I'm Mark Thompson, the Founder and Managing Director, and I'm going to try and go through a summary presentation that introduces the company somewhat, but mostly touches on some of the main activities of the last quarter and then get stuck into questions. We've had a lot of questions today, so I'll be leaving plenty of time to go through anything I don't cover off in the presentation. I'll just do a little technical check, if that's okay. I'm at time. Sound and everything's going okay there?
Yes, Mark. Everything's transmitting clearly to everyone.
Thanks, mate. All right, let's get going then. All right. So what do we say when we say we're integrated? Battery material and technology company means we are producing the final product you sell to a battery cell manufacturer all the way from the mined material. This is normally done in stages by different companies of specialisation. It's not done by many companies outside of Asia at all, and it's quite rare. We have the opportunity to supplement our mined feed now with the material from black mass, meaning recycled lithium-ion batteries. That's done by someone else. They create something called black mass, and if they choose to separate the graphite from that, we have shown that we can use that as feed into our same process, which is purification, shaping, and coating.
This is not just duplicating the existing Chinese supply chain of semi-processed purified material, what's called SPG. This is the full- Monty anode product, the same as what would be made by BTR, Shanshan, Hitachi Chemical, Mitsubishi Chemical, POSCO, groups like that. They're our peers. It's not just the mining. It's predominantly downstream chemical manufacturing. Why people like Talga, like the customers, and why people are interested in us as a source of graphite, which is a critical and strategic mineral in most jurisdictions around the world, is that one of our main differences is that we are in Sweden. We're in Europe, but particularly in Sweden, which is a renowned mining country, actually.
It's been producing a lot of minerals for a long time in iron and copper and gold and cobalt and other minerals, is that it's a very, very secure long-term investment jurisdiction, and we own 100% of our assets there. By owning everything from the mine to the final product, there's obviously an enhanced security you have there. We're now designated a strategic project under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act and the Net Zero Industry Act in Europe, but also we're very strategic insofar as being a tier one graphite deposit outside of the Asian supply chain, shall we say. Our material naturally suits high-power applications. This is a bit important in delineating, I guess, from the mass low-cost products into the premium or premium sector of the market. That's where we work with power-intensive and fast-charge applications, which we'll talk a little bit about later.
By being local to European manufacturers, there are upcoming regulations that impact them, and that makes us more attractive to them compared to imports. Of course, we are exceptionally green. Our Scope One, Two, and Three emissions are at least 92% lower than most of the incumbent materials today. There are regulations that are coming in that will start addressing fines on people that do not have emissions lower in their battery materials. You put that all together, and that is why Talga is a very strong proposition in the world of anode. Just a word on what is happening in the market. Interestingly, while the equity markets are really depressed, are really bad, demand, volume demand keeps growing like crazy, both for EVs, but more also for stationary storage.
The stationary storage is being driven a lot from both data centers and AI, which they need backups, and also solar and wind farms needing backups. As we've just seen recently with massive power outages in Western Europe, in Spain and Portugal, the nature of the electrical grids are changing, and batteries are needed to mediate that. Storage batteries are actually a surprisingly good market. Now, for some things like data centers and AI, for example, the power battery, the speed of the battery response is important, and so that can have an effect. Just as a rough guide, for every one megawatt hour of capacity and using batteries, that takes just over a tonne. It's 1.2 tonnes of anode, of finished anode. If you see a plant for 100 MWh of storage, that takes about 120 tonnes of finished anode in the batteries.
As you see more and more storage systems built around the world, and they're nearly doubling at the moment year on year, you'll see that supporting growth. It's not just all about EVs. However, EVs are getting surprisingly strongly, not just in China. Sales around the world are also surprisingly strong depending on the country. A lot of them are still tracking what were the previously designed things. Defence, every application of defence I'll talk about soon. Industrial machinery, automation, robots and humanoids. Sounds all very futuristic, but actually there's significant advancements being made in production, of commercial production of not only the existing sort of version of robots that zoom around factory floors and that sort of stuff. That's growing faster and faster. Actually the humanoids, which could be a really big market.
Again, you're looking at 5-10, 15 kilos of anode per unit, depending on the battery size, obviously. Again, they're looking for fast charge because their work cycle to charge ratio has to be quite extreme. This is not your standard trying to drag a car over 500 km type battery. These are new power-intensive industries and also heavy machinery. More electrification of mining and construction. Anyway, I won't go on. You can Google a lot of that stuff. In defense specifically, this has really taken off lately where really the supply chains were built for peacetime. More recently, there's been a lot of conflict, obviously in Ukraine, but other areas as well. We've had a COVID supply chain type response in some ways, and some supply chains getting cut off. Then you're also having tariffs and things happening with America.
