1 is our uranium processing line that we recently, a couple of years ago, converted to process rare earth minerals. We're expanding our current capabilities in Phase 1, what we're calling Phase 1B, which will allow us to produce commercial quantities of terbium and dysprosium. And then we're adding Phase 1C, which will allow us to process MREC material. MREC is mixed rare earth carbonates, and that puts us into a different league. And the fantastic aspect of that is we'll be able to process rare earth minerals and uranium simultaneously with Phase 1C.

Finally, in the quarter -- right at the very end of the quarter...

[Technical Difficulty]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the operator, please remain connected.

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is your operator. I thank you for your patience. I believe we have Mr. Bhappu reconnected. Thank you all.

Thank you, Jim. And ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for that mishap. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I hope you can hear me now. I'd like to go back and start -- I don't know where we cut off. So I'm going to start back on our first quarter highlights.

By any measure, what I would say is Q1 2026 was a very good quarter for Energy Fuels, and I'm excited to tell you about it. From an operational perspective, we mined 425,000 pounds of uranium and produced nearly 800,000 pounds through the mill.

At the end of the quarter, we ended with 2.25 million pounds in inventory, and we released a very positive Vara Mada feasibility study. That study showed an NPV of $1.8 billion, and we're anticipating over $500 million per year of expected annual EBITDA. This takes Energy Fuels to a new level by any measure and is a game changer for us.

We also released the White Mesa Mill Phase 2 feasibility study. We were pleasantly surprised that our CapEx came in lower than anticipated at $410 million. The economics of that project are robust and provide for a $1.9 billion NPV. The IRR on that project is about a 33% rate of return. We expect EBITDA from that project from the Phase 2 to be about $311 million, and that's just on a standalone basis, not including taking into account the Vara Mada feed as well as other feed.

We produced our first terbium this quarter, which again is a game changer. It's being done at a pilot plant scale. We're producing about a kilogram per week, and we've gained incredible interest from all those announcements across the board. The other -- sorry, the other announcement, of course, was the announcement of the ASM acquisition, Australian Strategic Materials. ASM is a metal and alloy producer, rare earth metal and alloy producer, and that's a game changer. It helps block a choke point or open a choke point that exists in our sector for rare earths.

From a financial perspective, we have a robust balance sheet. We have $950 million of liquidity. We generated $8 million of operating cash flows last quarter in Q1. We had sales revenue from a combination of both contract and spot sales, and we like to keep a balance of both contract and spot sales, and that's worked well for us in the past.

In addition, we are working on a number of exciting opportunities in -- at least we started working on them in Q1. The first one is Phase 1B. Recall that Phase 1 of our mill is our uranium facility that we've converted to process rare earths. Today, we can only process either uranium or rare earths. We can't do them simultaneously. But we're trying to fix that.

And we're adding Phase 1B, which will allow us to produce heavies, both dysprosium and terbium. And we will also be able to produce other heavy minerals like samarium, europium, gadolinium and possibly yttrium depending on market conditions. Phase 1C will allow us to process MREC material. MREC is a product coming from ionic clays and that will allow us to process both uranium ores as well as rare earth ores simultaneously, which we can't do today.

Also, I'd like to just highlight that at the end of the quarter, we published our sustainability report. It's a fabulous demonstration of what we're doing in the sustainability area. And I'd encourage you to take the time to have a look at that report. It's on our website.

For those of you that are new to Energy Fuels, new investors, I'd like to take you through a little bit of background on our capabilities. Energy Fuels started its life as a uranium company. We've been in the uranium business for over 45 years in various forms. And we built that uranium capability through mining and processing at our White Mesa Mill.

Given that expertise, we took that on and we carried that over to rare earth minerals. Now recall that all rare earth elements, all rare earth minerals contain some level of either uranium or thorium. They're all radioactive to some extent. Our knowledge and expertise in the uranium business has allowed us to be a leader in the processing of those rare earth minerals.

The mineral of choice for us is monazite. Monazite is a byproduct from heavy mineral sands. And that's allowed us to get into the heavy mineral sands business, and we've put our foot on and own 3 heavy mineral sands operations plus another mining operation called Dubbo with the ASM acquisition. So I'll talk about monazite and why it's our mineral of choice here in a few minutes.

While the 3 areas, those 3 sectors look quite disparate, they're actually quite -- they flow quite well together. And the thing they have in common is that they all contain radioactive components. And that's really what creates Energy Fuels the company today.

So when we look at a global footprint of where we are with Energy Fuels, on the far left side, the dark blue dots and highlights represent our uranium business. In the middle of the left side, the yellow box, that's our White Mesa Mill that really brings everything together and allows us to do everything else that we're doing.

Across the bottom of the page, the red boxes represent our heavy mineral sands opportunities and projects. Those will be not only producing titanium and zirconium products, but they'll also provide us the monazite that we will feed into the facility in White Mesa, our mill here in Utah.

And then with the addition of ASM, we now have an operating metallization facility located in Korea, and we're planning to replicate that facility with an American metals plant here in the United States. So very much a global footprint, very much a growth story and very much of an exciting story for critical minerals here in the U.S.

Carrying this over now to our uranium highlights. Recall that Energy Fuels is the largest producer of uranium. We mined 425,000 pounds from both La Sal and Pinyon Plain last year -- sorry, this last quarter. Last year, we produced 1.7 million pounds from those 2 mines. The White Mesa Mill produced about 800,000 pounds in Q1. And to date, we're about 1.2 million pounds of uranium from the White Mesa Mill. We continue to build a strategic base of uranium, and we sell opportunistically into the spot market. But then, of course, we also have a long-term set of long-term contracts that we're feeding into.

The U.S. is heavily reliant on export -- on imports of uranium, and we're trying to help solve that problem. It still amazes me that we're taking uranium ore from -- or uranium material from Russia. I know that's going to end soon, but we'd like to be a part of solving that. When we look at the market trend for uranium, you can't help but be excited about what's happening in the nuclear energy space and the need for more uranium.

So we'll continue to offer uranium on both the balance of contract and spot sales. The older contracts are set to expire over the next few years. Recall, those are lower-priced contracts, but those allowed us to get into business a few years ago or get -- restart our uranium operations a few years ago. And the new contracts will continue to have price floors and ceilings. So we're excited about the opportunities there.

When we go to the next page, the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah, the White Mesa Mill really makes everything possible for us at Energy Fuels. It's truly a national treasure by any means -- by any measure. It's 45 years old, but it's using state-of-the-art technology and equipment for processing not only uranium but rare earth minerals. We're often asked what it would take to replicate that facility, and it's hard to put a price tag on it because it's not easily replicable, mainly due to challenges with permitting, but the time constraints to replicate that facility would be very, very expensive.

The dual commodity processing of both rare earths and uranium, I think, is unmatched in the Western world. And the history of uranium processing really provides us with an incredible track record for processing not only uranium but the rare earth feedstock. We are the only facility in the United States that can commercially process monazite at that mill.

When we look at our rare earth highlights, we are building a truly fully integrated mine to alloy supplier of critical minerals. We plan through the acquisition of ASM to capture value across the supply chain, and we're not beholden to any other part of the chain by having this self-reliance of the vertical integration. We have a fabulous team at the White Mesa Mill, and we're actively producing heavy minerals at the pilot plant that we've been sending out for validation.

As mentioned previously, we are preparing to expand Phase 1, and that includes Phase 1B, which will allow us to process terbium and dysprosium. Phase 1C will allow us to produce and process MREC. MREC, as I mentioned before, it comes from ionic clays and it's a valuable source of rare earth minerals that we're going to be excited to be able to produce both uranium and rare earths simultaneously.

Then we have Phase 2. And Phase 2, we're in the permitting process. We hope to have those permits by the end of next year. When fully commissioned, we'll be able to process and produce over 6,000 tons per year of NdPr. So we will truly be a substantial supplier of rare earths.

So the question we often get is why monazite? And what we like about monazite is it offers a number of benefits. First of all, it's a very high-grade source of rare earth minerals. It typically contains 50% to 60% total rare earth minerals contained, but it's high in neodymium and praseodymium. And equally, it's high in dysprosium and terbium. So those are very attractive.

In addition, it also contains uranium, which we recover and sell as a byproduct of the rare earth processing. So monazite has a lot of benefits. The other benefit is as a byproduct of heavy mineral sands, the production costs can be shared across a number of different commodities. And again, the White Mesa Mill is the only facility in the U.S. that can process that commercially.

So we did the acquisition. We announced the acquisition on January 20 of Australian Strategic Materials, ASM. ASM really provides a unique opportunity for Energy Fuels. Outside of China, there are very few rare earth metallization factories and ASM has a commercial operating facility in Korea. The vertical integration that this allows from mine to alloys provides a tremendous competitive advantage, including expanded margins, greater market share, and it's resulted in a very positive comments and views from our offtakers.

The acquisition is progressing very well. We recently obtained our FIRB approval. FIRB is the Foreign Investment Review Board equivalent to CFIUS here in the U.S., and that approval was an important part of that process. We're targeting closing that transaction in early July. And again, it's progressing quite well.

On the heavy mineral sand side of the business, heavy mineral sands, again, is a really important product. It allows us to obtain the monazite as a byproduct. But heavy mineral sands contain titanium, zirconium minerals. Those are used across a wide range of industrial applications, including pigments, metals, ceramics, chemicals, refractories, foundries and nuclear applications. Energy Fuels has 3 heavy mineral sands projects. And with the ASM acquisition, we'll hold an important polymetallic operation as well.

The Vara Mada Project is our project in Madagascar. We're advancing that. We're working towards obtaining a government stability agreement, also called an investment agreement. That work has been underway for some time. But with the change in government recently, we've had a little bit of a delay getting that investment agreement signed. But we continue to have very good engagement with the government in Madagascar, and we're looking forward to progressing that as we go through the balance of this year.

The Donald Project is a project in Australia, where we're earning a 49% joint venture ownership. Donald is shovel-ready. It's a project that has obtained all of its permits. We are looking to make a final investment decision here in the next few months. I think the one thing that's holding us back is we're finalizing our financing and offtake agreements. But we're making very good progress and hope to be able to announce that FID fairly soon.

The Bahia Project is a 100% owned project in the state of Bahia in Brazil. We're conducting drilling there. We will hope to have a scoping study or a PFS done later this year. And then finally, we have the Dubbo Project, which comes from the ASM acquisition. Dubbo is not a heavy mineral sands project. It's a polymetallic project, but it's got very high critical minerals grades in it, and we hope to have that provide further feedstock to the White Mesa Mill in the future.

The next slide is an interesting slide because it shows just how global we are and especially in delivering the rare earth minerals to the White Mesa Mill. So again, we have our 3 heavy mineral sands projects that will supply monazite, one in Australia, one in Brazil and one in Africa and Madagascar. Those supply the monazite feedstock to the White Mesa Mill.

White Mesa Mill will then process those rare earth minerals, produce oxides. The oxides will then go to either Korea or once we build our facility in the U.S. for metallization, it will go there and be processed in the U.S. From there, it gets sold to magnet manufacturers and to the end producers. So we truly are a global company and excited about our opportunities there.

So with that, I'd like to hand this off to Nate. Nate Bennett is our CFO, and he's going to talk a little bit about the financials for the quarter.

Yes. Thank you, Ross, and good morning, everyone. As we look at the financial updates for Q1 2026, if you can go to the next slide. We continue to maintain a strong financial position as we prepare to develop our long-term projects. We finished with $957 million in working capital and $1.4 billion in total assets.

This working capital continues to reflect the $621 million in net proceeds received from our convertible note offering that we completed last year in the fourth quarter that we have yet to draw down on. The working capital also includes 2.2 million pounds of uranium, which about half is in finished inventories and the other half is in process or in ore piles. Now this liquidity gives us the financial flexibility to advance our strategic projects and be opportunistic as the market evolves and deliver on our guidance.

Looking at the P&L, we continue to see improvement in our net loss with a net loss of $11 million in Q1 2026. This compares to a net loss of $26 million in the prior year Q1 2025 and a net loss of $21 million in last quarter, Q4 2025. Now this improvement is due to the increase in our uranium revenue and sales and also an increase in income from our marketable securities from invested cash.

And this is partially offset by higher operating costs and transaction costs, as you see in the P&L as we progress our global strategy. Now looking at our -- noting our guidance, we do anticipate uranium sales to continue throughout the year to help offset our burn rate as we progress our projects and our strategy.

Looking at our segment footnote in footnote 19 of the 10-Q, we did note that our uranium segment has shown promising results as we begin to be profitable, and we expect this trend towards profitability to continue in our uranium segment. As we look at our revenue and our sales, we took advantage of spot price increases during the quarter, we sold 100,000 pounds at an average price of $95.88. And looking at our long-term utility contracts, as forecasted, we sold 410,000 pounds at just under $64 a pound. We expected these sales at this price as it relates to some of our initial long-term agreements entered into back in 2022 and 2023. And we entered into these agreements when uranium prices were beginning to increase. And these contracts really supported the decision to go forward with mining on Pinyon Plain and our La Sal complex.

