ABTC Q3 FY2026 Earnings Call - Record Revenue and First Positive Gross Margin Signal Scaling Momentum

Tiffany, Call Moderator, ABTC: On today’s call, our CEO and CTO, Ryan Melsert, will provide remarks regarding our two lines of business, which include our lithium-ion battery recycling business and our primary claystone to lithium hydroxide business. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Ryan, who is joined by our CFO, Alex Flores.

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

However, in addition to closing the loop, we also need to fill that loop the first time, that’s why we also have acquired critical mineral deposits within the U.S. and have designed our own processes for how to access these critical minerals and how to manufacture them back into battery-grade products. With these two lines of business, we’re both closing the loop and filling that loop the first time with domestic, low-cost, low-impact critical minerals. When we look at operations from our past quarter, we have been operating our first battery recycling facility near Reno, Nevada. While operating this quarter, we did have record-breaking revenue. We were able to generate about $7.8 million, a 64% increase from our previous quarter.

This was achieved largely through increased capacity factor at our first facility as we’ve continued to ramp operations and scale production. While our revenue grew substantially, our cost of goods sold to operate this facility grew at a much lower rate, so only about 11% increase in cost of goods sold compared to our previous quarter. When in removing non-cash expenses such as depreciation and stock-based compensation, this drops down to about $5.8 million of actual cash costs. This allows us to have a positive gross margin, the first positive gross margin that this company has had, and this is an achievement that many startups never get to. We are very excited and proud at ABTC that we have achieved these positive gross margin operations at our first battery recycling facility and encourages us as we move forward with future facilities.

Again, we’re not including cash expenses. This adjusted gross margin grows to $2 million for the quarter. We’ve also maintained a healthy cash balance, about $38.5 million as of the end of the quarter. Also, we as a company still have no debt whatsoever. Leaves us with a very strong balance sheet as we move forward, continuing to scale our first facility and also moving forward with the construction of additional facilities. In addition to our 3-month performance, if we step back and look at our fiscal year to date, 9 months into this year, we’ve generated about thirteen and a half million dollars in revenue so far this fiscal year. Again, our cost of goods sold is about $17.9 million. When looking specifically at our cash cost of goods sold, $14 million.

As we look at the 9 months of operations to date, again, we are getting very close to adjusted gross margin positive operations. We have 3 more months in our fiscal year, we are looking forward to continue to ramp our facility and to show even stronger performance as we wrap up our fiscal year in a few months. Within the battery recycling business itself, the growth in revenue and operations really was about increase in our operational effectiveness as we continue to scale these operations. We work very closely, not just with automotive companies to recycle electric vehicle batteries, but also with large grid operators. A significant portion of our feed over the past few months has come from these large energy storage systems that are largely used to support data centers and artificial intelligence development.

While our revenue grew again by about 64%, we only grew the cash cost of operations by about 11% as we continue to implement our cost down optimizations to really be able to provide a much healthier gross margin in this past quarter. We continue to work with many government agencies and handle both universal waste and circular classified material, which does end up being a significant portion of our feed as we work with all different types of battery material throughout the country. Because of the operational effectiveness of this first facility and as we’ve continued to increase the capacity factor, we are moving forward with the construction of a second critical mineral recycling facility.

Over the past few months, the team has spent significant time meeting with economic development agencies, with politicians at the state level, and we’re excited to shortly announce the details of our next recycling facility to be located in the Southeast U.S. We continue to work with a lot of our partners as well. A lot of the decision of where we actually specifically put the second facility is in consultation with our partners throughout the supply chain, so that we continue to enhance operations as we scale the second facility. On our primary lithium business, we are continuing to develop our Tonopah Flats Lithium project, which is one of the largest identified lithium deposits in the U.S. We published our pre-feasibility study last fall and are now moving forward with our definitive feasibility study.

We’re excited to have been chosen by the National Energy Dominance Council and the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council as a covered project. Essentially, we’ve been selected for streamlined federal permitting as we move this critical mineral lithium project forward. This deposit is located entirely on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of the Interior. Working closely with the federal government and having these fast-tracked streamlined operations has been extremely meaningful over the past year. Last fall, we announced that we did complete all of our environmental studies that were submitted to the BLM and have been reviewed by the BLM itself. This is something we started back in the fall of 2022. Almost 4 years of efforts were culminated by completing each of those baseline studies and environmental analyses.

The DFS is really the final phase of the engineering and financial analysis that we need to communicate to our offtake partners, to our investors, and to all stakeholders. As we complete our PFS last fall, we are working towards the completion of this definitive feasibility study. Some of the stats from the PFS are on the right, which really show how we plan to scale and operate this 30,000 ton per year facility and the financial attractiveness of moving this project forward. For the 3 months ending in March, our financials presented here against that same quarter a year ago. Substantial growth and revenue from this quarter, about $7.8 million worth. With our cash balance, we also are generating income from interest on that cash balance itself.

While the revenue grew dramatically, we see only moderate increases in the cost of goods sold as we scale these operations. We continue to work with several agencies within the U.S. government who are funding specific parts of both our development and construction of projects. As we look at how we used cash over this quarter, we had a significant drop in cash really needed for operating activities compared to a year ago. Within this quarter, we didn’t raise any funds through issuances through our At-the-Market instrument or from exercising of any outstanding warrants or options. We ended the quarter with about $38.5 million in cash.

We look over the nine-month period for fiscal year-to-date, again, a very large increase in revenue and only a moderate increase in cost of goods sold as we continue to grow the product we make much more quickly than our operating expenses themselves. We continue to work with the federal government over the past nine months. Again, we look at how cash has been used. An increase in cash used to purchase property and capital equipment. Even with a much higher throughput in our recycling facility, we actually reduced operating costs from a cash basis in the past nine months versus the nine months of last fiscal year. Last fall, we did raise substantial funds and again ended this quarter with about $30.5 million in cash.

Separate from our financials, at ABTC, we do think it’s important that really all employees have company shares as part of their compensation agreements. This is throughout the entire structure of the company itself. When these shares are awarded, they’re generally issued over many years and spread out over time, and many of them are conditional as well, meaning they’re only awarded if certain individual or company milestones are achieved. When we work, preparing our financial statements, a decision is made about whether a future milestone is likely to be achieved or not, and even before any shares are issued, then this starts appearing as an operating expense on our financial statements. A lot of these expenses can be inconsistent as they show in some quarters, really as it becomes more likely that a milestone is achieved.

The chart there really shows that over the past few years, really the amount of shares actually issued to employees is relatively consistent. Just over 1 million shares per quarter, and again, this goes all the way throughout the chain of the company. We do think it’s important that all employees really do have ownership. It does align incentives, and it does allow us to grow together with the employees and the company itself. That’s the walkthrough of our financials from our fiscal Q3 for the fiscal 2026 year. Again, thank everyone for joining this call, and we hope you’re as excited about our path forward as we are.