Nano One Materials Aktie

Good afternoon, good morning. I'd like to welcome you all to the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders of Nano One Materials Corporation. My name is Anthony Tse, and I shall move now to make some remarks as well as Dan and Alex as well.

So before Dan and Alex speaks, I'd like to offer a few words on behalf of the Board. I really want to thank Dan for more than a decade of leadership, advancing the technology that Nano One has nurtured today, importantly, strengthening the team that he's built up today, which I've been very impressed with and building our commercial capabilities. His contributions have positioned Nano One for the opportunities ahead, and we are extremely grateful that he'll continue to support the company as an adviser through the remainder of 2026 to help ensure a smooth transition.

This has been a planned succession. Effective June 12, Alex Holmes will become Chief Executive Officer. It is especially meaningful that Alex actually comes from within the ranks of Nano One's own senior leadership team. This is a reflection of the team that Dan has built and also the strength and depth of the management group that he has achieved over the past decade. Alex brings a deep expertise in strategy, corporate and commercial development and financing, capabilities, which I believe are essential for the next stage of growth for the company and importantly, commercialization. The Board has full confidence in Alex and the senior leadership team to lead Nano One into its next chapter, one that I believe will be defined by commercial execution, operational and financial discipline and importantly, long-term shareholder value. The strategy remains sound. The market dynamics have increasingly moved in our favor. And so Dan, at this juncture, on behalf of the Board, thank you for your dedication and your decade plus of service. And Alex, you have our full support.

Can I say something, excuse me?

Please go ahead.

Thanks, Anthony for those comments and for the recognition. Appreciate it. Thank you. So yes, after 15 years, I'm retiring as CEO of Nano One, and it's sort of come a long way. We've seen a lot together as team, as shareholders, as friends and colleagues. You only have to look at the team we've built, our shareholders, our strategic partnerships, the technology portfolio with a portfolio of more than 50 patents. We have operations now in Burnaby and in Candiac, and we have built a strong place in the battery ecosystem. Behind all of this is trust, it's collaboration. There's a shared vision that's solidly in place. So why now? And that's a question that a lot of people have asked. By the way, I'm not 59, and is constantly reported on the -- I am older than that. I'm not sure where that number came from, but that's. I'll get 59. Maybe I'm Babylonian mathematical. Going down. Yes, exactly. I only work in phase, I'm on my way back. I only works in phase 60.

Look, there's a clear path to commercialization that we're on right now, and it has already been driven by this team that you see here. And of course, the technical team and the team in Candiac that's driving production. And that's certainly a very important part of it. And it's been driven with the kind of renewed vigor and the discipline that our stakeholders, our shareholders all expect from us. And that being said, this is a planned succession. And yes, we prepared for it, actually for many years in many regards. And the timing is right, right now. Nano One's future, I think, is in very capable hands.

The Board, of course, has appointed Alex Holmes to lead the company into this next chapter. That was always in the back of my mind when I hired Alex, and we nurtured the whole executive team into the position it's in right now. So I couldn't be more confident in that choice. It's been something that I've kind of been backing for a long time. And I've worked closely with Alex, of course, and the whole executive team here over the years. Alex he's an experienced executive. As Anthony said, he brings deep commercial, financial, capital markets experience, certainly a very important part of this, and he's backed by a solid executive team here, but also a much larger team all the way down to everyone in the organization. So there is -- as I said, there is confidence and trust and a shared vision here that it's going to really underpin all of this and drive this. Alex cares deeply about shareholders, cares deeply about our people and doing the right thing. And I think you'll find that as you get to know Alex more and more, that's going to become super evident.

So I'll say it again, the company is in good hands. And at the end of the day, I'm not going that far. I don't plan to travel all over the world. I've done a lot of that already. But more figuratively, I'll continue to support Nano One as an adviser and helping with, of course, with the historical context. I've been here longer than anyone with the strategic and market insights that underpin actually good business decisions and good capital markets decisions. So I want to see this company succeed as much as anyone, as you all know, I'm still a large shareholder, and I'm long. And I have a sizable position, and I want to see that grow into something that is profitable and of course, will lead us all hopefully into a bar at some point in the future.

So listen, it's been an honor to lead Nano One, and it's also an honor to be handing this off to such an exemplary team. So I'd like to thank the team, our shareholders, our Board, our customers, our partners. Thank you.

