Welcome everyone to the financial year Q3 Talga Group quarterly investor webinar. Today we'll hear a presentation from Talga's Managing Director, Mark Thompson, about the group's recent updates. Mark is currently in Tokyo and has a very busy week, so forgive us if there's any glitches. Following Mark's presentation, there will be a Q&A. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question ahead of time. You can also submit a question during the presentation through the Q&A function on Zoom. If we've received quite a few questions, if we don't get to your question, please feel free to get in contact with us after the webinar at info@talgagroup.com. I now welcome Mark Thompson, Managing Director of Talga Group. Mark, over to you.
Thanks, Candice. Let me say hello or [Non-english content]. The last month I've been away, or more actually on the road, mostly in Europe, and this week in Japan, then back to Europe next week, and then back here to Japan in a few weeks' time. Basically, out of Australia for most of 3 months on this trip, responding to what is going on in our world, and that is all looking like it is very, very good. Okay. Let me get going and again, so we can get some time back to our get back to questions time. Oh. Let's see if that works. Just checking, Candice, you guys can see that okay?
Yes, all good, Mark.
Okay. There's an evolution underway with Talga, and that is a good thing. We've always been about graphite's many uses for graphene, for advanced materials, and also battery materials. The battery materials has been, I guess, the strongest growth driver, and I guess what's happened in the last few years is we finally attained the permitting at the mine in Sweden, is that the market itself has also evolved from predominantly a electric vehicle market to a more performance-orientated market. This has played into our hands, to be honest, because our material's very good at fast charge batteries, high power batteries, and as you'll soon learn over the coming months about endurance, extreme endurance, for this sort of material.
Being supply resilience refers to the fact that we're an extremely integrated platform of mine to anode in reality, which includes the technology of how we produce that material. The acknowledgment of graphite now being the main missing link of battery sovereignty is starting to grow and the position for Talga actually has been improving radically in the last few months and in fact weeks. This is diagrammatically, I guess, the way we see things these days. At Talnode, which is our proprietary name for, we have a bunch of different anode products within that. Talnode, which is now up to variant. We have a C50, a C60 under development, even a C80. C20 is current.
This is our IP moat, I guess, around our technology, which involves the mining, but also the purification and the shaping and the coating to make fully active anode material. By owning not just the mineral source, but the processing and the product tech, this is really coming into its own now with the geopolitical evolution we're seeing today. The fact that our material is fully traceable and sustainable is helping a lot. The fact that we've been doing this for a few years now, obviously held up to a large degree from permitting of the natural source. In the meantime, we were not hanging around when it comes to the products and the tech, and those things take years to mature, but that's what's arising now.
Just to reflect then on what the company, how it, how it's operating these days. Our raw material division, as it were, obviously means the mine. This is the largest and highest grade graphite resource in Europe. It produces only battery product. It doesn't produce industrial-sized flakes and commodified versions of graphite nor raw material, and it's Swedish. It's not coming from somewhere like Australia or Africa, Brazil, or somewhere else in the world. It's a very, very short supply chain to European customers, and it's a very effectively in control, stable jurisdiction for delivering things to Japanese and American customers as well.
By having the refining and anode production sites as well, the bit that's been missing with a lot of companies is knowing how to not only purify the material but also shape it and coat it, and that is what we produce, which means you're capturing the entire value chain. The fact that this is now a foreign entity of concern-free process or prohibited foreign entity, these are terms from the U.S. that are now being used more widely. This is becoming of great value to people, particularly obviously in defense and dual use situations. The recycling potential which arises from that purification is now fairly well proven. The silicon product and other products that we have allow us to expand our access to various customers in various ways.
I must say that those markets are based more on, obviously, there's a sustainability argument for recycling, which is maybe not the main focus at the moment, compared to the high-performance graphite anode material for the high-power market. Then you've got the energy market, which is where our graphite and silicon sort of can work together. What we've done, I guess, is left the confines of a European-only story when it comes to sales and expanded to not only looking at other jurisdictions within Europe for potential production, but also potential production in America and Japan. Interacting with not only them as customers, but also as financiers, for collaborations back into Sweden as well. On the market side, the growth continues to power up and continues to outperform.