You're seeing a huge amount of volatility. It's shaking up the supply chain. Graphite is recognized as one of the most important parts of that supply chain. Why? Because it's 98%, over nearly 100% owned by China. Not only do they control it to an even greater extent than the rare earth industry, but most of the material they produce is based on petroleum or coal. It's an extremely highly emitting and polluting and energy-intensive business to make synthetic graphite. That's your current material. That's where you're getting it from. By comparison, we're building a totally different project. The Vittangi mine combined with the refinery in Luleå, they're both now designated strategic projects separately. The mine under the Critical Raw Materials Act. What that does is it's a little bit hard to define.
I'll go into it maybe in a little bit of detail in question time, but it's been actually a big deal in Europe. It's been highly recognized there about the quality of the project and its effect on customers and financiers. That's where we are in Northern Sweden as an intro. Just a reminder, we have 27,000 tonnes of ultra high-grade natural graphite that is 100% battery flake size. We don't need to produce any industrial materials if we don't want to, unlike other natural deposits. We have the largest resources and highest grade in Europe. This is the stockpile from which we're currently producing material at our EVA Plant. Don't forget, we're not just a plan. We've actually been mining and processing and producing anode already on a small scale. We're doing that continuously, which is how you qualify your material through customer process.
Down at the refinery site on the top right there, you can see a picture I took just a few weeks back. You can see there the concrete batch plant there. It's all cleared, fenced, power is in over the road. High power. That's allowed us to, I guess, in the delays we've had in the Swedish permitting system for the mine, it's allowed us to continue working with different customers and really find better margin, more, shall we say, less flaky, more dedicated, more secure, more strategic off-takers that not only have got good margins, but have got a business that fits very well with our material, and it doesn't have to scrape along the bottom of just standard sort of Chinese pricing in the rest of the world.
We've actually had time to refine and qualify and validate our products with those customers, and that's gone really well and will lead to our upcoming announcements in future of our off-take parties when that's commercially available to do so. The recycled product has really taken off due to a lot of demand, and the way that's been developed, I'll say something to that. And silicon continues to be developed as well. They're all being tested by customers. You've got to understand that when it comes to battery materials, if you make the final material, it's not just a spec commodity. You make the final product, it's been cycled, cycled for hundreds and thousands of times with maybe one cycle per day. That could be two years of cycling for one customer, depending on their testing regime.
That's one of the big issues with everything to do with battery materials is the amount of time involved in qualifying them often is not actually your problem. It is just cycling time. It is just testing time. There are not many ways around that. Speaking of recycled, we are a bit pioneers. It is a bit underrated how rare it is. We seem to be one of the first that have got a commercial pathway to not only recycling material from the graphite from a black mass provider, but actually using it in an anode again to use it back in a battery. That is really hard. To purify it, to get the crystallinity and the shape and the performance of that particle to be suitable again for going back into batteries is actually a big deal. Graphite is 50% of the volume of the battery.
There is a lot of it, but it is not currently recovered. They recover the batteries for the lithium, for the nickel, for the cobalt, and for the copper and the aluminium, for all the metals. They do not currently have a, no one has got a solution for the graphite. We now do. We have been co-funded by the U.K. government and the EU itself have been helping co-fund the development of this product. We have some great partners in Altilium who are kicking big goals in the U.K. and Robust in the EU and lots and lots of other programs underway with many different groups, including auto OEMs who have got regulations coming in that will force them to use recycled products. Very, very good potential for this to continue to be an option for us.
The beauty of it is because we can feed the material similarly into our existing anode plant design, it means you could just copy that plant and put it in different parts of the world where you have that black mass graphite supply and be pumping out commercial anode somewhere. It sort of allows you growth opportunities you would not otherwise have. In summary, trying to get to the end here, get to questions. Battery market still growing like crazy. Being green, okay. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea is being fundamental, but it actually is fundamental. It continues to underpin everything. Once you have gone through cost discussions and the usual supply negotiations, your CO2 and your ability to comply with a lot of regulations that continue to grow in the world is important.