Thank you, Dan, and thank you, Anthony. And just some words of acknowledgment, Dan. None of this exists without you. We founded Nano One in 2011 on the conviction that the world would need a fundamentally better way to make cathode active materials. And you focused on LFP when most of the West had written it off. So hats off to you for sure and the team that you've built. Both of these calls have aged really well. 15 years of work, as you said, more than 50 patents and more growing. And the strategic partners and governments in the global battery supply chain take us seriously. And that's through trust and building over many, many years. And so it all traces back to your vision and the team he built alongside you. So Dan, I'm grateful. I'm glad you're going to keep supporting us as an adviser. Maybe our meetings can be like breweries instead of the corner office. I'm not new to Nano One. I joined in 2021. Few years since on the industrial side of the business, building the operating team alongside Dan and Denny and the manufacturing capability and the discipline it's going to take us to turn our breakthrough technology into something that's an industrial scale business.

Our early focus on LFP meant we saw the shift coming. I think maybe Dan, back in 2018, 2019, you were on a podium talking about the importance of LFP. Denny is actually making the stuff for real. And then I'll never forget our conversation in the summer of 2021 when we thought, you know what, this time -- the tide is turning. It's now the time for LFP, and we doubled down and brought Denny in and then we bought Candiac and the rest is where we are today. We also saw a huge risk in the supply chain constraint in the single country. So I think we've communicated this before, and this is third-party research. LFP is now projected to be more than 50% of the cathode market. And a lot of that growth is -- and most of that growth is coming from outside of China, and that's the opportunity we're focused on. We believe we have the most mature new LFP manufacturing technology outside of China today. We have a pilot in Candiac in Quebec, and it's being converted into a demonstration line to target more than 800 tonnes per year of production. And we've got really strong partnerships, as we all know, with Rio Tinto and a really deepening partnership with Sumitomo Metal Mining.

So we still have commercialization at scale ahead of us, but the work we've done today is what makes that reachable. Our design one build many partnership with Worley has been put in place to help us get there faster and license our technology to diversify and also broaden our market potential. Leveraging that platform, that decades of experience delivering technology solutions is what we're leaning on as well as our direct-to-customer licensing strategy. Some shareholders have asked why we've not named certain partners or updated progress more frequently. In this industry, I think it's important to understand that the larger counterparty almost always controls that disclosure, whether it's defense prime supplier, a cell maker or an OEM. They're balancing dozen suppliers and customer conversations across multiple chemistries, geographies and time lines. So disclosing these conversations too soon will be detriment to the company and the shareholders.

Sumitomo and Rio Tinto were unnamed well before they were named. I believe where we're going. I'm personally invested in Nano One. And over the last few years, I've bought over $250,000 in the market. I believe where we're going, and this is meaningful for me. And to our shareholders, many of you have been with us for many years. I want to know we appreciate you, your ideas, your support for Nano One. Thank you for standing with us. And to my colleagues, you're a great team. I'm proud to work with you and our partners, thank you for your trust. We honor it.

Thank you. So our shareholders, I know that many of you have been with the company for many years and probably as many years as I've been with the company in terms of months. This was a new venture environment for me to step into, but I'm not new to the sector. So just to share a little bit of my own background for -- I've been in the industry about 16 coming up 17 years. I was previously the MD, Managing Director and CEO of a company called Galaxy. And when I started with them, they're a junior mining development company. We're focused on lithium. And this was back in 2010 when really there was no interest in lithium. People barely knew the name Tesla or BYD. And Galaxy was like many aspiring junior development company. But over time and in my tenure, 11, 12 years with them, almost probably a little bit less than kind of what Dan served here. We built 3 projects. We became the second producer of hard rock lithium in Australia. We are the first Western company to actually build a lithium carbonate processing facility actually in China, and this was about 14, 15 years ago. We acquired project called James Bay, which is now known as Galaxy from probably someone who you know very well, gentleman called Paul Matysek. He had a company called Lithium One. And then we also ended up acquiring South Vida project, which is a brine project in Argentina. For many years, Galaxy was a very hard slog. When I took over, it was heavily indebted. My predecessor left the company with about $250 million of net debt, $20 million market cap, about $1 million in cash and $17 million a year burn rate. So I appreciate the hard yards that it takes to actually build projects. And first and foremost is the survival, but secondly is actually the operational financial discipline that's required to actually build things.