A little bit like looking back at the solar market where everyone's projections are actually like hockey sticks, but they were being outperformed by reality. In recent times, or let's say in recent years, you've seen a lot of negative stuff about EVs, but actually EV sales continue growing like crazy. The BESS, you know, which is energy storage systems, that's been growing like crazy. Total volume of anode's been going up. What's interesting is the stresses that's now creating throughout the system. You've got a lot of battery production obviously out of China available. As America and places like Japan and others are trying to wean themselves off that, they are actually coming into problems with supply, and China's keeping more material for itself.
The interesting thing for Talga is that the high-performance market, which is things like your robots, autonomous vehicles of many sorts, unmanned vehicles both in the air and underwater, everything from submarines to torpedoes, to drones, to different sorts of radios, to all sorts of devices used throughout the world. That market has actually grown so fast and big enough now that that alone is able to sustain us. Whereas a few years ago, probably when we first developed a lot of our feasibility studies, the only volumes available to sustain a new development was the EV market. EVs have turned out to be pretty low, I guess, on the execution and trust phase when it comes to continuing with the programs that they've talked about for a long time.
That is also now bouncing back in many areas. The sheer volume of battery demand continues to power positivity across many sectors that we work in, and we are particularly focusing on the premium segment. EVs have now become not a commodity, but have become a sort of more commodified lower-end form of the anode market and the performance variants where premium pricing lies are becoming the exciting amounts of volume. This unbelievably is still only just being understood that graphite is the biggest component of the batteries and is something that they never solved for. While a lot of companies we're meeting on the road every day are well aware they've got supply chains for lithium, nickel, cobalt, whatever else they're doing, manganese, they don't have a graphite supply. They've never thought. High energy. Remarkable sales.
I was just there the other day visiting them in Germany before I came here to Japan. Really exciting to see what they're doing down there. Really incredible, sorry, I'm falling over things, being in the technical world versus commercial. Anyway, that's about high power predominantly. Which has got a lot of applications, not just in vehicles, but also in industrial automation, robots, power tools and other things, which are now quite big volume markets. Then on the dual-use side, which is a sort of euphemism for defense, frankly. That's a, that's a really exciting area. It's less price sensitive, but they're much more concerned with supply chains, and there's a lot of new things that have happened for us in that area recently.
As you know, earlier in the quarter, the mine was finally permitted for the first time, earlier in the quarter that we're referring to. Our commercial plans for building the commercial plant continue to evolve. This is the site. The site itself continues to develop quite well as much as we can. Obviously, we're working on financing of this commercial plant, and that's in 2 phases. I just want to point out here that what we call the anode refinery is actually a combination of a purification plant and a coating line. That does shaping, coating and anode production. What we call the anode refinery is not just shaping and coating, it's actually purification.
Most other companies can do one or the other of these things, but they don't do both together. We're just sort of pointing out that this is modular. In other words, the mine obviously cannot move, but the purification plant could be built anywhere. This site is fully permitted for the purification we use, which is an alkaline system rather than an acid-based system. The coating and anode lines, which are the finishing parts, they can be either duplicated in other countries to expand, for example, in the U.S. or Japan. They could also be somewhere else in Europe, for example, where if there was a financial imperative to drive those lines being somewhere else, then that could be done.
The purification could stay in Luleå, and the coating and anode lines could be moved somewhere else. I just want to point out that the modularity of our design is not just about expansion scalability being attractive. It also gives you options now where we can, I guess, optimize what sort of financial opportunities are available to Talga to finish this funding stack on this project. Here I just talked about that scale-up plan, the Industrial Leap, which was funded originally by the Swedish Energy Agency partially and is underway. The FEED study at the moment is to go into the first large scale, the 5,000 ton per annum scale, as lines on the way to the full scale plant being built.
It will incorporate our current existing stockpiles, unless those stockpiles are sold to a buyer in some other way. In which case we would tap the mine for some more material. Yeah, it's quite exciting some of the new opportunities coming up there in this world this year. The full scale is also still attractive in its volumes for the sorts of customers that we're talking to. Let's talk about where we're at. 9 work packages underway on the FEED study. For those of you that don't know, stands for Front-End Engineering and Design. This is about getting to the point where you can basically start construction subject to finance. The finance obviously is related also to offtake, and that will be talked about in the next slide.