We are the largest and highest grade resource in Europe, and it's particularly good at making anode. So it's a nanode specific graphite deposit. It's very powerful in the amount of anode per tonne it makes. Therefore, it's of great import, not just to Europe, globally in reality. If we have that opportunity, we can prove the scale can be much, much larger and the exploration target of just under a quarter of a billion tonnes could be realized if you want to spend all that money on drilling. But certainly that would prove the case that in the earth's crust, this is quite special specifically for making batteries in particular. Being located in a super stable geopolitical jurisdiction is important. The ownership and the security of that, not having other people in the supply chain, the technology is ours as well.
Our IP is part of that, which is powerful. We're accredited to ISO level in many ways, which is needed by our customers. A lot of that is done. That is a strong moat. It's very difficult to get fully audited and qualified by an automotive company in particular. It's a bit like aerospace. As I said, the power in our area is low cost, but it's clean as well. When I say low cost, I mean it is a fraction. You're talking about less than $0.02 per kWh U.S. for some of our power supply and $0.03 or so for others, and even into the ones for some of it. Compare that to over $0.15 in the U.K. and probably $0.25 in Australia and other jurisdictions. It's very, very cheap. This underpins our competitiveness.
When you put that together, the whole package, that's why we have such low costs and can be competitive with China. We're very, very advanced. We've been making the material already, producing anode for three years now from our EVA Plant. We have real know-how. We have very, very accurate plans on financing, and those are all still in place and continuing to only improve. That's what we work on. Of course, we have skin in the game. Just a little word on behind the scenes. I just want to, I do want to point out that we have great staff. In Sweden, in the U.K., in Germany, and in Australia, everyone works so hard for Talga. I just want to, over time, try and reveal more about what we do. It's really difficult because it's very hard to show things.
are so many things that are proprietary and we cannot show the details of or even spend much time explaining how things work. I am going to try and just show a bit more about what we are doing. When you think about being vertically integrated, it means not just owning pieces of it and a lot of it is still contracted out. You just need extreme knowledge and competence about what you are doing. It is what, when financiers or customers visit our facilities, they see—the real ability to deliver. There is a vast range of skills all the way from the geology at the mine, all the way up through the different parts of the company into admin and HR and management. There has been a huge investment in equipment here. I am just showing some parts of our Cambridge Centre of Excellence.
On the left, you've got a glove box. You can see this is where we make coin and pouch cells there. You can see on the right, there's some of our cycling, just a small fraction of our cycling equipment. Again, we don't show some of our more modern stuff and stuff that's sensitive. In the middle, we've got our own scanning electron microscope. It's way cool. We're using this to help refine some of the products as well. On the screen there, you can see some, which and all of this stuff hopefully is all fuzzy enough that you can't see details. The point is that this is not like a mineral exploration company. You are not sitting on a company that's just promoting, sitting around for years, just promoting an idea. We actually have to walk the walk along the way.
We have to be delivering samples and optimisations and real data and real materials to people every day and interacting with hundreds of companies and picking away and choosing how to set things up. That is just a little glimpse into it. Therefore, we have multiple sites, as you can see. At that point, I will wrap up. Please follow us on the usual social media platforms and so forth and keep an eye out on what we do. I would probably rely more on things on other social media feeds rather than websites for real information. Apologies for everyone that we can't get to with details as much as we'd like. Hopefully, we continue exposing a little bit more of the company enough that you can see what we're doing. At this point, Shane, I'll throw it back to you for questions.
Yeah, let's go back to hoping for questions. Mark, you mentioned in the open a lot of names there and talking about companies that you're similar to. What is the status of the competitive landscape and competing products at the moment? If I can also just combine another question in there, has the current business environment changed the desirability of the project in terms of partner interest?
Sorry, while I was playing the screens, I missed the first part, something about other companies.
Just the status of the competitive landscape, yeah, and then how that's sort of changed in the current business environment.
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I'd say that everyone's, like a lot of the natural graphite proposed or even synthetic graphite proposals, I think the reality of their plans and models are coming home to risk a little bit. There is a lot of struggle. Prices have been low. They've been at record lows, and they're starting to come off that bottom now. The sentiment's been very poor because the Chinese have just swamped the market. They've stopped building a lot of new capacity, and that capacity has been getting filled up locally because their demand's been super high, and of course, it accretes year on year. I would say that the landscape's getting better. You're also seeing a little bit more competition come back in from steelmaking onto the landscape for synthetic as well. I would say that everything's been a bit held up.
The big theme has been in the last year has been a downturn from overproduction in China, rampant dumping. At the same time, with the change in the U.S. government, a lot of people stopped making decisions. With the more recent tariff things and the volatility, they're still not making decisions. From the EV, when it comes to then looking at the market demand, the battery energy storage and industrial and heavy machinery side continues to power along really well. Car companies are still growing. The EV base is growing, but the Western manufacturers are having problems making decisions. They're pretty flaky, shall we say, because their landscape's changing so far. I would say that the market for batteries continues to grow really rapidly, I mean, more rapidly than anything except things like AI. It's a great place to be.