Over time, we ended up building a Mount Catlin mine in Australia, the Jiangsu plant and then eventually the South Vida project in Argentina as well. And then since then, I retired from that company in 2021 after we acquired Orkem, but prior to acquiring Livent, which we actually tried to do 2 times during my tenure. But essentially, we have built Galaxy from a $20 million company to a $5 billion market cap company and became the world's fifth largest lithium producer. So that was my introduction to lithium over the past 1.5 decades.

Since then, I've spent a lot of time investing up and down the value chain in the cathode space, in the anode space, in battery recycling. Some have done well, some have not done so well. And I can share with you that building projects, especially in the western part of the world in markets which have not been used to building these projects, is hard work. You hear a lot about new capacity that's stood up in Asia all the time and projects get built over a 9-, 12-month period, they get ramped up over 6 months. And by the end of the second year, you're in full production. And the reality is that there is a lot more than just the technology and experience that exists there. There is a whole infrastructure.

I think Dan and Alex have always alluded to many other things -- many other pieces of jigsaw that actually need to come together. It's your partners on the supply of input materials, whether it's your iron, your phosphate, it's your ability or not to deal with byproducts that you actually create. And much of that environment does not exist in the West. So for any company which is pioneering like Nano One, they actually have to build it from scratch. So you probably would have heard Dan talk a lot about how is LFP made in China? And how is it different from how it's made here? One of the key inputs to making LFP in China is a little known input material called iron sulfate. And iron sulfate happens to be a byproduct, almost like a waste product of the titanium dioxide industry. It's an industry that is very, very mature in China, and it spits out a ton of iron sulfate. So as a result, many of these LFP players, notwithstanding that the technology at the time may not have been that advanced, but when you actually get free cost of input materials, that's a huge leg up in terms of your ability to deal with that. One of the other things that you will have heard Dan talk about a lot is the ability or in the West, the limitations around the ability to deal with byproduct waste streams such as sodium sulfate, which is a byproduct out of the cathode business as it is in the lithium business. And in China and in Asia, those byproducts are used actually in industry. It's an important feedstock that actually gets used in dye and detergent. Unfortunately, for the West, most of the dye detergent that gets produced in the world is produced in Asia. There's no real home for that byproduct here. So what Nano One's had to do over the years is actually innovate to a point whereby although we don't necessarily have the infrastructure or the supply chain infrastructure that Asia has, you've got to figure out another way of doing it because if you can't kind of get hold of free input materials such as iron sulfate and you don't have an ability to deal with sodium sulfate byproduct, you've got to kind of find another way to cut the cookie. And essentially, what Nano One's done over the past few years is basically identify a pathway and importantly, with Denny and the Candiac kind of facility joining kind of the portfolio of business as well is basically the key ingredients or the raw materials that's actually needed to actually to commercialize. This is not my first participation in cathode business. I've kind of been involved in other cathode businesses before as also -- as well as building other projects in North America. And some of them have had to go through financial restructuring. I'm sure it's not lost on many of you that over the past probably 2 or 3 years, there's been many kind of what we call battery tech companies or companies within the battery value chain that hit the wall that have had to go through restructuring that taking on too much financing and whether it's a gigafactory or recycling factory, that's actually hit some very hard yards. I think what's actually key and important to recognize today is that what Dan has actually built and what Dan has built along is not just the company, but actually the team that's allowed the company to survive to where it is today. Now I know that for shareholders who've been supportive of the company for a long time, right, there is an expectation that, well, when do things commercialize, when do we get an uptick in value, et cetera. But also at the same time, I can share with you that in my 1.5 decades in China, decade and a half ago, they didn't really know how to make LFP either. And frankly, probably up until just before COVID, there were only 3 or 4 main players of LFP in the market. And the world was probably sub 1 million tonnes, a few hundred thousand tonnes. That market has grown phenomenally to just under 4 million tonnes last year. So it's grown a multiple of 4 or 5x. And one of the reasons why it's grown so much is that China is actually really, really focused. The industry is really focused on just execution and commercialization. And that requires a lot of different iterations. Now there's a lot of advantages that they have there. But there's also advantages, which I think cannot be missed and should not be ignored that North America and importantly, Canada has had. I've been an observer of how the industry has developed in different parts of the world, more