Right now, all the engineering and technical work's been. There's teams and teams of people working around, not only in our office in Luleå in Sweden, but around the world in all of their sites as well, and back in Australia. All the stakeholder engagement and IP and risk management work, we have tried to push back a little bit to into September. Why, you may ask? There are some timing issues around the mid-year, but it's also because of the second stage of the funding that was pulled by the Swedish Energy Agency when they lost their budget for this year, and Talga was expecting to get AUD 100 million Australian equivalent in funding for the rest of that project.
To moderate our spend rate, combined with while we close out some other deals to hopefully replace that sort of volume of money, then that made sense to phase that up a little bit. The deliverables are well underway. The site establishment is well underway. There will be more action probably first thing around the summertime, which is coming up. The good thing about having this levered way up into the project rather than just building a whole thing is, in reality, you'd be commissioning these parts anyway in smaller chunks. Because the way this was designed to take advantage of subsidies, then it also meant that those subsidies were paying for a lot of the costs of the infrastructure and the setup.
Excuse me. They didn't actually require the mine to be started. The CapEx from the mine could be not on your books until you really needed it, because we could use the trial mined material. Right now, this FEED project is getting us set up to make a financial investment decision on push the button on construction once this FEED study's done. On the commercial side, we've now got record volumes of coming out of the EVA plant, which is frankly, quite expensive. Obviously increases our burn rate. It's for a good cause. It's for the customer demand that's just taken off this last quarter.
We've got a lot of new customers coming in with higher pricing and with more exciting applications, frankly, in the BESS systems, the robots, the drones, the hybrids, as well as EV customers continuing to work and develop. Predominantly, we're chasing the premium end of the market where there's a requirement for high power and fast charge, and also where there's new customers that are being driven to us because we're a non-Chinese supply chain. Not just with the source of the raw material, but in the production technology as well. We have a lot of multi-year qualification activities, both for Talnode products, different types of Talnode-C, as well as just purified, like battery-grade Talphite, which is 99.95% battery-grade graphite, but it's unshaped and uncoated.
We have customers who are wanting to purchase that at numbers that make, frankly, very attractive sense. Both are being worked on with customers, and it's one of the reasons why I'm here in Japan as well. We haven't seen a lot of that go public. I'm expecting a lot more to be delivered on that this quarter coming that we're working on right now. We have also upped our agreement with UCC, and things are Collaboration with the U.S. government, with them and with customers have been very, very strong.
I was at the big battery show in Florida. From there went up to Washington. So have been back in D.C. We have a lot of programs underway there. We've applied for various programs that have got money involved with them from the U.S. government. We're continuing to do that in new ways as well in Europe and also in Japan, where it's a little bit more one-on-one. We're quite excited and we've been making great progress with the UCC in America. The JDA, which is really sort of a conditional, in a way, sort of sales contract with V4Smart. The qualification process does take a long time. There's a lot of give and take and really excited to just get something on the board with them.
In reality, they've been using our material or testing it for some years, now it's just scaling up. We're excited to keep developing that. For those of you wondering what does non-dilutive funding mean? It means just trying to stay away from the equity market, frankly, from the share market. Obviously, we've been having a rough time of it. Amongst our colleagues, I mean, no excuses about what we do, but these you know, the entire sector has been really hard hit from the grants going down for us, from the anti-dumping provisions going down in the U.S., just general, you know, pressure from the overcapacity out of China, lack of commercial news for anyone. It's been extremely difficult. However, pricing is starting to go up.
Probably more exciting for us is that the opportunities for waking Europe up from its slumber have been somewhat successful, I would say. The rebates available from places like France, the tax rebates, which can be as much as 30% of your capital costs, has been a very successful formula down there. The ability for people to look at strategic interests into the project are, and further grants and further subsidies and interest-free loans are underway. Extremely low-cost long-term debt is also an option that's being offered from government bodies in different parts of the world. There's also an interest to purchase some of our material or prepay for material, and there's discussions underway on caps and floors and different forms of pricing support to help match our customers up with anode production like Talga.