I'd say that things are probably coming around more to what our sphere of excellence is. I'd say the market's actually coming to us a little bit now compared to what it's done in the past, where it was a race to the bottom against China just for EVs. Now there's a lot of companies that are heavily motivated to have non-Chinese material to then be able to sell into America and sell to lots of customers who can't take it. That makes us one of the few companies in the West and one of only a couple in the world capable of actually making fully coated anode.
Thanks, Mark. I guess if we turn to the sort of government response to those current business conditions, particularly with the more nationalistic aspects. If we look at the EU grants that you've already received, sort of when and under what conditions would you receive access to the EU innovation grant that you mentioned?
We're working with the Commission on that. The innovation grant fund, that money's milestoned with the project. You do have to match it with the balance of your finance for that part of the project. You start drawing down on that money in given milestones. As for other things to do with the strategic project status, that's under negotiation right now. We've obviously been in meetings recently. We've expressed what we like and what we want. They are contemplating that. We're having meetings with them and their different aspects, which range from outright grant funding all the way through to co-funding with private equity all the way through to building strategic stockpiles and getting involved in off-take type work. Those negotiations are underway. I must point out that for strategic projects, they are customised per project.
There is no one size fits all. Everyone's going to get a pool of a part of billions of dollars. It's actually customised.
Okay. So then it sounds like then those sort of EU funding opportunities that are available to strategic projects, because it's customized, you'll be able to align that to your project timeline. Yeah.
Yeah. The timing's working out fine. By the time that's done, you'll have the full permitting on the mine side done and the off-takes in place and everything else. It all should come together at the right time. Certainly, there's really strong interest. Our project is one of the more advanced, dare I say, poster children of critical raw materials projects in Europe. It's looking good for us getting the sort of support we want.
We have a very specific question on the CRM financial subgroup holding a meeting. Just wanted to confirm, is that all involved in that discussion of the strategic projects financing? Is that right? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. When I was over there, I just got back in the last few weeks. Yeah, after the decision, our team was already heavily involved. Yes, we were present at the subgroup meeting and have been a close part and have also had private meetings as well, of course. Yeah, we're deeply involved. It does not mean we're in control of everything, but we're deeply involved. Yeah, we're well.
If we turn, I guess, just away from that funding stuff to perhaps more on the ground. Now we've just got a few questions on the mining concession. I might just tag one or two together there. Firstly, what is the state of the mining concession? Then secondly, if the ministry grants the mining concession, can the parties make a further appeal? Yeah.
The mining concession, which is technically the exploitation concession, was granted by the Mines Department, and it was appealed to the minister, which is their normal stat process. The minister is doing a very, very careful job, has taken in all the material, and will be making a decision, we hope, very, very soon. We have very good relations with the ministry, and we do expect, we'd be very hopeful of getting something sooner rather than later from that. Yeah, it's not a court process. It's just with the ministry, who obviously have been very public about other decisions, positive decisions towards the project. You can't actually appeal that decision. If they reject the appeals that they've received, then the exploitation permit goes into force, which means it's legally clear. Actually, there can be no more appeals.
However, there is a way to ask for a judicial review. We have got advice that there is no grounds for such a thing, but someone could ask for a judicial review. In any event, the actual permit would be valid. Unlike what we went through with the environmental permit, where nothing was valid until the very, very end of the entire process, in this case, the ministerial decision, if it's positive for Talga in the granting of the title, then it's done. That's in force. You can actually proceed with what you want to do, even if someone wants to launch some sort of judicial review in the background.
Thanks, Mark. Would you say that that exploitation permit is the sort of final matter in terms of on-the-ground mining schedule?
Yeah, it's the biggest remaining one. There's always local things to do, like building permits. Our team is working on the local matters. The environmental permit was the big one. The mining permit, as I said, was granted, and we expect resolution with the ministry very soon. Everything else is being dealt with by our team at a local level. Yeah, we expect that by the time, remembering that we do have that stockpile to allow for commissioning and development and ramp-up of the anode refinery once we can come to fit and build the start construction of that, then there's enough time to overlap with the final local permits to go ahead with construction up at the mine. Of course, it's all subject to financing.
Thanks, Mark. This is a question from the Hattons. Have you been able to continue sort of off-take discussions during this whole mining permit approval process?