Now looking at our uranium production and moving forward throughout the year. For Pinyon Plain, we mined 375,000 pounds with an average grade of 1.12%, which was from a lower ore grade area as our mining moves between high-grade zones. Now these ore grade fluctuations are expected as we mine different segments of the ore deposit, and we expect these ore grades to increase throughout 2026. This is anticipated these ore grade fluctuations and were contemplated in our mining production guidance.

And looking at the mill, in accordance with our guidance, we continued processing Pinyon Plain and La Sal ore through Q1. We processed over 800,000 pounds, as Ross has noted through March, and we reached the 1 million pound milestone for the year during April. These are really exciting results as the last 2 quarters have really shown the mill's capabilities, which have been above expectations, having not run at these levels in many years.

Our all-in costs for mining, transportation and processing continue to be within our expected range of $23 to $30 per pound, and we expect this to continue throughout the rest of the year. We also expect processing at the mill to continue throughout 2026, but we do note that it will -- we will pause processing for planned maintenance downtime scheduled at the end of Q2 and the beginning of Q3. As the mill -- and we do know as the mill processes ore at a faster rate than we can mine, the downtime will really allow the mine production to catch up with the mill processing and replenish our ore piles at the mill. And we do expect our mill processing to continue to be within our guidance of 1.5 million to 2.5 million pounds for the year.

Now looking at our inventory and our cost. We continue to see a decline in our inventory cost as we produce low-cost Pinyon Plain pounds, decreasing to $36 a pound at the end of the quarter. This decrease is expected and we continue to see this -- we expect to continue to see this decrease as we mine throughout the rest of the year at Pinyon Plain. And we note our cost of goods sold, we expect it to decrease to closer to $30 per pound throughout 2026 as we sell through our inventory and add low-cost Pinyon Plain production. And this will really help improve our gross margins and our profitability in our uranium segment.

Looking at our inventory, we finished with 1.1 million pounds at $36 a pound with another 1.1 million pounds in process and ready to be processed. This really gives us the sufficient inventory to meet our processing and sales guidance and to meet our long-term utility contract commitments for the remainder of 2026 and the first part of 2027.

Now just giving an update on the guidance. As noted in our previous slides, we do continue to anticipate to be within our guidance ranges. Starting with mining, we mined 425,000 pounds between our Pinyon Plain and La Sal complex. We'll continue to mine during the downtime at the mill that's planned to replenish the ore piles at the mill. And we expect our ore grades and pounds at Pinyon to increase as we move into higher-grade zones.

Looking at the processing at the mill, like I noted before, we hit our processing milestone of over 1 million pounds during April, and we're starting to near the bottom end of the range by the end of Q2. And we expect to be within the range anticipated even with the planned maintenance downtime.

And now looking at the sales guidance, we sold 510,000 pounds during Q1. We expect sales to continue and to be in line with our guidance with both sales under our long-term contracts and spot sales depending on the market conditions.

And with that, I'll turn it back over to Ross for some final thoughts on our 2026 activities.

Thank you, Nate. Well, look, I'd just like to finish our presentation by talking about some of our objectives for the balance of 2026. For me, it's all about execution. We have an incredible asset base, incredible mines to develop incredible facility at White Mesa, but now it's all about execution. So what we're going to be focused on is our Phase 2 permitting. We're going to focus on Phase 1B and 1C, get that construction going and finalized. We hope to be operational on Phase 1B and 1C late in '27.

We hope to make our Donald FID very soon. We're very heavily focused on that. We're going to continue to advance our Vara Mada Project, both on the engineering side, but also on the investment agreement, government relations side. We have a big social outreach program, big focus on the communities there that will continue. We're going to continue advancing our drilling and our engineering work at the Bahia Project. And finally, I would say that a big focus of mine is for our company to operate safely and in a sustainable way. Again, I'd encourage you to have a look at our Sustainability Report that we just released. I think you'll find it very impressive.

So look, I'm really proud of what this team has accomplished in the first quarter. I'm excited to be taking the helm of the company and moving it forward through the rest of '26 and beyond and very excited for what we have going forward.

So with that, I'd like to end our formal presentation, and I think we're going to open it. I'll turn it back over to Jim for questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions] We'll hear first from Anthony Taglieri at Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe just starting with the uranium side of things. Just curious, how much finished inventory are you guys interested in maintaining? Obviously, we saw you guys sell 100,000 pounds in Q1 on the spot market, close to $100 a pound. Should we expect you guys to sell up to the high end of the sales guidance range if prices came back to around those levels?

Yes. Look, Anthony, I think, first of all, we have to maintain sufficient inventory to meet our contractual obligations. So first and foremost, I'd say that's a driver.

The other area -- the other way I would answer this is that we want to maintain some optionality where we can switch the mill over from processing uranium to processing rare earths depending on market conditions. So it's a bit of a balance. And when you look at our guidance, we have pretty high ranges of uranium sales. And it's largely because of that, because we want to maintain enough inventory to feed our contractual obligations. We want to have some going into the spot market, but we also want optionality and flexibility to transfer the mill operations from uranium to rare earths at any point in time.

So it's a great point, but we'll continue to process uranium as heavily as we can. When we see prices going over $100 like they did earlier this year, we'll certainly take advantage of that. And again, longer term, we do see uranium prices escalating. And again, we want to maintain some optionality around that. So it's a bit of a balance, and I'd say it's a bit of an art, but that's pretty much why we're going the direction we are.

Great. And maybe just as a follow-up to that. So in the first quarter, you sold about half of your long-term sales commitments for the year, it seems. Should we expect the sort of remaining portion of that to come in the second quarter? Or will it be staged differently throughout the year?

Look, I think it will be staged throughout the year. Again, we have big contractual obligations in the first quarter, and we'll be meeting those contractual obligations through the balance of the year. But there were some pretty big sales that came as a result of our contract -- one of our big contracts. But yes, I anticipate we'll smooth that out through the balance of the year, the balance of those sales.

Our next question will come from Soundarya Iyer at B. Riley Securities.

Congratulations on the quarter. My first question is on the -- is basically like rare earth companies as a standalone are trading meaningfully at higher multiples rather than diversified miners. Do you guys think about as this rare earth business scales when Donald, ASM, Vara Mada, all this comes together about spinning the rare earth business out and operating it as 2 distinct businesses like rare earth and uranium?

Yes. It's an interesting issue, right, because rare earth companies do trade at high multiples, uranium companies trade at a bit lower multiples, and then heavy mineral sands companies trade at even lower multiples. Look, our view is that we want to be integrated across those 3 sectors. It's vitally important from a technical perspective and from a commercial perspective that we control our own feedstocks.

And so when I think about it, Soundarya, I think remaining and being in the business, if we're going to be a monazite processing company, if we're going to be an MREC processing company, I think we want to control our own molecules. So spinning out the heavy mineral sand side of the business, I think, is something we might consider in the future. But right now, it's so important as a source of feedstock for us, and we want to be in control of it.

So I think I'll leave it to you and other analysts to figure out how to value us. But at the end of the day, I think that the bulk of our revenue, as I look at it going forward, will come from rare earths. We will have continuing revenue from uranium, and we will be ramping up revenue from heavy mineral sands. And so how you weight those across to come up with our valuation, I think we'll just have to sort of live with. But I would be hesitant to want to give up control over the feedstock going into our mill.

That's very clear, Ross. And just as on another line, how are you reading the uranium market right now? I mean prices have been really strong and holding up about the $80 a pound threshold. Are you seeing any utility customers signaling like urgency or to lock in domestic supply? Or is the contracting still moving slowly?

Yes, it's an interesting question. I think you certainly see all the headlines of different companies in the SMR business, for example, that some amazing future projections for selling SMRs. And the only way they're going to feed those SMRs is with uranium, right? So -- but we haven't seen the utilities ramping up their buying schedules yet. I'm fully expecting that we will see that. I'm confident that we're going to see much more focus on ensuring that they have supplies of uranium going forward. But I -- to the best of my knowledge, we haven't really seen a huge increase in demand or discussions from the utilities to date.

But look, I fully expect that's going to change. When you look at the projected demand, every research group out there that studies uranium and the nuclear industry shows that the supply and demand balance is going to start coming out of whack in the next few years, and you're just going to need more uranium. So look, I remain very, very bullish on uranium personally. And we talk about it internally here quite a lot.

Our next question will come from Brian Lee at Goldman Sachs.

Maybe I wanted to dig into the comments around Vara Mada, a little bit of a delay there. Can you elaborate a bit as to how much of a delay, what sort of needs to happen for you to maybe get that back on track? Any kind of milestones or triggers moving through the year that you could point to that might improve the visibility there? Just trying to gauge where you are in that process.

So let me just start by saying that the change in government that happened in September, October of last year really slowed the process down. We are very close to signing an investment agreement around that time. But with the change in government, that sort of slowed things down. We have been spending considerable time in country in Madagascar. And I'm joined here with Nathan Longenecker, who's our General Counsel and who's been personally spending a lot of time in Madagascar. So let me let him answer that as well.

Yes. We've been -- we continue to try to push it forward. What we have is a government that is relatively new, but we have been meeting fairly regularly with the highest levels of the government. And our discussions with them have been met with a fair bit of support from the highest levels. So the government has been supportive of the project, but there are a number of things that we need to get into place. And there's -- it's a bit of a -- the document itself has a lot of aspects to it and it takes a little bit of time to get that put into place. So that's generally where we are working with the government.

Okay. Yes. Fair enough. We'll continue to track the progress. I guess related to that, just any updated thoughts around sourcing monazite in the open market as you're waiting for some of these upstream assets to move to final investment decisions and also move to production? It seems like monazite pricing has come down a decent amount here recently, but any thoughts around maybe using that as more of a bridge to getting your assets online?

Yes, Brian, absolutely. We're going to need to source monazite. We have 3 sources internally of monazite. We also have an agreement with Chemours to source monazite from them. But look, to keep Phase 2, the expansion at White Mesa full, we are going to need additional sources, a small amount, but we will need some additional sources. So we've got a very active business development and partnership group out there searching and in discussions with a whole host of different suppliers of monazite. I think those groups that are in production today, they're selling their monazite almost exclusively into China. And those Western companies that are doing that are looking for alternative outlets to sell their monazite. So we have a lot of discussions going on with a lot of different groups, and we will have additional sources of monazite to feed our mill.

Next, we'll hear from Justin Chan at SCP Resource Finance.

My first one was just on the uranium processing side. I know there's some -- you could run a longer processing campaign or shift it over to rare earths or et cetera. So there's some choices there. I was just wondering what's your current thinking in terms of how long you intend to process uranium for.

Yes. Look, I think, first of all, the mill operates at a higher rate than our mines produce ore. So the mill will always outrun the mines, at least for now. And we're at a point where we're going to be able to process ore for probably another 4 to 6 weeks. Then we're going to shut down for maintenance and do some modifications to the mill, and that will allow us to build some of our uranium stockpiles up. And then we'll have to make a choice as to whether we restart with uranium or we -- or whether we restart with rare earths.

And a lot of that depends on market conditions. So we're -- as you can see, we're over 1 million pounds that we've processed so far this year. And we'll just have to make a decision as to whether we feel comfortable with stockpiled uranium or whether we want to continue producing versus producing rare earths. So look, I fully anticipate that we'll get through the next, call it, month, 1.5 months. We'll shut down for probably a couple of months for maintenance and then make a decision on whether we're going to start back up with rare earths or with uranium depending on market conditions.

Got you. I mean, I guess if nothing changes from now, I guess, how would that influence your thinking? Like what directionally would you be leading based on current conditions?

Yes. If nothing changes, we would probably start back up with uranium processing and continue our uranium processing through the balance of the year.

Okay. Got you. That's very clear. And then my second...

And look -- go ahead. Go ahead, Justin.

Sorry, go ahead. Please finish that statement. Sorry to interrupt.

Well, look, I was just going to say Phase 1C will really give us optionality to process rare earth minerals alongside uranium. Now Phase 1C is going to be geared towards processing MREC materials. But once we get that up and running, hopefully next year, that will allow us to not have to decide between processing rare earths or processing uranium, and we can do both simultaneously, albeit from MREC material. So that's why we're very heavily focused through the balance of this year on being able to process MREC next year.

Got you. That makes sense. So I guess, yes, maybe let's dig into that, if you wouldn't mind hearing me on that. So I guess you'll have your own separation lines and you won't need to like use the same tanks and everything for 1C. I guess to get the MREC, would you be receiving it from third parties? Or could you -- I guess you could presumably make your own MREC stockpiles at some point? Is that the thinking? Or is it mainly just source from ionic clay deposits?

Yes. It would be primarily sourced from ionic clays. Early on, when we did run the mill, we did produce an MREC material at our own facility from monazite. But we don't anticipate doing that going forward. We will likely source from third parties. And there's a number of third parties out there looking for a home for their MREC. So we think we could help fill that void.

Got you. And then if I could ask on, I guess, the longer term, when you do have your own dedicated rare earth processing lines and you're processing monazite, would you still retain the capacity to receive additional MRE for ionic clay?

Yes, absolutely.

Or does that create a blending issue?

No, no, no. This separate facility that we're building, this 1C will allow us to continue to process MREC in addition to processing monazite through Phase 2. So we will always maintain that capability to process MREC along with monazite.