All of these things you've probably read about over the years and seen operating in places like the U.S. are now spreading into the Europe very slowly. It's true that over time they have been, we think, woefully under-supportive, when it comes to the financial side. Now we're taking a very hard view on what's available and how we can benefit from it to make sure we get where we need to go. A lot of customers, including confidential ones, that are public obviously, but have provided letters of support to the government. The various forms of government can sort of see that they've tested the material, they want the material, they've validated it and they want a supply of it. They want to see us succeed. They want to see us go into production.
They see it as a national security issue as well as commercial, and they're pleading with the governments to do more to help us go ahead. Various forms of sales contracts are underway, and the reason why you haven't seen, I guess, as much of them over the years as we thought is, one is that the EV-type people, the auto OEMs, shifted around a heck of a lot. All their plans continuously changed, including battery chemistry, where they were going to produce, who was making batteries. One second Volkswagen's going to have 100 GW somewhere in Germany, the next second it's not, it's just going to import from China. There's been a lot of changes, mostly from the customer side from us. It hasn't really been from our end technically.
That has matured now to the point where for a lot of premium priced applications, we can go forward now. The fact that our IP and product offering is good has been extremely useful. Yeah, it's also relatively underappreciated that we currently produce anode. Like we're not just testing from a lab, we're not piloting. We produce tens of tons of anode every month that goes out to customers that are paying for it to various degrees and various pricings. We currently produce anode, and a lot of those are using it for these applications of which we speak. Some of them are actually in the street now, out in the world, and others are very close to it.
It's just for defense purposes in particular, and things that are relatively small volume, but with premium pricing, there's actually the opportunity to add more shifts to the EVA plant and expand, which was part of what we wanted to do in the early phases of this Industriklivet program. That's still something we'd like to achieve and have demand for right now. The usual things that you would expect in a way that we should be working on, which is why I'm on the road and out of Australia for months and months now, is to join the team and push in ways that maybe I can link the technical and the commercial in different ways around the world.
It's also at a time when my role can impact on where a lot of these discussions are at on sales contracts and offtakes into various ways. Also to talk about co-investment into the project, both from governments and customers and also from trading houses and mining-type houses. As well as chemical companies as well. Also with government to look into the various forms of state support, not just looking at it and applying for grants, but more direct, more direct discussions to try and find solutions for how the CapEx can be decreased from having state or European Union or larger government support and where that can be. That includes working bilaterally with government.
With the, say for example, here in Japan, there is a Japan-Sweden link and Business Sweden and the embassy here have been fantastic proponents for us in Japan from Sweden. There's also a link from Sweden and Japan back into America, and there is separate agreements, I guess that link Japan back down to Australia and so forth. We're also working amongst those and the agencies are becoming well known to us in that they recognize they're trying to help us now fill those problems for their customers who are their nations. At that point, I should probably wrap it up and say thank you very much.
I'm really excited about what we're doing and where things are coming to finally for us and in some ways post the mine permitting, you know, finally getting cleared only in February, you know, this year. Then having the real shock of the Industriklivet program grant money disappear. From that, from that event, it's actually led to a great sharpening and a realization of, you know, Somewhat of a change of strategy around funding options. Instead of relying on that and the way we were going, we've now been able to open our eyes a little bit wider to opportunities then. If that funding's not coming from Sweden, where can that funding be coming from? That's actually opened some really exciting new opportunities for us.
It's been really great to get on the road and catch up with the team making this happen, and really excited about what we can talk about in more detail over the next very, very short while, over the next coming few months. I'll leave it there and let you pester me with questions that I can enjoy answering.
Thanks, Mark. We will now move on to the Q&A portion of today's session. Some questions have been addressed during the presentation. Others we've received beforehand, will be consolidated into one question if several people ask the same thing. The first one, Mark, With the recent U.S.-E.U. Critical Minerals (MoU) highlighting potential joint projects, how is Talga engaging with the European Commission on this initiative? Is the Vittangi project being positioned as a candidate?
Well, the second part's easy. That's yes. The Commission's well aware of our project. To be honest, we've probably been seen as one of the most accessible and, like, we've been a bit of a flagship project for proving that it's ready, that we've made the investments and taken it up to a high level where the results now from customers are able to be put in front of the Commission. I would say that the ball's in their court. Entirely. We've promoted very well to them. We've made investments in various people going down there. Sacha Keen, our corporate finance director, is down there all the time. He's based out of Portugal. Emma and all the team out of Sweden and EVA from our board. Marty out of Sweden as well.
