Metallium Limited/ADR (MTLMY) August 2026 Conference Transcript

We are an industrial technology metal extraction development company. We're listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, and we've got soon aspirations to have an uplisting onto the NASDAQ. What we're focused on is the commercialization of a technology called Flash Dual Heating. It's for metal extraction and mineral processing, invented in the USA, in Texas, out of Rice University. and it's got unique applications in both extracting metals from both wastes and mineral ores and the real innovation here is that we're using a combination of ultra fast electrical based heating plus proprietary chemistry we've got backing from the u.s department of war we had our first grant about a year ago from the dow and the the technology actually was originally sponsored by DARPA back when it was invented at Rice University about 10 years ago. We're primarily initially focused on electronic waste, getting gold and copper, palladium and tin out of printed circuit boards, but there's a huge range of other applications, including from semiconductor waste that is rich in gallium and germanium and indium. These are very niche technology metals, and there's also various sources of tailings, including red mud, which is one of the biggest tailings issues in the mining industry globally. And with red mud, we've shown that we can get critical metals like rare earth elements and gallium out of red mud. And why are we trying to do this at this particular point? I think we couldn't have picked a better time in history to do what we're doing. We're effectively trying to bring innovation to what's not been innovated in decades. Most of the world's, as most people know, most of the world's critical metals processing has been offshore to china over the last 50 years whereas a lot of the original ip to process these metals was originally developed in europe and the united states and it's it's been a real shame that the a lot of that ip has been offshore over the last 50 years china has effectively weaponized the periodic table during that period and the chart on the right hand side just shows how dependent the West, and in particular the United States, is on China for a lot of these metals like gallium, germanium, indium. These are critical for NVIDIA-based chips, as one example. China is the source of 99% of gallium, of refined gallium for NVIDIA, as one example. NVIDIA is obviously the prominent AI player in the space, and gallium is the main source of their latest technology. So it's a real critical issue for both just dependency on a foreign power that sometimes is not the friend of the West. And then there's rare earth elements, as MP Materials touched on in the last talk. China is pretty much the dominant source of processing for the majority of rare earth elements. And it's only two companies, Linus and MP, that are the Western source of these metals but the processing of them is pretty much been offshore to China over the last 50 years and there's no way to beat China at their game they have vertically integrated and they've got state sponsorship that there's no way economically to compete with them so the only real way to compete is via technology and that's what our technology flash dual heating can bring to the table the technology was as I mentioned was developed about 10 years ago at Rice University in Texas. It was originally sponsored by DARPA, which is the research arm of the Department of Defense. It was originally developed to make graphene, which is a super carbon-based material, which has got a lot of super properties. And over the ensuing years, that has been put into a private company called Universal Matter. They're now making commercial quantities of graphene using this flash-jewel heating method in Toronto. Now, a few years later, the Department of Defense came back to Rice and asked, can you apply this method to pulling out rare earth elements and other critical metals out of unconventional sources like coal fly ash and red mud tailings? And that's where the applications of metal processing came with this technology. So it's the combination of electrical heating, ultra fast heating, plus proprietary chemistry. And that's since led to several metal applications, including getting gold and copper and palladium out of printed circuit boards, recovering cobalt and nickel out of spent lithium-ion batteries, and there were various mineral processing applications, including treating of lithium-based concentrates, tailings, and various other waste streams. About three years ago, we as Metallium, the ASX-listed company, we acquired the global exclusive license for all metal-based applications. And since then, we've been fully focused on taking it out of its humble beginnings at Rice University and and taking it to industrial scale. The breadth of the technology applications are very large, and to date our primary focus has been electronic waste. The main reason being is that we can go out tomorrow and purchase electronic waste on an open market. All the mining-based applications, they're equally compelling, but it's just a much slower proposition to deal with a mining company. They move at a much different pace than we would like to move at. So that's why we've chosen electronic waste as the first commercial feedstock. And we've got our first facility already established in Houston. And the ambition is to be doing about 20,000 tons per annum eventually of electronic waste out of Houston and taking it both nationally and then internationally. But the other applications are very broad and large, including spent automotive catalytic converters, which are very rich in platinum group metals, including palladium and rhodium, very very high value metals currently and various feedstocks of gallium and germanium bearing wastes we've we've got a commercial operation and partnership with a group called indium corporation they're one of the western world's only refiners of gallium and germanium and as mentioned these are very critical metals for a lot of the technology that underpins nvidia chips and and various other defense based applications but right now our focus is on electronic waste the main message here is it is a true platform technology we're not just beholden to gold or copper from electronic waste we've got various options and it's a huge almost a periodic table at our potential disposal and a lot of people would have ridiculed many of these technologies on the screen here when when they were first introduced but these these really have changed history and changed our life most people have probably never heard of these things but the the