Okay. Maybe just one last one as a follow-up to that. I know it's a bit of a leading question, but with that capacity, does that change your strategic thinking at all in terms of having your own potential upstream ionic clay feed? I mean you don't currently in the portfolio. I'm just thinking here that could maybe change your -- what your upstream asset base might look like in the long run?

Yes. Look, the way I would answer that is I would say we're always going to be opportunistic. And if there's an opportunity to acquire an ionic clay and MREC producer, we would certainly consider that if it made sense.

Next, we will hear from Noel Parks at Tuohy Brothers.

I just wanted to touch back on Donald. And I just wondered if you could give a sense of what remains on sort of finalizing the offtake agreement out there, which in turn will help get to the FID?

So yes, good to talk to you, Noel, and thanks for the question. So a couple of things. The Donald Project is going to produce a heavy mineral sand -- heavy mineral concentrate as well as monazite. So there's 2 separate offtake agreements that we need to finalize. One is on the heavy mineral concentrate. And then the second one is on the various -- it's not just one rare earth mineral, it's going to be 4, maybe more minerals that we get out of it. So coordinating offtake agreements across all those different commodities is time consuming. And unfortunately, it's taken longer than we had anticipated. And those -- once you get those offtake agreements locked in, then that impacts your financing. So they go hand in hand, and we're having discussions with various financing parties as well as offtake parties, and they're very different. They're different groups, and you got to coordinate between them.

And so it's created a challenge. And then that's also compounded on the fact that we have a joint venture partner. So we're partners with Astron, and we need to make sure that the financing agreements that we enter into, the offtake agreements that we enter into also are agreeable and meet with the needs of our JV partner. So what -- from the outside looks like it should be a fairly easy process to go through. It's actually quite complex and quite time-consuming. And unfortunately, it's delayed us being able to make that FID more quickly. But look, Noel, I would say we're very heavily focused. We want to get the FID as quickly as we possibly can. We want that mine to get up and running as quickly as we possibly can. So it's at the top of our mind every day.

Great. That does fill in some gaps for me. And in the past, we've talked a bit about just how on the rare earths, the -- what the market wants has been sort of changing and evolving, I guess, over the past year or so and that that's informed to some degree, your decisions about just which of the products you're pursuing and in what order at the mill. So I wonder if you could just maybe update us a bit on maybe how you see demand shifting for the particular elements going forward?

Look, I think what you're hearing in the market about demand shifting has more to do with what people are producing. I think what we're seeing is there continues to be very heavy demand for dysprosium and terbium. Now I mean, the fact is not everybody can produce dysprosium and terbium. I think magnet manufacturers are trying to design magnets that reduce the reliance on dysprosium and terbium, but by no means have they solved that puzzle yet. And so there remains big demand for DY and TV in these magnets. And I think that's going to continue for the foreseeable future.

So when I look at what we're doing at the mill, I think we want to be able to produce the whole suite of heavies. And that's not just dysprosium and terbium, it includes samarium, gadolinium, europium, yttrium because there is demand out there for those minerals. You take yttrium, for example, the demand and the request we're getting out of the aerospace industry is, is off the charts. So look, I think we're going to continue to see very heavy demand for the heavies. But I also think you're going to continue to see groups trying to design the heavies out of the system.

And just to add to that, the thing that the heavies add is the ability for these electric motors to operate at very high temperatures. And they haven't been able to figure out how to do that without the heavy minerals, the heavy rare earth minerals in there. So look, I think there's some wishful thinking in there. And perhaps that will happen at some point in the future. But up till now, we're not seeing -- we're seeing a lot of requests from potential offtakers on the DYMTB side of the equation.

And next, we'll hear from Matthew Key at Texas Capital.

I was wondering what market indications would you need to see to move ahead with some of those medium-term uranium projects? As you mentioned previously, mined ore is kind of the main bottleneck in the uranium segment. Would it be economic at current uranium spot pricing to bring a couple of those online?

Your question is really timely because we just had a meeting on this yesterday talking about our pipeline of projects and prioritizing those projects. Look, I think current prices, you start to consider bringing some of those online. And I guess one of the questions you always have is where is this pricing going to go? And if we see prices well over $100 a pound, which we anticipate we will at some point, that brings a lot of the pipeline into a real opportunity.

So at these prices, we're pretty happy with what we have operating. We have La Sal and Pinyon Plain operating. We have Nichols Ranch on standby. And I think our view is we ought to -- we will continue to permit the development projects. We'll continue to advance those projects and be ready to put them into production as soon as we feel like there's a long-term sustainable price above a certain threshold. And that threshold varies by project. But we do have this pipeline, and we will look to bring them online as prices permit. So look, it's something that's very topical. And I'm sorry, I can't give you like a hard number that over x dollars will bring this project into production, but we are thinking about that every day.

Got it. No, that's helpful. And just kind of on the back of that, I'm wondering if you would ever consider selling Nichols Ranch as an ISR project, it's obviously a lot different than the conventional portfolio. Like do you see that as a potential area where you could generate some incremental liquidity down the line? Or is the plan there to eventually develop that?

You're talking about Nichols Ranch? To be clear?

Yes.

Yes. Look, if you're making an offer to buy it, we'll certainly think about that. But we're -- look, we're pretty excited by Nichols Ranch. We love having the fact that it's ready. It's on standby. It's ready to be put into production. We could get it up and running probably in 4 to 6 months if we pull the trigger on it. So we like having that optionality. That doesn't mean if we didn't get a great offer for it, we wouldn't consider that. So -- but we like the optionality we have with it today.

Got it. No, that's helpful. And just one more quick one for me. While I understand the ASM transaction hasn't closed yet, I did want to ask a quick question on the Dubbo Project and what the plan would be for that asset if the acquisition closed, which is kind of my assumption. But could that be used as feedstock for White Mesa? Or would it have to operate more as a standalone project for you guys?

Yes. That's really a great question because it's not a heavy mineral sands project. It's a polymetallic project with high critical minerals credits like niobium, but also the rare earth minerals. The current plan from ASM is to use that -- to do a heap leach on that project and to do sort of semi processing to produce a rare earth hydroxide that would then come to the White Mesa Mill for treatment at White Mesa. That was driven to a large extent by capital cost considerations of ASM versus building a mill and producing more of a concentrate.

So we want to go back -- after we close on the transaction, we want to go back and look at those engineering studies make sure we agree with the path that ASM was going down or maybe not and then evaluate what is the best alternative for getting value out of Dubbo because it does have -- like I said, it has a whole host of other minerals in it, again, like niobium that would be a really interesting product or mineral to produce. But we just have to evaluate it and see what makes the most sense. But right now, they're planning to produce a hydroxide that we would then bring to White Mesa, and we could process in the White Mesa Mill, much like an MREC material.

And we have no further questions from our audience this morning. Mr. Bhappu, I'm happy to turn the floor back over to you for any initial or closing remarks you have.

Well, look, I would just say thank you to everybody for participating. This is my first earnings call as the new CEO, and I'm excited to be in this role and excited to take the company forward. And I just ask you to keep a watch on our company because we've got a lot of exciting things happening. So thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's Energy Fuels Q1 2026 Conference Call. We thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines. Have a great day.

Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Annual Earnings Conference Call and webcast. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels. Sir, the floor is yours.

Okay. Well, thank you, Morgan. And again, my name is Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels. Thank you for joining the call today to discuss our financial and operational results for year ending December 31, and 2025.

2025 was truly a breakout year for Energy Fuels. We achieved numerous operational ramp-up growth milestones, and we believe set the stage for significant future cash flow generation, market differentiation and competitive advantages in the critical materials space. We also believe that we are showing the market that we have the financial, technical commercial capabilities to execute our aggressive plans. I'm just going to touch on a few highlights.

In short, we exceeded guidance on all fronts in 2025. Not many in the uranium space can say that. And we even upgraded our guidance during the course of the year, and we beat that guidance. We mined newly mined ore over 1.7 million pounds of uranium. And we processed over 1 million-ounce of finished [ U308 ]. And it's important to note that there's a bit of a lead lag between when we mine and we process. So really, the processing has to catch up with the amount of uranium we mine and we also started ramping up our sales volumes.

Looking to 2026, we plan to materially increase uranium mining production and sales. We made remarkable progress on our rare earth segment, including pilot production at dysprosium and soon-to-be terbium oxides and announced plans to expand our commercial heavy production in mid-2027. Our NDPR and [ DI ] products have been qualified for use by major automobile manufacturers and some of that product has gone into electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles as we speak.

We received all government approvals for the development of our [ Donald ] joint venture project in Australia. We completed feasibility studies for the Phase II expansion of the rare earth processing at our mill in Utah and the Vara Mada project, which was formerly called [ Tolar ], critical minerals projects and demonstrated that the combined net present value of those 2 projects could be in the order of $3.7 billion.

We significantly bolstered our balance sheet by completing an upsized $700 million convertible note at 7.75% coupon rate back in October. And at the end of the year, we had nearly $1 billion of working capital and the company has never been stronger financially. In short, 2025 was an extremely productive year and really, Energy Fuels has solidified its position as the largest and lowest-cost U.S. uranium producer and emerging large-scale, low-cost rare earth and critical mineral producer.

So joining me today on this call and presenting will be Ross Bhappu, our President; Nate Bennett, our CFO; and also Curtis Moore, our Senior VP of Marketing, Corporate Development; and Nathan Longenecker, our Senior VP and General Counsel. Following the presentation, our conference call will have replays that will be available on our website. And as always, there will be time for questions at the end of the presentation.

So let's get going. So I know every time I do a conference call, I start off with this slide and comment how beautiful it is down in San Juan County, and again, I love it. So -- but as I said from the beginning, and as I said for multiple calls, we're building a globally significant critical materials company and are continuing to make great strides.

Slide 2, I may be making some forward-looking statements, and those are included on Page 2. So again, when you look at our company, our company based in the U.S. has built a very significant critical mineral company on the foundation of our core uranium business. Uranium, we are the leading producer of uranium in the United States, the rare earths, which also contain uranium that can be processed at the White Mesa Mill and the heavy mineral sands would provide us a source of rare earth feeds that we can process at the mill and they all have a common denominator, which is the contain natural uranium that again, we can recover at the White Mesa Mill, and that is a significant differentiator.

This slide, and this slide is getting pretty busy. I don't think anybody can say that Energy Fuels is not an asset-rich company. And I think that would be a real understatement. And so when you look at the world and you look at the number of uranium and vanadium deposits that we have in the Western U.S., several of them are producing, several of them are permitted, and we're ramping up our production of our uranium assets. And then in addition to that, when you look at the heavy mineral sands projects that we have, both [ Donald ], Vara Mada and Bahia, in Brazil, Madagascar and Australia. It's getting to be quite an impressive list.

And I think when you look at the past few years, when we're acquiring projects around the world, it couldn't be better timing. In addition, look at the proposed assets with the acquisition of ASM in Australia. That's -- we have a scheme document that we're executing as we speak. We hope to close by June of 2026. But also in addition to these mining properties and deposits that we've secured would have the Korean metal plant in South Korea, the Dubbo project, which is another source of feed in New South Wales, Australia and also potentially a metals plant in the United States, which we call the [ AMP ].

So the list is getting long. And what's really exciting is when people ask us how we're going to fund this, we've been able to demonstrate in 2025, the great strides that we've made along that path, and we hope to have more updates in this year on how we're going to continue to move forward with this very aggressive strategy that is well funded.

So this next slide just sort of highlights, how we can take the uranium ores that we have that are currently producing or will be producing in the not-too-distant future, how we can process those through the White Mesa Mill and come up with uranium and vanadium and potentially medical isotopes. Well then, on the other hand, when we secure the [indiscernible] that we will get from these heavy mineral sands projects and including from [ Chemours ] in Florida and Georgia.

We can stop producing uranium, and we can start producing rare earth in the current mill which we call Phase 1, and that is the dual facility can do uranium or the rare earth. But when you go over to the far right and you see this list of the end products, we have the capability of commercially producing at least 10 critical materials or minerals, and that can expand based on the markets that are available to us at the time that we need to produce things. So it's a very impressive list, and I've said this many times that many companies in the critical minerals space are dependent on one element and Energy Fuels is not. And we've seen the advantages of that, when you look at -- if you have a high uranium market or low uranium market, same thing on vanadium, rare earth and/or some of the titanium zircon markets, they can fluctuate quite materially.

So 2025 was absolutely a breakout year, and I'll provide some of the highlights. We are producing more uranium than any U.S. company today in the United States and it's interesting because even a year or 2 ago, people thought we were getting out of the uranium business, and guess what, we haven't. And we're actually beating everybody in the United States and a number of companies around the world that are trying to restart the uranium production. Uranium mining, and we've been focused in '25 and '26, mainly on conventional production from the La Sal complex and the Pinyon Plain mine we produced over 1.7 million pounds, as I previously mentioned, at an average grade Pinyon of 1.6%, and those grades are continuing.

The White Mesa mill produced about 1 million pounds or process 1 million pounds of finished product, and that was really driven on the amount of time that the mill ran. And we really went through a processing run in Q4 of 2025, and we expect to continue that processing through Q2 of 2026 or longer. And we can produce about 250,000 pounds per month on average, but in December alone, we produced 350,000 pounds of uranium. So it really shows the capability of the White Mesa Mill depending on when it's running and what feeds we have.