South America, Europe, Asia, Australia over the past 1.5 decades. And I would say that Canada in the past 12, 15 months, is actually coming into a very, very interesting sweet spot in terms of what I call strategic and political will to actually build up an industry here locally. So the window of opportunity, I would say, is actually coming even more square in the face of kind of Nano One's pathway at the moment. And what's actually important now is actually taking those good ideas that Dan and Denny and the team have built up initially in Burnaby and eventually in Candiac and really trying to convert them. But what does it take to actually convert? Customers within the battery value chain are some of the most fussiest customers in the world. I know that because I used to be personally as CEO, I was personally responsible for marketing to these companies, right? Whether it's a CATL, whether it's a Tesla, whether it's a Panasonic, whether it's an LG, they're always the biggest dog in the pound and you're the little puppy that's kind of wanted in wanting to play. We think that there's an opportunity to slightly level the playing field. They will always be much bigger companies than us. But increasingly, many of these big companies, whether for diversity of supply chain reasons or for recently, I met up with kind of some of the Korean counterparties that Dan and Alex and the team have been interacting with. They actually need funding as well. And where they're getting that funding, they're getting funding from the U.S. government, they're getting funding from the Canadian government. But what's also been evident in some of those conversations that I've had with them is that they are looking for funding from the Canadian government. And I would say probably since the change of administration, any government actually realizes that they have more cards that have a better kind of poker hand than they thought they did a couple of years ago. So now there's a lot more quid pro quo, which is like, okay, you want to unlock some policy funding from the Canadian government, that's great, but we want you to be supporting the buildup of local players and local champions over time. So I think it's a very interesting -- I think it's a very exciting point in time. Will Nano One and its team have to continue to hone its Kung Fu? Yes, for sure, because that's what our competitors in Asia do every single day. And what that basically requires is to hustle more to push more, not just on the technical development, but really kind of leveraging some of those positions, which we believe is kind of coming to the advantage of Nano One and Adam has done a lot of work in Ottawa as well as kind of in many kind of different provincial regions as well as kind of in Washington, D.C. And things are coming to the fore, which we would love to be sharing with you during the course of kind of this and this kind of next coming year as well. That hopefully, shareholders can understand why we actually feel very optimistic around kind of how the stars are aligning with strategic kind of policy support. And it's not just dollars, it's leadership picking up the phone to key international and foreign players who want to build in Canada. And I think the important thing now is that I personally have a stronger view that the vertical supply chain has a greater ability to be built in Canada than it does in the U.S. I spent a lot of time on projects in the U.S. I have some of my own kind of early-stage start-up projects in the U.S. unless you're a defense metal, i.e., tungsten, titanium, antimony, germanium, gallium, Lithium, unfortunately, is viewed to be a little bit too left, a little bit too work and a little bit too democrats. So at the moment, the lithium battery value chain is not resonating as much as defense. But in Canada, you guys have rocks in the ground. You've got metal units in the ground. You're now having end user demand, which is actually building up solidly. I mean LGES is already at 48 gigawatt hours in Windsor in Ontario. And PowerCo stop, start, stop, start, but they commenced construction in November of last year. Those 2 projects alone actually over time over the next -- between now and the end of the decade, plan to be producing up to 138 gigawatt hours of batteries. So -- and many of those importantly, LG originally that 48 gigawatt hours was set up to produce EV batteries and they were looking at producing mainly kind of non-LFP chemistries. And at least in recent conversations and meetings that I've had with them, they are looking to switch over to actually produce energy storage. And energy storage, you may have kind of read some headlines or you may be invested in other companies that are enjoying growth from that particular sector. But it's predominantly driven by a lot of kind of behind the meter, but also kind of growth from kind of renewable storage, but importantly, kind of AI and data centers as well. I'm not sure if many of you are familiar with, but when you do one click of prompt or query on Google, that's one unit of energy. If you did the same in ChatGPT or Claude or any other AI platform, it's equivalent to about 7 to 8x of energy for every click. That's why all these data centers need to be built because there's so much processing capacity. The problem is that the infrastructure in many parts of the world in -- especially in kind of more mature markets like North America and Europe, they're very mature. So it costs a lot to actually pick up holes in the road and lay cable and lay fiber. And so as a result, many of these data centers are being built in locations where it's much more convenient for them to build battery storage side.