Yeah, it's obviously been hard. The main issue has been one of timing, right? Most people have got the battery makers have got their part of a product that has got a timeline when they need to start production, when it ends. It might be eight years, might be five years, whatever the life of the product is. The main problem was the shifting of the start point, knowing that when you could shift the start of production, the SOP date. In the meantime, it's allowed us to complete qualification with even more customers and have more choices about who we negotiate with and under in what way. It's actually been somewhat beneficial. Yes, we've continued making material and engaging with off-take customers.
I actually think it's been very, very significantly positive, actually, for Talga to be able to have time outside the normal big automakers who one day they're building a plant in Spain, the next day they're not. One day they're building something in America, the next day they can't. We've found other customers that have got more steady-state demand that will not be impacted by some of that volatility so much. We've been really successful, I think, at improving the outlook for our off-take portfolio.
Thanks, Mark. This might be a little bit of an off-the-wall question, but someone has asked, what is the status of the orb? I believe that's a reference to an orb of material that was manufactured from a very large cube on site. Yeah.
Yes, the large graphite, the seven-ton ball. It lies safely. It is of great interest to its owner, who appreciates it very much and has plans to place it in a very prominent position in a building, hopefully in the near future. It is safe. It is here in Australia, in Western Australia, in fact. It will be hopefully accessible for people to see sometime in future. Maybe some others can be made at some point in different things. In the background, I would like to also make some little orb widgets and things for shareholders to have a piece of, as we do with customers like the cars here and other mini orbs that we have. Rest assured, the orb is happy and well.
Excellent. Thank you, Mark. That's good news. Yeah, we've had a question on, and you did touch on it in your presentation, Taln ode- Si commercialisation plans.
Yeah, just I mean, obviously, we've been really, really focusing on Vittangi and getting the whole Swedish project up and running. But in the background, the silicon market's been going quite well, actually. The demand is really good, continues to find more and more people are adding more and more silicon here and there. It's not absolutely necessary for a lot of things, but for people that want it, we have a really low-cost, large-scale way of doing it. We continue optimizing it and refining it. It's cycling. It's just going through lots and lots of cycling tests with different customers. We just maybe can't go pushing it quite so hard without literally spinning it off or doing a deal with someone. At the moment, it's commercializing well. It's just that it takes some time.
Thanks, Mark. Obviously, you're very busy with a lot of activities underway and obviously pushing towards going into production. With all that, how do you feel about your sort of funding strategy, both near-term and long-term, and where Talga's positioned for that?
Long-term, it's very, very good. As I said, I think that probably the analysts like to think or are really forced to think that you will have to come to the equity markets for the balance of your project funding. Whereas in reality, we've always been very clear that our preference would be for a project equity sell down and to have at a project level, like at a Talga AB level in Sweden, and doing something with a big partner like we had with Mitsui and LKAB. We're really well advanced towards that situation again. From a long-term funding perspective, that combined with the debt, combined with the grants, and combined with the opportunities arising for European funding, both at state and federal levels, but also a lot of new funds getting set up to rejuvenate ownership of their manufacturing sector.
That's really sound. In the short term, of course, we always have we're reliant on the market for our short-term needs. We have been for 15 years. We've managed that, I would say, fairly well. We have just over AUD 400 million shares out on issue over 15 years now since we floated. In July, it'll be 15 years since we IPO'd and 14 years since we went to Sweden and only seven years since we started battery material product testing and/or development. Three or four years have been from the DFS. Yeah, we're always just reviewing our capital needs as required. When times are tough, we try and do the minimum thing we can. When times are better, we try and do something better. Yeah, I think the next few months are going to be really exciting.
As usual, we just have to manage everything as well as we can towards getting the medium to long-term, which is more strategic parties coming into the project, potentially into the company as well, of course, is one of the options we're looking at.
Thanks, Mark. We'll just bring up a few sort of peripheral questions. Someone was just asking for an update on Aero Lithium and if drilling was likely this European summer. Oh, and also sort of when is the drilling season open and closed in northern Sweden?
Okay. Specifically on the drilling season, it's actually all year round. It depends on the site. To be honest, most of the drilling we like to do in winter, because you just are floating around on top of the snow. You can go anywhere you want, and there's no tracks, and there's very little impact. You do have to negotiate about access if there's Sámi groups in there or reindeer that have come down from the mountains into the low-lying ground. Winter's actually a really, really good time because everything's firm. In summertime, anywhere that's outcropping is available to drill, anywhere that's not swampy. In wintertime, you can drill anywhere you want. It's actually year round. SQM, we're waiting for their foreign investment review process to finish from Sweden. We got ours.