When you look at the uranium inventories, at the end of December, we had over 2 million pounds of total inventories. And a lot of that was made up of uranium contained in raw ore and raw materials that will be processed this year or later, but including over 800,000 pounds of finished uranium and over 100,000 pounds of work in progress. So what does this all mean in terms of cost? It means that our costs are dropping materially. And we still are on course to have production costs and actually the current production costs at Pinyon Plain are in that $23 to $30 a pound. We're seeing our cost of goods sold, decreasing from $53 a pound to currently at the end of 2025 or $43 a pound. And as Pinyon Plain ore is processed in mind, those costs will continue to drop.

So we currently have 6 long-term contracts. We added a couple contracts late last year. And those contracts combined equal about 50% of our uranium production capabilities. So we are definitely not over contracted, but we definitely have enough contracts to give us a base load, which is required. You cannot run a company with just no contracts and trying to depend on the spot market. So we're really excited about where we are there.

In '25, we sold 650,000 pounds at an average price of $74.20 per pound. We're seeing stronger fundamentals when it comes to uranium prices, long-term prices and the growth of uranium demand looking out to the future.

So this will be the last slide I'll talk about at the moment before I turn it over to Ross. The White Mesa Mill is truly a remarkable asset. We've taken a uranium vanadium project and turned it into a critical mineral hub. And we see that as a very unique accomplishment over the last few years. It is the only operating conventional uranium mill in the United States. It is the largest uranium processing facility in the United States, fully licensed, permitted producing license capacity of 8 million pounds, and we have the operational and expertise to both process the uranium, the rare earth and the [indiscernible].

It is the only facility that can process what we call alternate feeds. It is the largest primary vanadium production facility, and we're getting a lot of additional inbounds now on our vanadium production capabilities, and it is the only facility in the U.S. with the ability to process monocyte and that is a material differentiator. So now I would like to turn it over to my good colleague, Ross to talk further about company's activities.

Great. Thank you, Mark. Look, as Mark said, the White Mesa Mill, it's the jewel in the crown of our portfolio. It is -- it's the only operating conventional mill for processing uranium, but it's also got the capability of processing commercial quantities of monocyte producing meaningful amounts of DPR.

We can -- we have a current capacity of 1,000 tonnes per annum of [ NDPR ], but we can also process some [ Arium ] concentrates, [ Merian Plus concentrate ]. So the heavies. We've demonstrated the use of our NDPR in various applications. Most importantly, it's been qualified and validated. It's even in some operating electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles coming out of Asia. So it's an exciting aspect of our business.

Late last year, we reported that we produced 29 kilograms of dysprosium oxides, and that's been validated by rare permanent magnet manufacturers as well. Next month, we plan to produce our first kilogram of terbium oxide and then following that, we plan to produce pilot circuits for both samarium, europium, as well as gadolinium oxides. So we're doing some incredible things at the White Mesa Mill and it's a credit to our incredible team that we have on the ground there.

This year, we're working on our Phase 1 expansion, and that's going to allow us to produce commercial quantities of both mid- and heavy RE oxides. That again includes dysprosium, terbium, samarium, europium, and gadolinium. We also could possibly produce [ atrium ]. We're planning to install equipment this year that will allow us to produce and process [ MREC ] material, mixed rare earth carbonates.

As you can see, we have not only an incredible facility there, but we have an incredible team of scientists and engineers that are allowing us to do some truly groundbreaking work at the mill. Just a few weeks ago, we released the feasibility study of our Phase 2 expansion at the mill. This is separate from the Phase 1 expansion that I was talking about just a minute ago. This Phase 2 expansion is going to allow us to process up to 50,000 tons of additional [ monazite ]. That will allow us a capacity of 5,500 roughly tons per annum of [ PR ] plus approximately 50 tonnes per annum of terbium and another 165 tons per annum of dysprosium.

Phase 2 is going to allow for a dedicated rare earth circuit that will be separate from uranium, so we can simultaneously produce both uranium and rare earth minerals. And we've already applied for our permits for this expansion. And we're hoping to get those permits sometime next year with planned commissioning in late 2028 or early 2029.

Just some highlights. It's a pretty impressive feasibility study that the results of the feasibility study include about a $1.9 billion NPV. That equates to almost $8 per share. We have a 33% IRR on the project, will generate over $300 million a year of EBITDA over the first 15 years and all that's being done with a CapEx of only $410 million.

With the inclusion of feedstock of our [ monazite ] from the Vara Mada project, that feed will result in [ NDPR ] costs of under $30 per kilogram, truly revolutionary and making us competitive anywhere in the world, including China. One of the interesting things that we are seeing is the trend in rare earth oxide prices.

This slide shows the oxide prices for NDPR for dysprosium and for terbium. These are the non-Chinese prices and it's interesting that there's a slight premium for the prices outside of China for [ NDP ]. But when you look at the [ DY ] and [ TV ] prices, there's over 400% premium to the Chinese prices. At our projected Phase 2 volumes and at these prices will generate almost $1.2 billion per year of annual revenue. So truly remarkable for our company.

As Mark mentioned, we've got a proposed acquisition of our strategic materials, ASM. In January, we announced this acquisition, and we're making good progress. Again, as Mark mentioned, we're hoping to close on that acquisition in June. It's a great acquisition for our shareholders, for our customers and for national security.

For our shareholders, it provides enhanced margin capture, it's accretive on an NAV per share basis, it accelerates our ambition to become a mine to metal and alloys producer and it positions us to capitalize on reshoring of U.S. manufacturing with a strong customer base. For our customers, it significantly expands our product capabilities. We'll be the lowest cost producer and have ability to deliver oxides metals or alloys depending on customer needs.

The company has a proven track record and an ability to meet Western demand, and it's already got a number of top-tier customers acquiring or treating their metals and alloys. From a national security perspective, we'll be able to deliver ex China supply chain. We'll have unmatched technical capabilities in solvent extraction and metal and allay making and the vertical integration allows us and support supply chain resilience with 100% U.S. controlled supplies. It's also an additional source of rare feedstock from our double projects in Australia, as Mark mentioned earlier.

So this next slide kind of shows how it all fits together. With the ASM acquisition, we created a near-term mine to metal and alloy supply chain. We now have 4 owned or controlled mining assets, including the [ Donald ] project and the Dubbo project, both in Australia the Bahia project in Brazil and of course, our Vara Mada project in Madagascar. All of these supply high-quality rare earth speed to the White Mesa Mill [indiscernible], Utah and all of the rare earth oxides from the mill will supply feed for either the existing Korean metals plant that we'll be acquiring from ASM or to our new newly planned American metals plant where we will produce metals and alloys here in the United States.

As you can see, we're truly a global rare supplier that's 100% U.S. controlled. I'd like to get a little more detail now on the Korean metals plant that we're acquiring. This slide provides a pretty good summary of what the capabilities are at that facility. It's located in the [ Chang ] foreign investment zone in South Korea, and it has a current capacity of 1,300 tonnes per annum of neodymium [ iron Boron Alloy ] plus [indiscernible] metal.

Today, it has 4 furnaces and 1 strip testing machine, but we've got a Phase 2 plant expansion that will include 18 furnaces and 2 strip casters. That will give us about 3,600 tonnes per annum of neodymium [ boron alloy ] manufacturing capability. We're planning to expand our product mix by producing heavy rare earth metals and alloys, including [indiscernible] metal and [ TV ] metal in the future. And then for even going beyond that, we have a Phase 3 plant expansion, which takes us to 30 furnaces with 3 script casters and that gets us to a capacity of 5,600 tonnes per year of [ neodymium iron born alloy ].

Our [ A&P ] facility will replicate what we have in Korea, and it will give us the ability to produce all these metals right here in the United States. We currently have sales and offtake partnerships with vacuum [ Schmeltbac ] with [ Neo Performance Materials ] and with [ Novion ]. So you can see that the relationships are with the very top-tier producers of magnets and we're very, very happy to be acquiring this asset.

The [ Donald ] project is our shovel-ready project. It's the first mine that will supply heavy and light rare earth minerals to our White Mesa Mill. It's in Australia, we're getting very close to making a final investment decision perhaps as early as the end of March. This project provides exceptional sources of heavy rare earth oxides and it will provide feedstock to White Mesa by 2027 -- late 2027 or perhaps early 2028.

The attractiveness of the [ Donald ] project, there's the very high levels of dysprosium, terbium and samarium. It's also in a great jurisdiction. The project is fully permitted. And as I said, it's shovel ready. I think most people are aware of this product -- project, it is in a joint venture with [ Aston ]. We are earning a 49% interest in the project, but importantly, we're going to receive 100% of the rare earth offtake. Projects received conditional support from the government of Australia through Export Finance Australia and total funding required for the project is about USD 340 million.

The final slide I'm going to talk about is Vara Mada, which we used to call [ Toliara]. It's our heavy mineral sands and rare earth project in Madagascar. In January, we released the feasibility study results and it's truly one of the largest and highest grade heavy mineral sands and rare earth projects in the world. It will produce titanium products that include [ rutile, ilmenite ] as well as zircon and it will produce high-quality monocyte that gets fed to the White Mesa mill. Again, very attractive project economics. It's got a $1.8 billion NPV, a 25% IRR. CapEx of just under $800 million and EBITDA generation of about $500 million per year.

The mine has a 38-year life but there's additional resources there that we haven't put in the reserve category. It's got the potential to go well over 100 years. So it's truly a world-class project, and we're currently working now to convert our MOU to an investment agreement so that we can advance that project. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Nathan Bennett, and he'll talk about our financials for the year.

Thank you, Ross, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with our balance sheet and liquidity, followed by a discussion of our financial performance for the fiscal year '25. So we ended the year in a very strong financial position as we prepare to develop our long-term projects, finishing with $1.4 billion in total assets.

Our working capital was $927 million which includes $862 million of combined cash and marketable securities with the majority of our marketable securities being excess cash invested in highly liquid interest-bearing securities. This also reflects the $621 million in net proceeds received from the convertible note offering completed at the beginning of the fourth quarter. This liquidity and profile provides substantial flexibility to fund ongoing operations, advance our strategic projects and remain opportunistic as market conditions evolve.

Now turning over to the income statement. For the year, we reported a net loss of $86 million or $0.38 per share compared to a net loss of $47 million or $0.28 per share in fiscal 2024. Now this year-over-year increase in net loss was anticipated and primarily reflects higher ongoing costs with the expansion of our global operations following the acquisition of [ Base Resources ] in the fourth quarter of 2024 as well as continued investment in our core projects.

Specifically, we incurred approximately $15 million higher ongoing SG&A expenses, largely driven by our expanded workforce to support the execution of our global strategy. In addition, exploration and development expenses included an increase of $9 million as we advanced priority projects across our portfolio, including the Juniper zone at Pinyon Plain, La Sal, Bahia and delineation drilling at Nichols Ranch. It also included an increase of $7 million in noncash write-downs related to changes in tax laws and exploration projects that we're no longer pursuing.

Finally, market conditions also impacted the results. The average month-end uranium spot prices were approximately 13.8% lower in 2025 compared to 2024, which reduced our revenue per pound and our gross margin percentage, which was 31% in 2025. We did increase uranium sales year-over-year by 200,000 pounds to 650,000 pounds, which was an $11.8 million increase in uranium revenue year-over-year.

Now as we continue to mine and process ore at the mill and increased uranium sales throughout 2026, we expect our gross margin to increase to 50% and above as our finished inventory weighted average cost continues to decrease from $43 per pound to the low 30s and as uranium prices continue to strengthen during 2026.

Now turning to the next slide. I will briefly touch on our $700 million convertible note offering that was highly successful, being oversubscribed by more than 7 times and closed at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Now without going through all the details of the terms, I just wanted to mention that overall offering places us in a strong financial position to fund our expansions of the White Mesa Mill and our [ Donald ] project joint venture and doing it with very low-cost debt. Now with that, I'll turn it back over to Mark, who will discuss our 2025 and 2026 guidance.

All right. Thanks, Nate. Look, as I've mentioned earlier, we're really excited that we exceeded guidance for mine uranium process uranium and sales of uranium in 2025. And I think it would be very rare for a uranium company to do that. And really, it's because we have experience of producing uranium. It was a transition year for us because we were ramping up back into commercially raining production. And that kind of leads us into our guidance for 2026.

And you can see that our projected guidance for mind uranium is increasing materially from 2 million -- to a low of 2 million to 2.5 million pounds. And I know that for a lot of time, I've been telling people that our first goal is to get to 2 million pounds of production and then go and increase from there. The process uranium also increasing materially from 1.5 million pounds to 2.5 million pounds, and that really is just a function of how long we run the White Mesa Mill.

I talked about the mill produces about 250,000 pounds per month. So you can see that if we ran for, say, 10 months, we would get to the 2.5 million pounds and I also highlighted that we did 350,000 pounds in December of 2025. And then on sales pounds, we'll have the ability -- well, we certainly have the ability with the process and finished goods to cover all our contracts and also figure out where we're going to find home for those residual pounds, but we can also keep them in inventory, we can also sell them or go into other long-term contracts.