There's a huge amount of interaction every week down there with someone from the Commission and some of the DGs. I would say that things have advanced quite a lot, and there is a lot of media and commentary that is been hurting them, which is based on how ineffective they have been. How they are sitting on vast quantities of funds and legislation that has had almost no effect on building anything. I think I read the other day that of what the 65 strategic projects, only 3 are in construction, and those were done beforehand, and one of them has gone broken. No one's received any financing at all from the battery booster project or anything else.
The frankly, you know, of course for us, abject failure of them to take any action is now just not an opinion anymore, it's just a fact, and that is spurring them to work out what they can do. I would say that we're very well placed for that, and we are also now very well-known in Washington and well-known in Japan, and that is helping the commission and the E.U., maybe sharpen their pencils a bit. We're very, very active in it.
Will the planned 5,000 ton per annum commercial anode plant in Luleå also produce Talphite? If so, what annual volume or percentage of output could we expect from that first phase plant?
From the first phase plant, no. It's supposed to be all anode. However, if we have enough volume and there's a reason why some of the material from the purification plant can be sold off as Talphite for a margin that's at least as good as the anode or better, then we will look at it. Right now there is no non-anode plan to come out of the stage 1 plant. Out of the stage 2 plant, we are allowing for, you know, the original, say, roughly 20,000 tons of anode. There could be, you know, 4 - 5,000 tons of that being Talphite, that is not our focus. It is subject to, yeah, a lot of negotiations that are underway, particularly around price and usage.
There's some customers that currently, coating material they buy from China, they would like to instead buy that material from us, but obviously the price has to work for us. It has to be at least as profitable as Talnode, otherwise you would rather just sell the Talnode. That's about all I can say on that. In the first stage, it's not planned to produce any Talphite unless a customer is paying enough that it's the same level financially.
Is Talga still actively working with Altilium?
Yes. Altilium are very, you know, obviously they're, they're busy working on predominantly cathode and like recycling everything. I think that maybe it's a little unclear in the market what they're doing anode-wise in that they're when they talk about having a 99% anode recovery tech or something like that, they're talking about the recovery of the graphite. They're not talking about the making of the anode. Talga purifies so that they have a very high recovery of graphite from their project, from their recycling. We do the purification and the shaping and coating and turn it back into a usable anode again. Yeah, we're still working together, and it's really exciting to see them continue to grow and, you know, their shareholders are what? Marubeni, I think, and SQM, who are friends of ours.
We are very interested in what they do, and they're interested in us. Yes, it's interesting. I mean, the recycling we saw is obviously a sustainability issue for many people around the world, but there's a lot of companies, battery companies, including here in Japan, that it's just built into what they have to do. They can see they're going to have to do it, and graphite is the bit that hasn't been done because of the processing side, turning it back into anode. Now that Talga's proven that, the real hold up on that is going to be the customers. It's like, okay, well, who's buying that now? Who's ready to take that material?
That's why we needed the FEED or sorry, the stage 1 plant to include recycling is to produce enough material that everyone can start qualifying it and get back to us about the commercial needs going forward.
What is the current status of the building permits for the mine site infrastructure?
As I know, they're advancing. They're not done or we would have said anything about it. As far as I know, they're just advancing and I'm not hearing that there's anything other than the usual local, just minor issues to you know, there's a lot of box ticking to go through and so forth. We don't you know, things aren't really waiting on that anymore. There doesn't seem to be so much pressure anymore on that, on that end. It's more around the anode supply end and, yeah, I would say that the smaller parts of the permitting process now, you know, the all the majority parts have been done. As far as I know, there's no big issues there.
In the two and a half years that these announcements were made, has there been any actual on-site construction activities performed for the anode refinery, i.e. where physical machinery has commenced excavation, installation of infrastructure buildings, et cetera?