The Swedes imposed this new regulation only about a year ago, and we had to go through it. Now SQM are going through it. Once that's granted, then things can commence in earnest. We hope that's very soon in time for summer work. In the meantime, we have been advancing things on the ground, excuse me, on that we have been doing further exploration and, yeah, developing the situation. Yeah, we look forward to them being able to be available for the joint venture to commence formally and start harder work on the ground. I can't tell you that'll involve drilling this year at this point until things are formally agreed.
Thanks, Mark. Again, just to run through some of the questions. Did you want to comment on the Vittangi expansion scoping study and sort of potential timeframes associated with that?
Yeah. Yeah, we've chosen to delay things a little bit to finish it. Turned out to be quite a lot of work. At the moment, we're trying to focus just on execution of what we've got, obviously, in our core short-term goals. While we did complete the mining scoping study, the downstream anode part, we have left for now. Also, we're actually continuing to find massive optimizations in equipment and the way we can process things and the way the OpEx changes. It does make sense in some ways to wait until those things are done before being able to feed those numbers back into that study.
The baseline is that we have delayed it or put it on hold for now until we not only get more info, but can free up some more resources while we just try and keep things very tidy and start to, yeah, just manage things better with a priority focus on the immediate Vittangi development.
Thanks, Mark. Another question in two parts. Is it possible to produce small quantities of anode material from the existing anode factory for profitable sale? The follow-on to that is, why is the anode material being produced for qualification purposes without financial consideration? I think that may mean, why aren't you charging your potential off-take partners for the anode that you produce?
All right. Again, I'll answer it reverse order, sorry. So we actually do charge depending on who it is, how big they are, what is happening exactly, what are they using it for, whether they're samples or commercial samples on their end. So we actually have produced income. It shows up in different quarters from selling the material. It is not a production facility for commercial purposes. It is a demonstration plant. Until there's a certain scale, the economies of scale, you cross over, where a certain amount you produce will be profitable. The EVA Plant was never built for that. It's too small for that. The start of the commercial plant could be profitable. Meaning you don't have to build the whole plant to be profitable. You could build just the first anode line could be profitable at the commercial anode level.
From our current stuff, you just can't sell at a high enough premium for the small batches that you do. It's not possible at that scale. It's just a scale thing. That's the catch-22 of anode making: you have to build something big enough to prove that you can commercially build something real and not have such a big technology risk and development risk in that gap. You have to prove competency and skills, and you have to produce big enough volumes for the customers to do their B and C samples, which are larger and larger samples than what you can get out of a lab. They need to see it consistently. If you don't invest in that, you don't have that, you actually really aren't capable of making anode. You're hoping you can, but you haven't done it.
Over the last three years of running EVA, you can prove that you've done it, and they have that material, and they're cycling that material. Some of that material I've seen is in a car driving around like a prototype car, and it's in prototype products that we've actually seen operating. This is the stages you have to go through for them to see that, to enter into the real off-takes, which is post-qualification, where they've tried the material. Unfortunately, it just can't be done profitably. It's not making shirt and buttons or something where you can make 10 of them and sell them with enough profit to then go make 20. You have to build it before you can get paid for the commercial scale.
Thanks, Mark. If we just turn back to sort of financial and capital markets questions for a second. One first quick technical question. Do Talga's loyalty options expire in September, and can they be extended?
Yes, they do expire then. No, they cannot be extended. Sorry.
Thanks, Mark. Yeah. Just generally on capital markets, how do you feel about markets at the moment and sort of how that is what's happening with Talga's share price?
Yeah, yeah. Really, really super tough capital markets. It feels like they've come off the bottom a little bit, but not a lot. Heavily negative sentiment just in general in the world with all the volatility. I am seeing some blue sky. I'm seeing more interest from really sophisticated investors and funds are starting to nibble again, coming back into battery materials. If you look at a lot of the lithium guys, even though lithium prices are still horrible, a lot of lithium-related companies are actually up 10%-20% off the bottom. There seems to be a sentiment that eventually demand is overwhelming stuff. Talga is a long-term investment. It's not short-term. I know that long-term can be whatever you want it to be.