So it is materially changing our cost of goods sold is going to decrease as we ramp up the production, and we still are focused on basically using our uranium business of fund a lot of the company's expenditures going forward over the next several years while we build out this world's significant critical mineral company.

So before we go to questions, I just want to talk a bit about CEO transition. And I just want -- and I'm going to tag team this with Ross. So Ross, you just jump in wherever, but I want to just tell people that, that succession plan is proceeding as expected. We've had this in place over the last couple of years. Ross has anticipated to become the President. While he's the President and current President, he's worked with us for 7 months and to become CEO in April and I will be retiring.

But I plan to stay around as a consultant exclusively to help Ross and excited about that. I'll never really -- I mean, it may be shifting from a full-time role to a consulting role, but I'm not retiring as professional because I still want to give more, but I also want to spend more time in Australia in the coming years. So Ross, I don't know if you want to --

Yes. Look, I just want to express my gratitude to Mark. He's -- when I look at where this company has come from over the last -- well, 10 years, but really over the last couple of years, you think about it being a single product, single jurisdiction sort of company to now very much a global company with over $5 billion market cap.

It's a tremendous credit to Mark and his leadership that we've been able to grow. And we've been able to do it without taking on debt and we've been able to do it with limited resources to grow this company into a truly world-class company with amazing assets. But the other part of it is the team. Mark has been incredibly successful at putting a team together that has been able to execute to this stage. So it's an exciting company, exciting time but it's a tremendous credit to Mark and his leadership in getting us to where we are today. So thank you, Mark. Looking forward to continue to work with you.

Yes. Thank you, Ross. And we are building that team out even further. I mean, with our office here in Denver, Lakewood, in Australia, in Perth in some of these operations around the world, we're able to attract some remarkable people to grow with the company and I can say this that we have an aggressive strategy that we're not slowing down.

We're not slowing down. There are not enough hours in the day. People are calling us. People are watching this. I was at the BMO conference in Florida earlier this week, and it is amazing how many people are watching energy fuels and they see the progress we're making. So anyways, I'll stop on that note and open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Brian Lee with Goldman Sachs.

I guess, first off, Mark will we'll miss your leadership, Ross, looking forward to working with you closely going forward. But as you think about the projects and having put them kind of in position to ramp up here over the next few years. Kudos to you guys for all the work through this point. I guess the question I had would just be around the time lines. Has anything shifted on your heavy mineral sands projects?

I know looking through the deck and you guys have some of the most detailed decks out there. it looks like some of the time lines may have shifted out a little bit. I don't know if that's a more updated view or if that's something that -- it sounds like you may have expressed earlier this month in an updated corporate deck. But can you just kind of talk about what's happening with the project time lines for heavy mineral sands projects and if there's any significant drivers of the updated views on kind of maybe pushing out the time lines of [indiscernible]?

Yes. Look, the [indiscernible] project is our shovel-ready project. I mean, really, the focus there is coming to a final investment decision on that. We're very, very buoyed that the timing of a shovel-ready project like [ Donald ] with the -- particularly the heavies in addition to lights is really optimal, and it's very important for not just the company but for the United States of America and the world in general.

So yes, it shifted a little bit, but we're very confident that we're very close to making a decision there. We still got to look at sort of the final numbers and looking at homes for the product is produced there. Vara Mada, we're still making significant progress with the government. We've had meetings even this week with the Madagascar government.

We've been working with the communities and kind of rebranding that project. But we're really taking maybe a little slower in the fact that we want to make sure that, that project has all, certainly the permits, but also the social license to operate because it's an exceptional extraordinary project, but we're -- we couldn't be more excited about it because it's a game changer in the whole rare earth business. Bahia, we're making progress there with coming up with a resource there. And then you got Dubbo now, another one in the queue. So Ross, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

No. Look, I completely agree with what Mark has said. I think Vara Mada maybe slowed down by a quarter with the change in government. With this government we've met with, as Mark said this week, and they are -- they seem to be very supportive of and recognize the value that a project like that brings to the country. So yes. No, I think we're progressing pretty well on all fronts there, Brian.

Okay. That's great. I appreciate the color. And then, I guess, in terms of timing, [ Donald ], like you said, shovel ready, it doesn't sound like anything is really shifting out there. So is the time line still for FID here? In the early part of '26 and then deliveries in late '27, any kind of updated thoughts around the time line for getting volume out of that project?

Yes. That's still the time line. And as we said, it's a very important first major step for us in the rare earth space. And to put it into context that the expected heavies from the [ Donald ] project is equivalent to about 25% of the U.S. requirements, and that's the first phase and the second phase could be up to 50% of the heavies required for the United States.

So yes, we're on that time line. We've been doing things behind the scenes to make sure that we can maintain that time line, but we've got to just look at the final numbers and make a decision at board level on how we proceed.

Okay. Great. Last one for me, and I'll pass it on. Mark, you mentioned you've obviously got a very unique asset, and you just alluded to the fact that you could represent a significant percentage of the heavies for the U.S. with [ Project Vault ] having been officially announced recently, what is your discussions with your government contacts? How have they evolved? Sort of where do you sit in the positioning of potentially having some sort of government support or offtake given that heavy is exposure in your asset mix?

Look, everyone in the critical minerals space is spending a lot of time in D.C. and including energy fuels, I can't go into too much detail, but I can say one thing. When people look at the number of assets that we've acquired and how we're advancing, it's getting noticed by everyone around the world. End users, upstream, downstream, midstream and with these the Australian government and the U.S. government.

So I mean, I think that the differentiator for us is the quantum of -- scale of what we put together. I mean I think a lot of people are used to small little fragments in the business, and we don't have fragments. When you look at the potential acquisition of ASM with -- through alloys and you look at the multiple projects, it's a good look for the right reasons. Let's leave it at that. And Ross, I don't know if you have anything to add.

No, I think -- well, I would just say that I think -- yes, the attraction for us is that we have a real facility. We have the White Mesa Mill that you can go out. You can see -- we have bags of [ DPR ] that are sitting there. We have [ monocyte ] on the ground there. We are for real. And I think that's caught the attention of a lot of people. And so we're hoping that we'll continue to progress in that area. But nothing definitive on that end yet, Brian.

Yes. One other comment, Brian, but it's not just the rare earths. People are looking at our uranium production and our vanadium production. So there really isn't anybody else that they can compare to that has this multi-element really, everything we're doing is in the wheelhouse of the U.S. government and these OEMs and stuff in terms of how to reshore some of these elements and final products.

Yes, we're in a good spot, I think.

Your next question comes from [ Anthony Taglieri ] with Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe starting at White Mesa. Given your uranium production guidance of 1.5 million to 2.5 million pounds, what factors sort of drive the potential high end of that range, maybe producing for 10 months versus the low end around 6 months? And if you process uranium for 10 months in 2026, would you still switch over back to uranium in Q1 '27? Or could this be pushed back a bit?

Yes. The -- it's really a function of the run time of the mill, and we also have to be mining fast to because the mill is very hungry. When we're doing a uranium run, we really don't want to switch the mill on and off very much because once it gets to equilibrium, it perpetuates and you get the efficiencies of just continuous operations.

So I mean, one of the things that we've -- and we've talked about the Phase 1, we have what we call Phase 1b and Phase 1c that will allow us to commercially produce both the lights and heavies in 2027. So we've always given ourselves some flexibility that we can shift the mill to rare earth run, if need be, and we're trying to -- what we are showing the world that we have that flexibility. So I would say it's really a function of the critical mass in maximizing the economics of running longer, if required. So we're just giving ourselves some maneuvering room there in that regard.

Okay. Great. Understood. Maybe switching gears a bit. So with your '26 uranium sales guidance, there's obviously some room there for some spot sales. We all know where spot prices are right now, around $87, $80 amount. Are we at levels where you guys would consider selling more into the spot market? Or do you want to see prices reach a certain threshold before you do that? Could the decision to sell more or less on the spot market, be tied to a potential strategic uranium reserves. We talked about [ Project Volt ] earlier. Maybe some color there would be great.

Yes. I mean we certainly don't want to sell a significant amount of uranium at low prices on the spot, and we really haven't. I mean if the prices go low, we're a buyer. Prices go high. That helps us with our contract pricing because of the formulas and 5 out of the 6 contracts that we have. And so we always want to try to time spot sales when it makes the most sense. So we have sold a bit under 80, like 77, 70 a little bit here and there, but we're always targeting higher prices.

So right now, I still believe that the true replacement value on a pound of uranium is still in excess of where the spot is right now and we always keep that in mind if we do make itself. But I also think that companies need to show they're building the revenue and they're moving towards profitability and so we're not just going to not sell uranium just because we're not happy with the price.

If we've got a margin on it, and we do have a material margin when you look at our production costs, we want to keep growing our revenue, our profitability and reducing the burn as we build out the rest of our strategy. So -- and we're in a unique position with the ability to use this uranium business to provide a material bridge for the next few years.

Yes, I would just add Anthony, when you look at the long-term supply and demand fundamentals, you can't help but be pretty bullish on uranium, and so we're trying to maintain good optionality between our spot and our term contracts that give us that optionality to play it if it does go stronger, like we think it will.

Your next question comes from Heiko Ihle with HC Wainwright.

Mark, congratulations on your retirement and on that same token, Ross, congratulations on your appointment here. Mark's done a wonderful job with the [ Farm Ross ], and I actually just looked this morning and we initiated coverage of the company. On June 29, 2015, with a $6.30 price target. So that's [ 10.5].

We've come a long way.

I was a little bit hesitant to ask this question on a public call, but I just can't help myself. The firm has changed so much since then. And presumably, with the near-term appointment of you, some changes will be in the area. And I assume that most of these changes are going to be minor given how well the old company and air quotes has done. But do you want to just give us a touch of color on your expectations for the company going forward? Maybe things that are not as obvious in press releases or in guidance or anything along the lines of that you think you're going to bring your expertise and maybe change things around just the touch?

Sorry. Yes. Heiko, I'm letting Ross answer that question.

So -- yes, it's a great question. Look, when you look at our growth plans, they're pretty ambitious. We're going to have 4 major construction projects going on simultaneously. So I think the key is we're going to have some significant additions to the team that are around execution in multiple geographies. So it's really setting the company up for execution success with some very diverse geographically and commodity projects. So it's all about execution going forward and ensuring that we have the right additions to the team.

Fair. And then just on guidance, and you sort of hinted at this in the prepared remarks. You're building off of a good year. But I mean the 2.5 million pound, can you go through some of the factors that could get you all the way to 2.5 million? You mentioned earlier in the prepared remarks that it's obviously dependent on the mill. But besides that, anything that we should be looking out for in our models, please?

Look, I think it's -- we're getting Pinyon Plain into more of a routine when it comes to the mining rates. So we're very confident that we can be in that range or even beat it potentially. And the same thing is happening at La Sal. We've got miners and trained a lot of miners because one of our impediments was getting miners know how to mine conventionally. So -- but at the same time, we'll have -- we're win.

We're planning to do more work to get it back up and into production, actually first time, it's never been in production in 2026. It would be in 2027. The same thing with [ Energy Queen ]. We're still doing drilling and looking at when to start up [ Nichols Ranch ] in Wyoming. So it's really with the conventional mining, it's really about having more work areas, more miners, and we can ramp up accordingly. So it's pretty low risk for us right now when it comes to getting there. And also, what you're seeing, Heiko, is that we're mining more than we typically plan to either process or sell.

So we plan to be building inventories that are quite material. And those inventories, particularly the unprocessed uranium can be turned into finished goods pretty quickly with the mill restart or if the mill is running at the time. So we have a lot of flexibility others won't have, and we plan to use that to [indiscernible].

Your next question comes from Noel Parks with Tuohy Brothers Investment Research.

Just on a couple of things. The additional oxides you're going to be pursuing in Phase 1 that you announced last night. Is it -- is that essentially sort of the Phase 1c that you've been mentioning late last year?

Yes. I mean, one of the things that we're doing with our Phase 1, which is the existing constructed and operable rare earth [ SX ] circuit is we're adding what we call 1B, and I know it gets a little confusing because we've got a lot of Phase 1s and 2s but we've got Phase 1bs and Cs. So the Phase 1b is to allow us to take the [ SMS ], which is [ Submarine Plus ], is really heaviest concentrate and go ahead and separate out the [ DYTB ] and some of these other rare earth as well. And so we see that as a real differentiator to have a commercial plant in the United States that have it quicker, faster than others.

The ones really kind of emerged last year, mid late last year. And it is really focused on being able to take MRC. And that is sort of an intermediate product that could come from either other cracked and leach monocyte, but it also could come from potentially [indiscernible] or other sources, which will allow us to maximize the usage of that Phase 1 infrastructure for the rare earths, both for lights and heavies with 1B for the heavy separation and 1c for an [indiscernible].

It's really giving significant flexibility quicker, faster. And when we talk to people, whether it's the OEMs or government agencies, they want fast and 1b is something that we see as fast and quick. Now looking to Phase II, which should be approved in '27 going into construction '27 with a FID decision that will be scaled up about 5x greater and it will be the more permanent facility even though we're planning to continue to have that 1B and 1C for the long haul.