Yeah, we've shown pictures of that over the years. I mean, we haven't put up buildings because, I mean, you can put them up, you can lease them, you could rent them, you could do anything you want and make it look impressive if you want. What we've focused on is actually sewerage works, water works. Wastewater in particular is a big deal. You need very expensive deep drainage to go from there and out to the sea in the pipe that's been built. Power, like we've got a 40 MW power allocation there, which we've negotiated over time, and transformers and lines and things have gone in for that.
We've cleared all the trees in the area, and we've got a concrete batching plant there on site, and we've constructed all the drains and the fencing and things around there. We've done what's appropriate to do without pushing the button on more expensive stuff that we know would look exciting, that you build a shed and put your sign on it, but in reality it's empty inside and it's a, it's a waste of capital, frankly, until you're actually ready to go there and use it. We look forward to doing that. We want to build on it.
We've done everything that's needed and there's some more things we will do that we'll nibble away on. We're not fully funded yet. Funding any more on that site right now isn't really the way to go.
We saw you tweet from France. What were you doing there?
Yeah. Mr. Gallezot. Well, France has actually got a very effective range of subsidies. A couple of things. Number 1 is that a lot of our customers are in France. In the European battery industry, it's surprising all the plans that were for battery factories all over the world, from Northvolt in Sweden to various groups in, whether it's Italy, Croatia, Czech Republic, you name it, there was battery factories everywhere, U.K. As of today, the ones that are actually producing material are groups that are publicly known to us like ACC and Verkor are public. We have relations with them. There's several others that operate there that are not disclosed, but they're well known. France also has a very. They obviously have an EV industry.
They have Renault and other car makers there. They have Stellantis. They also have those battery factories are commissioned now, operating well, on the verge of full qualification and going out to their car customers. From that you can launch further modules and further growth. It's exciting that they're about to get turned on, you know, properly in anger. Also the defense side, they've got a really strong dual use in economy in France. You've got a lot of big defense companies and a lot of industry out of there, and they are also tapping batteries. Some batteries that are imported from China or materials that are coming from China are okay for EVs, but it's not okay for defense and for more sensitive applications. We've, we're finding a lot of interest.
The French government since Sweden, you know, pulled that budget and pulled that funding, they've become more interesting to us to potentially do some part of our project down there, frankly. The opportunity would be there to shift either some of our current planned production down to France or to have separate expansion modules in France. We're talking with the government agencies there about what their interests are, what their volumes and timing are, what sort of support would be available if Talga was to do something down in that area. That's why I was in France.
Okay. Are we seeing changes in the use of synthetic versus natural graphite? Like with BYD announced it's using natural graphite for its super fast charging. Is that an opportunity for Talga?
Yeah, absolutely. It's totally in our wheelhouse. It has been for years, we just haven't. EVs were all about sort of longevity, energy density. For a lot of applications now it's about fast charge and high power. Those fast charge things were really interesting because frankly, if you go back quite a few years, we showed fast charge results that are far better than what BYD published. That was, you know, back 6, 7 years ago. No one paid any attention then. These days it's actually been attracting a heck of a lot of attention for all these new type of applications. The fast charge applications, which aren't about EVs, they're actually about the performance of individual applications, how they work. From an EV point of view, that was really exciting.
Yeah, the reason why they're publishing a natural graphite product only is because natural graphite goes faster than synthetic. Synthetic, you never crystallize the stuff properly. You just can't get there. You can't replace 2 billion years of Mother Nature cooking up your graphite with something that just sits in a furnace at 3,000 degrees for a few days or weeks, and you never get there because you can't do the pressure component as well. Natural graphite. There's different natural graphites get cooked to different degrees naturally. Ours is really well cooked, and we've really high crystallinity, and that means we've got really super fast charging materials. Yeah, we look forward to competing with BYD's numbers, and I look forward to stating more about those.
Natural graphite's actually making a comeback, where for a lot of applications, they're now realizing that it works better than synthetic, and so it's coming back a little bit. As synthetic prices are rising because the oil, because of what happened in the oil industry, that means the coke and all the carbon-based products the synthetic was based on. Energy prices go up, synthetic pricing's going back up and then natural gets more competitive. Actually a lot of it's coming from just pure performance, which is fantastic for us 'cause it's not a, it's not an argument about price. It's just saying, "Well, how fast charge does your thing last for versus ours?" We can now compete them on fast charge. That's gonna be something to show.