Talga is all about just being a part of something that has got a purpose, has got fantastic quality assets, has got a position that's rather special. It has got various moats. Eventually, you say, "Why wouldn't you own it? Just own it and own it for as long as you can." Eventually, the markets will recognize that. Obviously, there has been a lot of stuff in the media lately about Warren Buffett retiring. He was pointing out that three times in his history of Berkshire Hathaway, the company's value got reduced by 50% just from the market. No change in the company whatsoever. It is just when the stock market crashes, their share price changed. No validity whatsoever. Yet, of course, up AUD 5 million percent over time.
I'm not saying we at Berkshire Hathaway are unbloody warrant, but I'm just pointing out that this is the way of some companies, right? We're a buy-and-hold type situation. If you want to trade, you do whatever you want. The market for us does never reflect accurately what the company's probably worth. Right now, I'd say it's undervaluing Talga a heck of a lot. We have a lot of upside to go from here. I admit there's been lots of delays in lots of milestones that people want to see. Having said that, we've seen other companies in our sector deliver similar milestones, and then nowhere they also have been smashed. The entire sector's down 60%-80% over the last couple of years. It's stopped going down.
It seems like a lot of these have started coming back up again, including some of the graphite companies who are up 20%-30% from their bottoms as well. Yeah, it is just a terrible, terrible equity market for minerals and resources in general. It feels like the worst is over to me. It feels like things are improving. I know we are getting a lot more inbound now. Yeah, I think same as last webinar, I am quite excited about the outlook.
Thanks, Mark. If we move on from there, I've got a question about conference attendance and how that sort of feeds into either we've just discussed on the equity capital markets, but also how that enhances or advances the project development.
Yeah, it is for project development. Yeah. We pick and choose conferences pretty carefully. We just do not go to all these industry ones because someone wants to go, who wants to get on a plane and hang around and get another hotel in some other city somewhere. We do not care. The reason why we go to conferences is usually customer focus. If you see us at a conference in Korea, it is because there is someone in Korea we are seeing. If you see us in the U.S., it is because while we are in the U.S., it could be some sort of technical conference or industry conference. That is because later on that week, there will be meetings in different states with different customers. For example, recently, we were at a conference in Italy.
I was like, "Why are we going to Italy?" I was over there at the time, so I went with some of the team as well. We were meeting with, there was, I mean, who was there? CATL, the world's largest battery maker, Italian battery maker FAAM, ACC, Ferrari, Verkor, Iveco, customers, investment partners. That's why we're there. It's not just we're there to hope. We usually have meetings with them there at their facilities or we're visiting something. If we're doing, obviously, if there's something in Perth or somewhere near us or near our place in Germany or near our place in Sweden, it's cheap and easy to pop down.
Sometimes we'll go to a conference because, say, there's one in Sydney, and we haven't been to the East Coast for a while, and we'll do that as a cornerstone of catching up with shareholders over in the eastern states who we haven't seen for a long time and doing the rounds with them. It is not really, to be honest, we don't really ever do anything just from a pure promote point of view, hoping that somehow magically there's support for the share price coming from those things. It is usually very carefully crafted by our comms team and for commercial purposes.
Mark, probably while we're talking about EU, a question online. When does Talga get to take advantage of being EU-based in order to stop China from dumping activities and dumping activities in Europe?
Interesting question. Currently, synthetic graphite types have actually got tariffs on them from Europe against synthetic graphite, but not on natural graphite. I think it's because they've never produced that much themselves. They also have investigated dumping from Chinese companies of synthetic graphite in, I know for sure, in Italy and maybe other places as well. They've imposed tariffs of over 100% on some of those companies. They haven't got around to doing it on battery materials yet. I think it's because it wasn't historically they weren't making the batteries there. I don't know when, but it's a subject of discussion in the halls of Brussels, shall we say. Between that, when you look at what's happened in America, where we can now sell synthetic graphite, America has got tariffs totaling about 130% on it now for anode material.
That's made anode material twice as expensive as it was before. Natural now regains its price advantage in that market, in that final end market. I could easily see that happening in Europe. We just do not know when. However, Europe has introduced CO2 and emissions rules and localisation rules. You have to have at least 10% local material in your products. In some ways, there is a whole bunch of different legislations and trade impacts going to be supportive of Talga, but they are not in place right now for 2025. They are coming up. That is only going to strengthen our position. I just cannot tell you when. On the tariff side, on the battery passport side, localisation content regulation, CO2 regulation is by 2028, 40% recycled material by 2030, 10% local material by, I think, 2028. A lot of things are starting to impact.