Great. And I just wanted to ask about the progress with -- or toward closing of ASM. And any updates you can give on that? And I was wondering -- do you know specific South Korean regulatory approval for the plant there and also, I mean, for the sale of the plant there? And also, just wondering if you have any ballpark on the capital requirements for the future phases of the Korea plant?

I'll answer some of it, but also have Ross jump in. We have a scheme document that we're executing that was signed by ASM. And again, we're planning to close June of this year. We have to get a firm approval, which is foreign investment review board in Australia. We had to do the same thing for base resources. So the good news is we've gone through the scheme process recently in Australia.

We still got to get shareholder vote. We've got to get all the various other approvals in the jurisdictions that they have assets in. So we're advancing that. Ross, do you want to add on things like capital or approvals?

So yes, I should have mentioned the Phase 2 is already funded for ASM. So that's adding the 18 different additional furnaces in the strip additional strip caster. So that is already budgeted and funded. Yes. And then going forward, if we do Phase 3, we don't have numbers around that just yet. But they're relatively modest numbers. I think the key time line, as Mark mentioned, is really getting the FIRB approval and the scheme document approved by the shareholders in Australia. So it's something we've done recently with the Base acquisition, and I think we're pretty familiar with the process there.

Your next question comes from Joseph Reagor with ROTH Capital Partners.

I think most of the mine have already been answered, but a couple of small things. I guess on the uranium sales guidance, what's the breakdown there between existing contracts and spot sales for this year? And then if you guys can give any color on what we should expect for pricing either over the remaining, call it, 3.5 million you have under contract or just for 2026 to those contract panels?

Yes. Look, at this one, I'm going to flip to Curtis because he's on the call here, and he's in charge of our uranium sales, but go ahead, Curtis.

Sure. Glad to hear from you. So we have -- this year, I believe the number was about 650,000 to 80,000 pounds of total contract sales, of which we've already done some here in Q1. So that's the number. And that range, offered some flex on those contracts.

These were some of our first contracts that we signed back in 2022 that where we had to offer some flex in order to get those contracts in place. But keeping in mind as well as those contracts enable us to get the Pinyon Plain mine going, which, of course, is the largest, lowest outline in the United States today.

So yes, the rest would theoretically be on spot midterm, maybe there's sold on the core price curve or something like that this year. And again, we're not going to -- the price drops, as Mark said, we're probably going to be buyers of uranium to replenish inventories. But I'd say we're likely to be price-sensitive to sellers.

Okay. And can you give any color on what the contract pricing is kind of set around either for this year or if you are more comfortable just over the remainder of the book?

Yes. We haven't put any guidance out on that, Joe. If you look at our contract pricing from the last couple of years, that's a pretty good indication of where the prices are for our first sort of tranche of contracts. We have 3 contracts, 3 were signed kind of in early to mid-2022. And we got a little better pricing on those contracts than what was reported at the time, but they weren't high priced contracts.

And the base -- and the fixed price component on those contracts, they're hybrid contracts. It has been escalating with inflation. But then we've signed 3 more contracts here in the last 18 months or so, which obviously has some higher prices. And so we still have those 2022 contracts that we're delivering into this year. But we also have, I believe it's one of the more recent contracts that has deliveries this year.

So I think you're going to probably hopefully see our contract pricing increased throughout the year, though Q1 is likely to have a little lower because that's when we had, again, one of our other 2022 contracts come into place. And so we made a delivery there. But that one will be done for the year. So you'll see Q1 come out, but then it will probably start going up pretty significantly after that.

But I will say this, it will be in the 70-plus okay. And depending on how uranium prices are, you can go into 80s. So -- but it's not in the 60s, Joe. A lot of people have 60s, and we're not in the 60s.

Okay. That's very helpful. And then you guys also provided updated reserves and resources with the K. It looks like numbers went up a little bit. Can you kind of talk through what some of the gains were from? Was there some just stuff that came into resource because of higher pricing or any other revisions? I know Pinyon was a big part of it, but just overall.

Yes. I don't have my geologist here. He's in transit on a plane, I think. But looking at Pinyon, when you look at Pinyon originally, and that's -- at least right now, that's the one that's generating cash flow. The original estimate on the what we call the [ Upper Zone Main Zone ] was like 1.6 million pounds. And this most recent estimate, they increased that 2, threefold greater on the main zone. And it's really hard.

And what's interesting is that main zone that the [ SLR ] did the estimate on was the most drilled out zone I've ever seen in my entire career and they're off by an order of 2 or 3 or greater. So it's hard to really get what I can -- I believe is accurate estimates, particularly in the Juniper zone. But so what we're seeing is we saw the substantial increase in the main zone, substantial grade, the grade was almost double.

So that was one of the reasons that it was off so much as a great but higher and in the Juniper, we have an area in the Juniper, which is 600 feet, and we're currently mining the top 200 feet, which is above that. So it's 800 feet of total area to mine and I see a lot of exploration potential in the Juniper zone.

We already know that we have some very, very high-grade intercepts in the Juniper zone, but it doesn't have a lot of drilling particularly 200, 300 feet below the Juniper zone is very open ended. So it's going to be kind of a work in progress. I've worked at a couple of mines over my career that had 1 year of resource or reserve, and it just went and went and went. We know that Pinyon Plain isn't going to go for 20 years, but I feel very optimistic it's going to go for a number of years and going to really materially keep our costs very low because of the grades.

Your next question comes from [ Matthew Key ] with Texas Capital.

I want to drill down a little bit on the 2026 guide on [ MIND U308 ]. I was wondering if you could provide maybe an asset breakdown on that total particularly as it relates to Pinyon Plain? Should we be expecting a similar run rate in we saw in late 2025? Obviously, that mix would be important just as we kind of model out costs. So just trying to get a sense of the breakdown there.

Yes. Look, we -- we're pretty comfortable with Pinyon Plain on its own. We'll do at least 2 million pounds plus just as Pinyon Plain. And so the residual of that would be made up from the La Sal complex, which is currently 2 mines. And so we do have another mine at La Sal that we're looking at refurbishing and start up and then we have the world in mind.

So the bulk of the pounds are coming from Pinyon Plain. But it's also interesting to note that the La Sal complex right now all we're doing is recovering the uranium. We're not recurring to vanadium. And vanadium is about 5x the grade of the uranium. And if the price of vanadium keeps going up, we may start talking about recovery in the vanadium and getting another byproduct that drives our cost down even further on the La Sal complex in our uranium vanadium mine.

So what I think you can see is that we're comfortable with that range with probably Pinyon being around $2 million plus in the La Sal complex topping that up. And then you can see that with [ Energy Queen ], [indiscernible] and even [ Nichols Ranch ]. You can see where it's really quite possible we can get up towards 3 million pounds if we elect to. And again, this is 3 million pounds with limited capital.

We don't need a lot of capital. We need basically working capital to get there. But you could also -- if the price of an [ ADM ] starts continues to increase, you could see us getting a credit for vanadium production as well. which can drive cost down a lot because it's significant when the price is up.

Got it. No, that's super helpful. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about the medium-term projects there as well. What market signals would you need to see to make that go-ahead decision on [ Nichols Ranch ] and [ whirlwind ]? Would you say it's likely those assets come online sometime in 2027? And if you could just remind me just at a high level, the CapEx requirements to kind of bring online those medium-term uranium projects?

Yes. I think it's very high probability in 2027 that [indiscernible] comes on as well, [ Energy clean ]. And really, depending on your aim prices, [ Nichols Ranch ]. So I mean, the capital cost, I mean, if you look at [indiscernible] and you look at [ Energy Queen ], I mean, it's like $5 million, $10 million each. It's very, very small. When you look at [ Nichols branch ], it's really about putting in the well fields and you're probably talking $25 million or something and thereabouts for [ Nichols Ranch ].

And most of that capital is going into the well field, which is really the mining process, okay? So you put that -- those wells in and then you attract uranium. So between all 3 of them, it's really small compared to others. But I do think very high profitability that a couple of more conventional mines come on and [ Nichols Ranch ] I think, is a very good probability it could come on.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I will now turn the conference back over to Mark Chalmers for any closing remarks.

No, thank you, everyone, who are listening in and ask questions. I think in closing, we've -- and I've always said this, that we've had an aggressive but not reckless strategy. We want to keep a strong balance sheet. We need good people to advance the strategy. We're working on that and we're really getting a lot of attention globally and it's really been a pleasure to be a part of this over the last 10 years.

I plan to continue to be available to work with Ross and the others because I've spent a fair amount of time with a lot of these assets over the years, but I'm really excited. And there's more to come. There is so much going on. I don't want investors to think like we've reached some peak because we're still driving this company to become a $10 billion-plus company, and I'm just looking forward to not working 7 days a week and having a little bit more time to have more fun, go skiing, spend time with my grandkids and family, friends, which over the last 10 years has been a little bit short supply. So Ross, do you want to say anything else to that? Or ...

Well, again, I'd just reiterate that Mark is going to be on a 2-year contract going forward, and I fully intend to utilizes expertise. He brings such an incredible wealth of knowledge. But look, the company is set up for just incredible success, incredible continued growth. To Mark's point, we have a lot of exciting things on our plate right now and yes, excited for the future of this company.

Thank you for today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful rest of your day.

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" H.C. Wainwright & Co, LLC, Research Division

" ROTH Capital Partners, LLC, Research Division

" B. Riley Securities, Inc., Research Division

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Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Q3 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Mark Chalmers, CEO and Director. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Eric. And again, Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels. I want to thank everybody for joining our Q3 conference call today. And I can say with absolute confidence, the entire team continued to deliver on our promises this quarter, which is rather unusual in today's world when it comes to getting projects restarted in advance. Namely, we had increased sales, increased revenues. We continued our buildup of low-cost and increased our uranium production. So we're lowering our costs as we increase our uranium production. And we're setting the stage for increased gross margins in 2026, and the timing could not be better.

We're making remarkable progress on our rare earth segment, including heavy rare earth piloting and plans for commercial production. We've received a qualification for our NdPr production, which is going into major automobiles manufacturers as we speak. We received all government approvals for the development of our Donald joint venture project in Australia, which has significant heavies as well as NdPr. We received a conditional letter of support from Export Finance Australia, more commonly known as EFA, for up to AUD 80 million, and that's with respect to our senior debt project financing for the project. We also completed an upsized offering of a $700 million convertible note on very favorable terms. And post-quarter, we had a working capital balance approaching USD 1 billion.

As many of you understand, these accomplishments are not the norm for many in our sector because it is tough. It is tough to produce uranium. It is tough to produce heavy mineral sands, and it's tough to produce rare earths. And we are a company that is playing the long game. We've been doing that for a long period of time. We deliver on our promises. We have the right team with the right skills, and we have put the company in a unique position of all things, critical minerals, including uranium by design. Not an accident. We're capitalizing on our advantages, which are skills, infrastructure, permits, and capacity globally in all 3 of those sectors.

So just a reminder, there will be conference call replays or a replay, which will be on the website later today. And as always, as Eric mentioned, there will be time for questions at the end of the presentation.

New for today's call and for the presentation, I will have Ross R. Bhappu, our President; and Nate Bennett, our CFO, to discuss overall company finances, and Ross will be talking about the convert. And in addition to that, at the end of the presentation, both Nate, Ross, Dave Frydenlund, our Executive VP and Chief Legal Officer; as well as Nathan Longenecker, our Senior VP and General Counsel, will be available to answer any questions I am unable to answer. So let's get going.

Again, I always say this, I love this slide because we're building a globally significant critical mineral company in the U.S., and this picture is taken not far from the White Mesa Mill. Next slide.

I may be making some forward-looking statements. Those are included on Page 2 of this presentation. Next slide.

An investment in Energy Fuels is really these 3 investments that I discussed: the uranium, where we are the leading producer of uranium, lowest cost producer of uranium in the United States, the rare earths, which are rapidly emerging, globally significant, and the heavy mineral sands, which will provide the rare earth feeds, the monazite for our rare earth processing. And so basically, you get 3 companies in 1. We are focused and we build these 3 companies on how they fit together, Energy Fuels around the foundation of our core uranium business. And all of these materials contain naturally concentrations of uranium that are found alongside the minerals that occur with these minerals. Next slide.

We talk about the uranium mines. And as I mentioned, we're producing more uranium than any other company in the United States today. The Pinyon Plain mine in Arizona, which is in production and it's conventional. We're ramping up our production there. And it's got -- I believe it's the highest grade uranium mine in the history of the United States, and we're actively mining and shipping ore to the mill right now. That's going very, very well. And we'll be seeing and hearing more about that during this presentation as we ramp up the scale of the Pinyon Plain mine.

At the same time, the LaSalle complex, also conventional in production. That actually is the Pandora and LaSalle incline, but there are also several other mines along 11-mile trend in that area. And that mining is advancing, and we're doing additional work on other mines there that are being reactivated as the uranium business improves. Next slide.

So let's talk about uranium production moving forward. At the mill in Q4, we've commenced processing with the newly mined Pinyon Plain ore in this quarter, and that's the first uranium that has been produced at Pinyon Plain at the mill were actually processed at -- the Pinyon Plain ore processed at the mill. We expect to produce between 1.1 million to 1.4 million pounds of uranium to Q1 '26. That run could go longer. And when we run the mill, basically, we produce about 200,000 to 250,000 pounds per month for every month we run the mill.