So the outlook from a demand-supply perspective -- and by the way, the energy storage story is no longer contingent on one market. For the past, I would say, up until the last couple of years, much of the growth in lithium-ion batteries has actually been predicated on just EV growth. And many of you probably would have seen, especially in North America, how slow that growth has tapered off in the past couple of years, right? And if I look back to kind of when you had the first spike in EV growth in China, again, even back then, it wasn't passenger vehicles. It's all trucks and buses and then it became passenger vehicles. And then the next cycle was, well, maybe we're expecting growth from Europe and U.S. And that lasted for about 2 years and then that tapered off. The interesting thing about the ESS sector is if we look at what happened in 2025, the EV sector probably grew at about 25% year-on-year demand. The ESS sector grew at about 53%. And if you look at the first few months of this year, I'm not sure the first half of the year is out yet, but the numbers that I looked at year-to-date till April, the ESS sector on a global basis grew at 84%.

So why is ESS important? Because 90-plus percent of chemistries within lithium-ion batteries used for the ESS market, are guess what, LFP. And importantly, many of those systems and many of those battery systems which are being deployed are being deployed in many different markets. It's not just China. Yes, there is U.S. U.S. 2 years ago was the second largest market. But have a guess, which was the second, third, fourth largest market in last year, it wasn't the U.S. It was Germany, Netherlands, Middle East. So you've actually got growth coming from different parts of the world. Whether you want to introduce the political angle to it, the geopolitical angle to it or you can -- in my view, you can actually completely skip it. In the post-COVID environment and the post-Iranian war environment that we're living through now with the Straits of Hormuz, it's increasingly obvious, it doesn't make sense to have 80%, 90% or even 70%, 80%, 90% of anything coming from one part of the world, right? And within LFP, that is very much the case with respect to China. So whether you overlay the geopolitical angle or you don't, the world needs to diversify supply chains. So this is what I think you will have heard many from the team kind of try to echo and resonate in terms of there is a window of a very -- there's a very interesting sweet spot that is opening up now. And so where I think the team is now really doubling down focus is really the commercialization, but also bringing partners across the line in terms of building some of these projects. A lot of them have also been caught blindside. Many of the Korean companies for many years, heavily invested in other chemistries, underinvested in LFP and now find themselves kind of behind the eight ball. And that's much the case for many other players as well in North America and Europe, right? Notwithstanding that, and you can attest to it, there's been LFP produced in different parts of the world for actually many, many years. So it's reinvigorating kind of those opportunities, but also rebuilding in the same vein that shareholders need to -- the team needs to earn trust and support from shareholders, they're also going through the same process with customers. And customers take a long time, right? I'll give you an example, one of the deals that I did with Galaxy was with a Korean company called Osco, right, fifth largest steelmaker in the world, okay? That M&A process, the actual direct negotiation probably took about 12 months. But getting to know and doing the deal thing took 3 years. So unfortunately, some of these companies do not move as quickly as we'd like them to move, but what's increasingly evident is that when U.S. policymakers or Canadian policymakers says, you can't have 90% or 80% of your materials coming from one country, you've got to find another source. At some point, there is a push comes to shelf, and they will need to actually pick up kind of other suppliers. And that's where I believe Nano One sits.

So to all of those shareholders who've actually shown up today, I know that you've been with the company for many, many years. I do want you to know that we and on behalf of the Board, we all appreciate support that you've shown and the patience that you've shown in supporting the company today. To my colleagues, Alex, Dan importantly, the team that you've built is one of the most impressive teams that I've worked with in terms of its resilience and discipline. I think you have built an incredible team in terms of the depth of experience, especially kind of Denny, and I was in Montreal last week with Denny's team as well. There's very few places, and I've been walking around plants in Asia and China for many, many years. There's very few places that you can go outside of Asia where you actually see a real operating plant. And that's something that continues to need to be reinforced with investors and shareholders. But I can tell you that every time that we have a customer, we host a customer visit to Candiac, they are also kind of very impressed because they don't see it very often. You don't see it very often, right? So it's a little bit like when -- I don't know what's the equivalent college hockey player drops up in Hong Kong and starts playing for the professional hockey league in Hong Kong. They've never seen anything like it, okay? And so that's actually what Nano One actually has today.

So I'd like to finish with thanking you for your trust and your support over the years. I appreciate you taking the time that you have today to come along. And obviously, it's important that we retain your long-term support. And last but not least is thank you to Dan actually building up a very strong vehicle, a platform today from which the team can then kind of take Nano One to the next steps. So unless there's anything else, I think we're going to have some coffees and we can chat on the side, but that kind of concludes today's kind of formal program. And the webinar link will now be terminated as well.