When you think about a two-year lead time to go from qualification to supply, then those regulations are starting to impact decisions of companies that have got, yeah, electric vehicles like your Ferraris as well as your Stellantis and Mercedes and your BMWs and your VWs, but also your Volvo Groups, your Scanias, and your smaller companies as well, your performance cars, hypercars. Also then your data centers, microgrid storage. Anything going into anything military has to, a lot of them are now non-Chinese stipulated. The anode has to be local. That has to be qualified now to be in production by 2027, 2028. Yeah, I'd say it's sort of underway. It's happening faster and faster.
Thanks, Mark. Very specific question on Coruña Council and whether they potentially could draw up the mine plan before a date in June.
Yeah. The government has stipulated that they have to complete the plan by the end of June. They did give them a month's grace, which they asked for, delayed it from now for just 30 days. They are just stipulated to do it. We're lobbying for no further changes to that schedule.
Thanks, Mark. Another specific question on Northvolt, I should say, sorry. They're reported to have problems with Chinese cathode manufacturing equipment. Just wondering, is that equipment that Talga is planning to use, or is that issues that Talga may face?
Oh, that's a good question. Actually, about, yeah, we've no, it's not a problem for us. Why? Because we made a very, very early decision that we would make anode differently. We wanted really high yields. Our material is different. And we've totally manufactured our downstream process around our mine. We haven't just squeezed our mine into an existing Chinese process. Therefore, we actually don't use Chinese equipment at all, which means we don't have Chinese software. We don't have Chinese chips in the same way that Northvolt did and came a bit of a cropper for them in various ways. Also, by the way, we're not exposed to Northvolt. For many years, we obviously had relations, but we were very careful about our situation there.
Word on the grapevine, or on the decline as it were, is that there will be someone taking over that plant. That may be of great interest to us as to who takes over that plant and it goes back into production. No, it's not the same threat to us. In fact, we get audited. When we have some vehicle companies and some defense-related people come up and actually audit our place, they go through everything, including mining equipment, the lab equipment, who's signing off on calibrating the scales in the lab, things like that. All has to be from other countries. We use a combination of European and some Asian/Japanese equipment that we developed our own processes for. These are proprietary. Some of our processes are patented.
We use most of the equipment off the shelf from other vendors that are used in different industries like the food and pharmaceutical industry. You should really think about it as a pharmaceutical-grade product. It's extremely high quality and very, very small particles, very difficult to manufacture. To make commercial products is extremely high quality. Yeah, we use the highest quality machinery that we get separately, and we're not getting it from standard Chinese vendors.
Thanks, Mark. We're approaching towards the end time of the webinar. I'll just hand to you now this final question as well as an opportunity to make any closing comments. The final question was, what are the next milestones for the company?
Obviously, we've got the combination of the local news that's a bit out of our control about when Sweden's going to do something when it comes to the administration and the bureaucracy there. That's always a good milestone when things come through. On the commercial side, seeing where we're advanced at with the Swedish permitting situation has allowed us to advance our offtake situation with some new customers that we really like, that we've come up with really good solutions, much more powerful economic solutions for us going forward. We're looking forward to bringing those out as big things. Thirdly, but probably the main thing is actually strategic investment.
While we obviously need to keep the show on the road, the big change, I think, in the value for us will be the introduction of major strategic parties into the project so that people can see that we have the rest of the funding secured, we have partnership in scale of building the project and expansions of it in future, and that they'll be participating in offtake and financing of those offtakes. That'll be the bigger picture. That is something deliverable in the near term for us. They're the major milestones.
Thanks, Mark. Have you got any final closing comments that you'd like to make for everyone?
No, other than, look, I have had an opportunity to talk to some shareholders recently of different scales up and down the company. I think that everyone has been driven absolutely crazy by the delays. They're being driven crazy by the share price being where it is versus the way we feel about the company. At the same time, a lot of people are like, "Okay, you guys have actually still been doing what you said you were going to do. It always gets delayed, but you end up getting there in the end." We are happy and interested in the company, and we are happy to own it and continue owning it. Yeah, I share that sentiment. I obviously am still second largest shareholder and still going through it.
Yeah, I think we just share the frustration, everyone, and just know that we're doing everything we can on our end, usually behind the scenes, maybe not in the most visible way. Yeah, I genuinely see, I think, considering how tough the times are that we've been through in the last couple of years, the disappointments that there's been in timing and in the markets and in every way, shape, and form, I have reason to be more confident about what's coming up in the short term for us. Yeah, thanks for your interest. I look forward to sharing more with you very soon.
Thanks very much, Mark. That is where we will leave the webinar, everyone. Thank you all for joining.
Thanks, Shane. Cheers.