At Pinyon Plain in Q3, we mined around 415,000 pounds of uranium at an average grade of 1.27%, that is a bit lower because we're mining kind of the upper part of the main zone, where the grades are lower. So that is all expected. Year-to-date, we've mined 1.15 million pounds of uranium at an average grade of 1.66%, and we expect to be mining over 2 million pounds per year at the Pinyon Plain Mine in 2026. Truck haulage has been an impediment earlier in the year, but I'm pleased to say that we have improved that significantly. We've been averaging about 250 trucks per month, and that is more than sufficient to get to about that 2 million-pound run rate for production, getting that ore to the mill.

The relationship with the Navajo Nation is going very well, and we've seen that turn out to be a significant positive for both Energy Fuels and the Navajo Nation. And we had a number of those from the Navajo Nation at our open house, which was held a month or so ago, and it was really pleasing to see how they've received the relationship and how we've been executing that relationship together.

Uranium cost of production cost of sales are expected to decline. We have previously mentioned that we believe the Pinyon Plain cost will be in that $23 to $30 per pound range as we ramp up production and as we process this material. We have existing inventory right now at the mill of 485,000 pounds, and that is currently at a cost of goods sold of around $50 to $55 per pound. And it's sort of a mixture of various feeds that we processed, including LaSalle, including some of the cleanup material that we've done, and alternate feeds. But as we start ramping up the Pinyon Plain run, we see those same -- the costs dropping pretty materially, should be in that $30 to $40 per pound range in Q1 of this '26 and lower as time progresses. Next slide.

So on the contract front, we still have 4 existing contracts. I believe that we are seeing a strengthening in desire for long-term contracts with utilities. In 2025, we have contracts for 300,000 pounds, of which we just in this last quarter, sold 140 into contract. And -- but those commitments are increasing in 2026, and they ramp up to 620,000 pounds to 880,000 pounds and could be higher in due course. We're looking at various spot and midterm sales for the additional uranium inventories that we have that will be greater than our contract sales, and we have a significant margin to benefit from that because we didn't overcontract where other companies have overcontracted and are having trouble meeting those commitments. But we're also looking at other long-term contracts in due course, and the terms just seem to improve as time progresses. And lastly, we have also received a small amount of ore from third-party miner in Colorado. Next slide.

So let's talk more -- a bit more about rare earths and heavy mineral sands highlights. We are becoming the leading rare earth producer in the United States, including heavies. I mentioned earlier that we have been getting our NdPr oxide validated by outside manufacturers and confirmation, particularly with POSCO, with that material or some of the surplus material going into the production of electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles. The piloting has been going exceptionally well. We have recovered around nearly 30 kilograms of Dy oxide, 99.9% pure and that's through September of '25, and we're getting ready to start piloting Tb later this year.

We're also -- based on the results that we have from the piloting, we are expecting to advance commercial production of heavies later in 2026, and that in itself is a major milestone to pull that off, where we'll be able to commercially recover Dy Tb and perhaps other elements like Samarium through that circuit. Phase 2 feasibility study at the mill is progressing very well. We expect to have that completed towards the end of the year. And the design of that facility, given sufficient feed, would be up to 6,000 tons of NdPr oxide, 275 tons per annum of Dy, 80 tons per annum of Tb, and potentially other rare earth oxides. So that in itself is world significant by every measure, and it is approximately the same quantums as Lynas is in Australia and Malaysia. Next slide.

And I've used this slide and talked about this slide before, but monazite is our structural advantage. It is simply a superior rare earth concentrate, super high grades, more NdPr, more heavies, more mid and heavy rare earth oxides. It's a low-cost byproduct of HMS mining. We get the uranium credit. It's easier to process if you have the facilities that can receive the radionuclides and high recoveries. You can see the existing SX circuit in the mill building that recovers the rare earth lights, and you can see the bulky bags. And what we're planning to do is to include a circuit in that building or very close to that building for recovery of the heavies with the commercial facility. So we're the only facility in the U.S. that has the ability to process monazite into lights and heavy oxides. Next slide.

So let's talk a bit about the Donald project in Australia. It is shovel-ready and is an exceptional source of heavy rare earth oxides. We expect that potentially as early as Q1 of '26 that we will be in a position to make a final investment decision, a FID, and potentially have monazite deliveries from the Donald project by late 2027. As I mentioned, has exceptional high concentration of the heavy oxides, the Dy, Tb, and Samarium and others, and it is allied country and friendly jurisdiction. It is a joint venture with Astron, where we're earning our 49% JV interest. But we will receive 100% of the monazite.

I mentioned the conditional support from EFA for project development financing, and the total capital cost of that project is approximately USD 340 million. And Energy Fuels has agreed to fund approximately the first $120 million. And after that, that will be split between the joint venture. Next slide.

Now this is an interesting one showing that at the design capacity of Phase 2, in the capacity at the White Mesa Mill and reflecting on the current rare earth oxide prices, particularly those prices that are outside of China, where NdPr prices are -- have increased 13% over September of 2025 and then looking at the prices outside of China in the European Union for dysposium and terbium, which are all at premiums to the China prices and you look at the production capacity of the rare earth oxides at Phase 2, you can do some simple math there, and that's about $1 billion if you achieve those prices in those production quantities. So it is very, very material. Next slide.

Talk about Toliara, heavy mineral sands, and rare earths and Madagascar. It's economically robust and scalable. It is a large-scale operation. It is a high-grade heavy mineral sand deposit. We believe, and many others do and agree that it is considered one of the best heavy mineral sand deposits undeveloped in the world and includes the significant byproduct of rare earth monazite. It's very simple from a mining perspective and tailings perspective, technically straightforward, exceptional project economics. We plan to provide an updated feasibility study by the end of 2025. It has a long project life. There has been some unrest in the country, and a new government is in the process of being appointed. And while the outcomes are not fully known, initial indications are that the new government is pro-economic development. So it's been a little choppy there, but things are starting to settle down, and we're just basically adjusting our plans as prudent as that settles down.

We do have people in country that are resident in country that are still working on the project. As a matter of fact, we are still working on the project. And so this work is ongoing. And I believe that Toliara is a company maker. And when you look at when we acquired Toliara, we acquired it because we believed it was a company maker. And I think our time is coming in due course to have this contribute materially to the company going forward. Next slide.

Again, you've seen this timeline, and it really hasn't materially changed. There's been a few additions where we've added the rare earth processing of heavies with the Phase 1, also the uranium production ramping up at that 2 million pounds plus over those time horizons and looking at both the Bahia project, the Donald project, the Toliara project, the material we received from Chemours and potentially others that basically position us in the same quantum as Lynas going forward. So we're still executing on all fronts. And again, I don't think the timing could be any better.

So now for the tricky part, we are going to show a video explaining our heavy mineral sand processing. [Operator Instructions].

Okay. Hopefully, that provided some information on how the heavy mineral sand mining process advances and how we end up with a monazite concentrate that then is transported to the White Mesa mill for further processing. So -- and again, we're trying to add some of these videos to just mix it up a bit and provide additional information on the company.

So now I'd like to hand over to Ross Bhappu to talk about the convertible note. And then after that, will be Nate Bennett, our CFO.

Thank you, Mark. Well, as Mark mentioned, the company is in very strong financial position right now. On the back of about a $700 million fundraising we just recently did, we intend to use those funds to expand our Phase 2 project at the White Mesa Mill. We also intend to use some of those funds for the Donald project development. Again, it was a fantastic outcome. And really, the funds were very, very inexpensive. It's an inexpensive source of capital. We used an unsecured convertible debt structure that gave us maximum flexibility. The interest rate on that note was 0.75% coupon rate, which is incredibly low. It gave us a 32.5% conversion premium. So the reference pricing was $15.30.

The premium with the premium it gave us a $20. 34% conversion rate. The all-in effective tax rate on that note is about 2.1%, again, a very, very inexpensive financing. The nuance of the note was that we put in a capped call feature. The capped call effectively gave us insurance against future dilution and gave us an effective conversion price of $30.70. So it was a very successful offering. Again, we raised $700 million, and it was oversubscribed by more than 7x. The use of the funds is shown there on that slide, the Phase 2 expansion. And if we go to the next slide, it gives you a sense of just how big White Mesa will be.

Effectively, we're planning to double the size of the facility to give us individual lines for both processing uranium and rare earths simultaneously. So it's an incredibly impressive project that we're undertaking, and we've got a great financial position to undertake these future plans.

And with that, I'll hand it to Nate to talk a little bit more about the financial structure.

Okay. Thank you, Ross. During the third quarter, we continued to strengthen our financial position as we're preparing to develop our long-term projects in the next couple of years, and we finished the quarter with $750 million in total assets. We also increased uranium revenues leading to an improved net loss of $16.7 million compared to the second quarter's net loss of $21.8 million, and we continued low-cost uranium mining at our Pinyon Plain mine. We expect this to continue to improve as we mine and produce low-cost uranium inventory and increase future uranium sales in the fourth quarter.

At the end of the third quarter, our working capital was approximately $300 million, which includes $235 million of combined cash and marketable securities with the majority of these marketable securities being interest-bearing securities, treasury bills and bonds. This does not include the $625 million net proceeds from the senior convertible note completed in the fourth quarter, and this will be reflected in our fourth quarter balance sheet. And by the end of the year, we expect working capital to be somewhere between $900 million to $1 billion in working capital.

During the third quarter, we sold 240,000 pounds of uranium at a realized price of $72.38 per pound and a gross margin of 26%. We expect similar margins for our fourth quarter sales as we sell and average down our 485,000 pounds of finished uranium inventory that we had at September 30 and as we start to add our approximate 670 pounds of low-cost finished uranium inventory during the fourth quarter as we process those pounds at the mill.

As we continue to mine and process ore into 2026, we expect our finished uranium inventory cost per pound to decrease from approximately $50 to $55 per pound to approximately $30 to $40 per pound with our gross margins expected to increase to approximately 50% or above and above.

And with that, I'll turn it back over to Mark.

Thank you, Nate and Ross. Look, these last few slides are a bit repetitive, so I'll try not to repeat too much. But look, we plan to retain our status as the largest uranium miner and processor of uranium ores in the United States. There was a time where people questioned if we were leaving the uranium business. Well, we're not. We're still going to be #1 in the U.S. We're processing ores. As discussed, the White Mesa Mill is running with Pinyon Plain alternate feed materials and some LaSalle material. We're increasing or have the ability because we have not overcontracted. We're looking at opportunistic spot sales and other opportunities to add to our contract sales volumes, and we'll have a material amount of additional uranium to do that, whether that be later in '25 or in '26.

The cost of goods sold is decreasing, as Nate has mentioned, with the addition of the Pinyon ore. We're increasing our ability to produce uranium of 2 million pounds plus per year. And we could probably do that with Pinyon Plain alone without alternate feed, without LaSalle complex and other projects. So we're very comfortable in saying that. The margins are expected to improve material with lower cost and increasing improved uranium prices. We've talked about the 3 conventional mines that are currently in production.

We're getting a number of other mines ready for production. Some of those are already permitted. Some are not, but we're advancing the ones that are not fully permitted to get our ability to produce 4 million to 6 million pounds per year, particularly once Phase 2 is completed and the mill is able to be dedicated 100% to uranium production. And we're still continuing advancing the R&D work on the uranium recovery. Next slide.

And just talking a little bit about guidance. We haven't really changed this since Q2. But I want to say that we are always conservative on guidance. And I am very, very hopeful and positive, and we mentioned in the press release that we are on the higher ends of a number of these areas, and we hope to exceed guidance in some of these areas. And for example, on the mined uranium, I'm quite confident we're going to be well above that. Look at sales. We have 350,000 pounds. Well, we've already sold 290,000 pounds year-to-date, and we've got contract sales of another 160,000, which would put us at 450,000 and whatever spot sales that we might have on top of that. So we want to be conservative because we deliver on what we say we're going to do, and I like to surprise people on the upside or the company does and the team does.

Last slide, just talking about the rare earth and the mineral sands. We mentioned the piloting on the heavies. And we also mentioned the fact that we're planning to have the ability to commercially recover heavies later in '26. Phase 2 expansion project going along very well. I already talked about the quantums for NdPr, the Dy and the Tb. And we will have that -- we're planning to have that update for the feasibility study at the end of this year. Donald project, we discussed with the FID. We think it is in a unique position to supply a material amount of heavies and lights to the United States as required. Toliara FID is still expected in 2026. We're still working through this -- the -- pursuing the permits and approvals with this new government. But as I mentioned earlier, they appear to be pro-business, pro-development. So we just have to kind of see how things shake out there.

And we also have all our exploration permits to restart some of the drilling at the Bahia project in Brazil. And on top of that, we're always looking at other opportunities. We do not stand still at Energy Fuels, and we're looking for value-accretive opportunities on a number of fronts, and we'll continue to do so. We have a strong balance sheet to deliver on our existing projects, but we also have a strong balance sheet to look at other opportunities that may come our way.

So last slide is just this pretty picture again, the diversified nature of our business with these multiple critical elements. And now I'd like to turn it over to questions for those that are listening, and we will do our best to answer those questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Heiko Ihle with H.C. Wainwright.