Bessemer converter was introduced about the 1850s, and this really underpinned the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom. It was the first inexpensive method to mass-produce steel, even though Henry Bessemer, the engineer who developed it, couldn't initially get any seed funding to develop it. The modern rotary kiln had a similar story. The fluidized bed, both of those devices have really changed mass continuous processing of various different types of metals and petroleum products. And then the electric arc furnace is most analogous to us. Again, it uses electric-based heating. And a lot of the big blast furnace guys at the time were ridiculing it. It's just a toy. You can never use electricity to mass-produce metals. And fast forward about 50 years, the electric arc furnace is now the dominant source of steel globally. And it put most of those blast furnaces out of business. We've got a very similar technology and proposition to the arc furnace. We're effectively applying the same principles of electrical heating plus some additional chemistry. And there is a real breakthrough potential for the technology in mineral processing. Here's a very simplified diagram to show that a conventional method for extracting lithium from spodgamine, which is coming out of Western Australia as the world's current dominant source of lithium, we believe we can dramatically reduce the number of steps using our process to get to the exact same end goal and there's a very similar proposition on various different types of rare earth elements so we're going for at least a 50 percent reduction in the number of steps and overall that would lead to massive reductions in capex and opex for new green fields mineral processing projects and as mentioned this is not just a concept we've now got our first industrial plant under construction and in commissioning right now just outside of Houston in Texas. We acquired the site less than 14 months ago, and since then it's been a huge point of our activities over that time. The eventual plan for this site is to be not just a development facility where we can show to different clients the merits of the technology, but it's also going to be our first commercial site where we will be making revenue and profits from 20,000 tons of electric scrap. which is rich in copper and gold. This facility is in a very convenient location. It's right beside an existing landfill, and it's a formerly active hazardous waste incinerator. We were attracted to the site because it's already got permits to take in hazardous waste, and there's a lot of concrete already poured. And that's the reason we've mainly been able to scale the technology up so quickly, having this previously active industrial site. And our initial commercial proposition is electronic waste. And why are we focused on this? You can see that the metal content of electronic waste is massive compared to typical mining operations. A typical gold ore body nowadays is about one gram per ton. And some of the boards that we've been testing to date are over 700 grams per ton. So they're an extremely rich source of metals. And the primary metals we're focused on are copper, gold and palladium and we're effectively competing with asian smelters the asian smelters only focus on copper and gold most of the other metals aren't recovered and they go to tailings our technology we're focused on maximum utilization and recovering all the metals the the business model in a simplistic manner is going to be based around two business units one is a build-on-operate where we will own the site like we do in texas purchase the feedstock like we have for electronic waste and then own the full economics and we've already got some pretty significant partners including Glencore which is our supply partner for printed circuit boards. Glencore is obviously one of the world's pre-eminent mining companies and they also trade in PCBs and they've done their diligence and we were very fortunate to get them as one of our first supply partners. We've also got other smaller players dynamic and plastic recyclers So our supply of e-waste is already fully secured for the Texas facility. On gallium and germanium, Indium Corporation is a major Western world refiner of technology metals, gallium, germanium, indium, and tin. And we've got an offtake agreement with Indium, and we're hopefully soon to pencil a supply agreement for this gallium and germanium waste. Then the other side of the business is what we call processing as a service. This is where we license the technology to potential mining companies and others, and we effectively sell them equipment, become an OEM, an original equipment manufacturer, and charge a licensing fee and also a royalty on the recovered metals. There, we've already got partnerships with a major mining company, Vedanta, who's an Illumina processor out of India, and they've got a huge red mud tailings issue in India that we're hopefully going to help them with. And we've got other players like Meteoric Resources. They're an up-and-coming rare earth developer with a very large rare earth project in Brazil. So we have tier one names already established, and we're only getting started. And then just to finish the story, I think it's a really once-in-a-generation opportunity for the time that we're in. The Trump administration has really lit a fire under the just public perception on critical metals and the importance of not being so reliant on China, in particular for metal processing. And we've already got some support from the Department of Defense in the form of a grant, and we're hopefully soon going to get some extra, much more significant grants from the federal agencies here in the U.S. So we're very excited about what that could bring. And the technology really has a unique motor around it. There's nothing else out there that has such a broad breadth of critical metal applications. And we believe that this could be truly a generational opportunity for any investors who get in right now during this really critical period where the critical metal exposure that we have to China is really, it's untenable. And that's why the US government has done such a big effort so far and even the effort that they've done so far is only going to scratch the surface on really getting that imbalance corrected and we're we're one of the companies that can help with that imbalance we've already got multiple scrap supply agreements and hopefully potentially soon to be announced offtake agreements established we've got our first operating facility in Texas and we really couldn't pick a better time in history to be doing what we're doing. Thanks. Any questions?

Can you give us a sense of, I'll say, projected margins, indictive kind of, you know, maybe revenue from this initial plant, that type of thing?

A bit difficult to give any formal projections currently, but from a high-level perspective, for the Texas facility for electronic waste. When we get to about 16,000 tons per annum of inbound boards, we're aiming to be almost producing an equivalent of 80,000 ounces per annum of gold, which if you put us up to other gold producers, we would be considered a mid-tier producer. And we want to be getting to that type of run rate within about 18 months from now. So that's about 80,000 ounces of gold equivalent. So taking the copper, the tin, and the palladium, turning them into gold equivalent, that's the type of projections. And for e-waste, we're aiming, margins is a bit more difficult, but we're aiming for at least a 25% gross margin.

Could you take us through the process? Because it sounds like right now you have a handful of machines possibly running. And then I assume the goal is to get, or anticipate, I hate the word assume, anticipate that you're going to have a fleet of these machines around the globe which is going to put a pressure on production of machines. Can you talk about how you're going to go from where you are today as sort of I guess sort of building them a la carte to building them at scale?

Yeah sure so at the moment it's still very much in the development stage and the core reactor is probably still at least six months away from being mass-producible. So we still have to do several thousand runs and iterations before we've come up with a final design that's truly certified. And just in the time being, we've got about three certified fabricators who can make the machines currently within the U.S. And it's not a super complicated machine to fabricate. We obviously have to be very careful of the intellectual property. But the long-term ambition is that within six months from now, we will have effectively a mass-producible stack of drawings that we can give to any fabricator who's certified. And there's at least five additional fabricators around the US that we've identified. But I think that's not going to be a constraint. To get to the 16,000 tons per annum, we will need about 20 of these reactors, these core flash dual heating reactors. And the lead time, the manufacturing lead time is about nine months. So the mass rollout thereafter is just a case of choosing additional fabricators in the vicinity where we're setting up the additional plants. But it's definitely not going to be a constraint for manufacturing. And if you, just one other question, please.

If you get the volume of machines out there, and I remember you talked about how China now kind of has dominated the world through the periodic table. What do you do to that periodic table domination by having these systems out there? Do you really start to create some balance in the world around these minerals?

Well, just last week or maybe two weeks ago, Trump put out an executive order to stop the export of electronic waste overseas that has critical metals. That's been a big benefit for us because there's going to be less competition for the scrap that we're trying to source. And the proposition is that the more waste we can get, the more critical metals we can obviously sell back to the United States. So that's just one example of how focused this current administration is on trying to counteract that balance. On gallium and germanium, currently the Western world is 100% reliant on China for refined gallium and germanium. What our technology does is we give the option to take existing wastes that are effectively waste and not being used, we can get the gallium and germanium back out of those wastes so you don't have to be 100% beholden to China for these metals. They have put out export bans on those metals in the last 18 months and it's caused significant price increases and dislocation between the China price and the Western world price. For example, the Chinese gallium price is about four times less than the current Rotterdam price in Europe. So effectively, our technology allows the urban mining of wastes that you don't have to be buying the raw material from China anymore. in the next three months. So the nearest term hurdle is to get our expanded chlorine permit in Texas. So we've had a slight delay in that one of our main buildings, we had to repair the roof and the proximity to where you're using chlorine and your nearest neighbor is what the permit is based on and because we've had to move activities a couple of hundred meters away we've had to get our permit revised and we're now just going through the legal process of doing that so that's that's the nearest term delay that we've had longer term the the next bigger hurdle is to how do we take this from the current scale which is it's suitable for these high values feedstocks like electronic waste that are 700 grams per tonne, for all the mining applications and treating of tailings, we'll have to take the scale up another level. So that's the next technical challenge. We've got a prototype for doing that. We haven't built the prototype yet, but we will build that prototype early next year. So that's the next big technical challenge. How do we take the scale up another 100,000 X from where we currently are? And we know we can do it. We've got the design, but it's just going to be a matter of testing and engineering. Right now, we've got enough cash to get us to our ambitions to get to the stage one target of 8,000 tons per annum of processing electronic waste. That's stage one. And when we're doing that, we're going to start generating revenue. To prosecute all of these additional growth opportunities in gallium and germanium, that would need additional capital. But we are quite active with the U.S. government currently, and we are quite hopeful that we will get something significant in terms of support, either a grant or otherwise in the near term. We can't be super confident about that, but it's looking very favorable. Thanks.