Conceptually, for the Donald project, I mean, you got the final government approvals. You got the $80 million from EFA. You actually discussed that earlier on this call. We might see the FID as soon as next month. But I mean, just again, conceptually past that, you got the balance sheet and liquidity to put whatever number is needed really into this. Why are we not doing that? And I know the time line is quite accelerated, but I feel like we might be able to shave 1 or 2 quarters off of that now.

Yes, Heiko, it's ready to go. I mean what we're looking at is, as you know, there's this huge interest in getting these materials like from the Donald project in the United States, particularly the heavies. And we're just looking at our options potentially with offtakers for that project. And we're working through what that can look like. We've been talking to and basically out seeing what the opportunities could present. And I think there's also this opportunity when you look at that project and you look at these higher prices that are being placed on non-China material, there can be premiums there. So we're really looking at what those are and to help us make the best informed decision there.

And that's really what we're doing is we're shopping around to see what interest in those products that are out there, whether it be private or even government agencies that might be interested in those products.

And it wouldn't make sense to essentially skip that into the secondary step and just move forward now while you're looking for that?

Yes. I mean, Heiko, we're going to -- we're looking at all these opportunities in a holistic way. Yes, we have the capacity to do that right now. And so we're just looking at all our opportunities on how we best go forward. I don't know, Ross, if you want to add anything on that front?

Well, look, I agree. I think we're waiting to try to secure some offtake agreements. We also have a number of different options on financing, and we're just trying to run those to ground, Heiko, and do the best thing that's -- do what's best for shareholders on utilizing the money that we have in the bank right now.

And then just one quick clarification on your preliminary guidance for next year. It says there you expect to sell between 620,000 and 880,000 pounds with the long-term uranium sales contracts. Where is that delta between the 620,000 and the 80,000 come from? Is that a timing? Is that a pricing issue? What exactly could make it go from one end to the other end of that range, please?

It's really the flex up or flex down, is what that is, Heiko.

So it's purely your choice.

No, no, that's a selection of the contracts. So I know some companies have said they're not going to do flex up or flex down. We have. It doesn't really bother us too much because we're -- a lot of these things are evolving as things progress. So that flex up, flex down. We're still looking for homes, whether it be spot, midterm, other contracts for the future. So if you look at -- if we're up at 2 million pounds of uranium production, thereabouts, 1.5 million, 2 million, and we've currently got that kind of contract portfolio, you can see we have a lot of headroom there for doing other arrangements as we see fit.

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Reagor with ROTH Capital Partners.

So I guess first thing on the rare earth separation plant at White Mesa, I know you guys have floated a cost of $300 million to $500 million, but there hasn't been a lot of like ranges put on IRR or NPV for this project. When do you think we'll get those numbers? And then as we're leading up to that, is there a range you're comfortable putting on that so we can start to try to build these into our models?

Well, Joe, first of all, thanks for asking the question. We're really on the cusp of getting a number of these feasibility studies completed. One is for the Phase 2 separation plant. We're also completing the feasibility on the Toliara project and also getting the final investment numbers for Donald. And with that publicly disclosed, you're going to have all the information you need to figure out what all those costs are going forward.

When it comes to the Phase 2 processing plant upgrade, we are adding -- we've added -- since those earlier estimates, we've been adding a lot of additional infrastructure including the ability to recover heavies. And so some of those costs are going up, but the actual facility is actually becoming more capable to do more things. So we expect to have, again, all these studies completed by the end of the year and then the dots can be connected with certainty because they will be done by third parties or signed off by third parties, fresh and updated to give you the most recent information to make your calculations on.

Maybe a follow-up to that then. Would it be fair for us initially to assume that the economics are roughly similar to what we see for this kind of thing historically, where CapEx and NPV are roughly equal and IRRs are in the high teens, low 20s?

Look, I don't want to really overspeculate until those studies are completed. But we believe that what our plan, our strategy with the multiple assets we have is going to deliver a very low cost compared to our peers option for producing these multiple rare earth oxides and some of these other critical elements. So we're very confident that our focus on monazite is going to be a very attractive and low-cost opportunity for our shareholders going forward.

One other thing on the uranium production side, you guys kind of gave guidance for Q1 only. And is this to say that mining at Pinyon Plain is going to wrap up and then the mines to go back on care and maintenance or just that you're not comfortable giving a guide yet for next year?

The main reason that we've only given guidance into part of 2026 is that we have a rare earth plant as part of the White Mesa Mill in that Phase 1, where we share the mill. And we're also doing trade-offs on how much rare earths we have to process versus uranium versus our ability to stockpile. For example, when we process the Pinyon Plain or, we're going to keep mining Pinyon Plain, we'll put it out in the yard, and it will be stockpiled for future processing. And that may be extending that run in 2026, but we're also giving ourselves the option to be able to recover both lights and heavies later in the year, if need be. So that is the reason why we haven't gone too far out, but we will have, and we do have -- frankly, we do have enough mining capacity and pounds that are coming out of those mines to keep running that mill if we elect to do so on uranium only.

Your next question comes from the line of Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities.

Maybe starting on the uranium side. You mentioned blending Pinyon Plains higher-grade ore with LaSalle's lower-grade material through early '26. So can you quantify the margin differential between Pinyon Plain as a stand-alone campaign versus the blended approach? And then just given Pinyon Plain's superior economics, I mean, why wouldn't it make more sense to process higher-grade ore from that asset now while spot prices are above kind of the $75 level and preserve the LaSalle material for potential toll milling arrangements further down the road?

Yes. Look, it's a combination of things. I mean the Pinyon Plain is obviously absolutely our lowest cost source, with the exception of on occasion with some of the alternate feeds can be lower. And we look at how -- what feeds we have to process, we have the ability or will have the ability in 2026 to run just Pinyon Plain ore alone. We've made some modifications in the mill to do that. But also when we look at like towards the end of this year, we have -- and we need to do some blending to cut the grade down to some extent. The LaSalle complex -- and right now, we're not recovering the vanadium, okay? So when you look at the LaSalle complex, Pandora, our costs are, say, in the 70s, low 70s, recovering just uranium, but not recovering the vanadium. The vanadium gets put out the tails. We can bring the vanadium back at a later date.

And so when you blend in those costs with Pinyon Plain and alternate feed, we can still come up with a very, very attractive combined production cost at those sites. But I believe that where we are with our processing is we're going to push the Pinyon Plain as much as we can. We'll complement alternate feed and La Salle, looking at that blended cost, but we're also likely going to be gaining inventory of mined unprocessed material this year and going forward, we should have a material amount of unprocessed ore at the mill that will be ready for processing at whatever rates we really choose up to complete design capacity of the White Mesa mill as we get Phase 2 rare earth circuit online in due course.

Maybe switching gears. You've signed the MOU with Vulcan could lead to an offtake agreement for downstream magnet production. I mean I think we'll be getting something on the product validation front in the near term. But can you just remind us what really the critical steps beyond that validation would be and kind of how that plays into commercial production decisions later in '26?

Yes. Well, these various groups that are looking for are oxides Initially, it's about the validation. And after that, it is working together to come up with potential offtake arrangements, pricing, whatnot, which we really aren't at that stage yet. I mean we are in some initial discussions on those fronts, but we haven't really advanced those. So as you are aware, between POSCO, Vulcan, and we're talking to others, it's pretty dynamic at this point in time. And -- but we haven't really secured any binding agreements for offtake at this moment.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Tatiana Lauder with Merger Markets.

I just wanted to speak to the excitement around the Toliara acquisition. And the statement earlier that you guys are always looking at value-accretive opportunities. I wanted to ask what those opportunities might look like and what your forward-looking appetite to expand via acquisitions on any part of the uranium supply chain would be or if there's any excitement around some bolt-ons, divestitures or JVs?

Yes. Look, we look at every opportunity on its own. I mean we've expressed our desire to do further integration and from one aspect, but we're also looking at having additional feed and diversification of our feed as we go forward. So I think what you're seeing is when you look at the market and the people that are in the business, whether it be heavy mineral sands, rare earths or uranium, they're seeing our -- the strength that we have, the momentum that we have, and it's really a unique market.

The world is wanting an integration story of scale. And that is what we're building. And there are companies that routinely come to us and trying to see how they can potentially join with us in different ways. It could be a number of different options on how they might be able to join us. And so we look at them on their merits. So all I'm saying is we will look at each opportunity opportunistically and see how that fits with our strategy and go from there. But I think that when you look at the market cap that we have and the momentum we have, it's very attractive for a number of these parties that are kind of isolated in a small portion of the business, and they don't really have that critical mass.

And I'll ask Ross to say a few things on that front, too, if he--

Yes, Tatiana, it's a great question because there's so much activity going on in the market right now. I'd say we're looking at probably 2 dozen different opportunities on our plate that are very potentially opportunistic. And so to Mark's point, I think we're going to remain opportunistic. We've got a lot on our plate with our own assets. But that being said, we're always going to look for unique and good opportunities to bolt on to what we have. So there's no shortage of those, and the key is finding ones that are going to be accretive and good value for us.

And I would just add that, that both in uranium and rare earths tied to mineral sands. So monazite is really critically important.

It sounds very exciting. Were most of those 2 dozen opportunities just around traditional mining or anything around uranium extraction or other parts of the supply chain?

They can be anything really. I think as a general rule of thumb, I'd say most of them are more rare earth oriented, but they can be different things. I mean, again, we've got the infrastructure, we're processing uranium. There's people that would like to have us purchase their ore, the same thing and whether it's monazite producers, heavy mineral sand producers, they're just seeing that momentum and capacity that we've established over the last few years.

And how soon do you anticipate going back out to the market? I know you guys just did the $700 million fund raise that was oversubscribed. How soon should we expect to see you guys going out again to raise more capital?

Look, we're in a strong position right now. And you look at our balance sheet, you look at the convert, you look at the building revenue from uranium, we're in good shape. So I'm not going to speculate on how soon we're going to go out to the market again. But again, we're only going to go out to the market whenever that is, when we think it makes sense. And we think it made sense to go out to the market on the convertible, and it was a real successful execution. We're very proud that we were -- Goldman Sachs took the lead on that, and we couldn't be happier with the outcome.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric is a retail investor.

So I had a broader question. Given that this current administration is a lot more active about making strategic investments in critical mineral producers, including the Pentagon's equity stake in MP or the DOE's investment in Lithium America or the even more recent Westinghouse partnership. I was just wondering if you guys were in talks with the administration regarding any sort of strategic partnerships? Yes.

Yes. Look, that's a loaded question. But I think everybody in these critical minerals sort of sectors, whichever one they are, are in D.C. talking to the administration on what support might be available or not. Look, we're no different. I mean, we spend a lot of time in D.C. We're not prepared to speculate on what the U.S. government may or may not do. But I do believe that really, we've been driving our own bus. We've secured multiple projects. We're producing a lot of the elements that the government is interested in, whether it be uranium, the rare earths, even some of the heavy mineral sands elements are also critical elements. And we are just basically moving forward on our own strategy.

Does that mean that might be attractive to a government agency or potentially private entities that are interested in securing U.S. processed non-China material, I think it does. And that's where I'll pretty much leave it at that. So I just think we're positioning ourselves. We're playing the long game, and we'll see where we go from there. But yes, there are these investments that are going on. And just look at the assets we have and where we kind of fit into the picking the chain or food chain when you start looking at MP, Lynas, ourselves and others.

Your next question comes from the line of Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities.

I just wanted to really go back to your long-term contracting philosophy on the uranium side. I mean you have fresh capital. Utilities are out there discussing supply concerns. So I think you're uniquely positioned to sign baseload contracts that would really derisk production. So can you just speak to what percentage of 2026, 2027 production capacity you could target for term business? And what would be the remaining spot exposure?

Yes. Look, again, a tough one to fully quantify. Generally speaking, with my experience in this business, if you're not highly leveraged, I generally say 50% of both one or the other is not a bad place to be because you're either 50% right or 50% wrong, and you're not overcommitted. And we obviously are not overleveraged here from a debt perspective with our projects at the moment.

So -- but we also want to make sure that we don't have to put too much material on the spot market because it's really not really -- it's thinly traded, and we recognize that we don't want to hold back the spot price. So it's something that we discuss frequently, and it's how to position what new contracts that we're willing to commit to. I believe that the price uranium has to continue to increase because of the true cost of producing a pound of uranium currently isn't at that, say, $80 per pound-ish.

Yes, we're just going to play it by ear. But also at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, we currently use the mill to process both uranium and rare earths. And we're also looking at how if we decide or elect to process more rare earths and we're not going to process uranium that we don't overleverage ourselves in terms of too many long-term contracts. So it's that balance that we're looking at. But I think you can safely assume we're going to have 50% of our production contracted in some form, maybe a little bit more, but not less.

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mark Chalmers for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Well, again, thank you, everyone, for your interest in Energy Fuels. It's been an exciting time for Energy Fuels. I mean you've looked at our share price and how it's appreciated over the last number of months. I think people are finally getting our strategy and the importance of our strategy. I don't think that we could ask for better timing when it comes to the realization by governments around the world that we've become overly dependent on Russia, China, and we plan to continue to execute. And so watch this space. We are focusing for the stars and doing things that are extraordinary.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.