Yeah, natural graphite's making a big comeback actually.
Okay. Last sort of 2 or 3 questions.
What are you seeing in terms of how critical graphite is in the world ex-China?
It's just growing in knowledge. I mean, you're not seeing it much in the media still. It's still woefully under-reported. It's still extremely misunderstood. It's new to everyone. I was just having today a meeting with a major, you know, defense prime globally and it's news to them. They had no idea that their batteries were coming from China. The material in the batteries is owned by China even though the batteries are being bought elsewhere around the world. It's only just becoming known, but it is becoming a lot better known. It's still getting swamped by all the interest in rare earths, this because of pricing, I guess, and because of various. I mean, here's something that's interesting.
In the decision that came out recently on the anti-dumping case in the U.S., and I'm sorry if I'm covering something out of my you know, like, we're not, like, I'm not like Sara and others doing things in the U.S., but we're doing some things in the U.S. and we're interested in expanding there. There's many opportunities there. It was interesting. We looked at the there was an anti-dumping case that found that China was deserving of duties of 160% on imports into the U.S. is what it would take to replace the subsidies of China on graphite. Objecting to that tariff or that objecting to that anti-dumping cost provision was Tesla, and Tesla had Jeff Dahn and some of their commercial people there.
They brought down, you know, Jeff Dahn is like, you know, Mr. Battery in the U.S. and around the world, as well as a bunch of other people. They had about six or seven people from Tesla there trying to stop the U.S. government putting this tariff onto batteries. That shows how important it is to them on trying to stop the price of that material from going up on the graphite. There is a real world addiction and knowledge of graphite for batteries being a, being an issue. They're all currently trying to use as much cheap Chinese material as they can for as long as they can, but they also know things are evolving away from it. The knowledge about it is spreading. Yeah, it has been slow and it's still very under-reported.
Certainly in Japan, there's not a sense of panic, but there's been quite a sense of there's some very un-Japanese like desperation showing up in because they, in particular here in Japan, they've been getting cut off from Chinese supply. It's happening to them first, whereas America and Europe are still getting supplies from China, but Japan's getting a little bit more constricted due to the export controls in China. Those export controls are currently being negotiated by, you know, by the U.S., by Trump and others there this week or in the last few days. We'll see what happens, but it doesn't really matter. The genie's out of the bottle now, where these governments and the security of these nations is now they're realizing that at the heart of the batteries is not actually the lithium.
That's got a more diverse supply chain than graphite. The graphite's actually a real problem. Once they see how big a problem it is, it's making for a fast response. Sorry for the long answer. Yep.
Okay. Last question. What is holding Talga back from more offtakes?
Mostly the time, charging time, the customers. It's mostly just customers spending a lot of time, really. Their plans change. They cycle like crazy, 6-1 2 months of cycling, come back to do more tests. It's just a very, very long process as you would see. It's not like every other graphite company around the world's been announcing offtakes. This is for anode, remember. This is not for raw material. It's not for SPG. It's not for purified material. They're raw materials. They're easy. You work directly with an anode company, and their applications change. Their company plans change. One second, there's a factory here we were talking to a customer about. The entire factory, they had a I can't say the tonnage, but it was for EVs.
Now they're converting the whole thing over for data centers and robot use. They want our graphite now, whereas before they didn't want our graphite. They were happy to get it from China. Now they can't. They've got to get it from someone like us that's got an FEOC free supply chain and our material, you know, with its fast charge characteristics. They themselves have changed. Yeah, it's just difficult to go public. It's actually a business that's not normal for people to do offtake contracts at all in. The anode business is actually done secretively. Yeah, personal contracts. It's usually none of it goes public, and it's only gonna be through the geopolitical changes and the demand that's happening over the next few months that are gonna allow any of that to go public.
Yeah, it's underway.
Great.
Doesn't, you know? Yep. It hasn't really been a hold up from our side. It's mostly just the nature of that business is slow and difficult. Remember that our deals we do are post-qualification, so they're not subject to qualification usually. Nyobolt, for example, they had already, you know, they're already using our material in the market. That binding offtake is actually post many years of doing it. That's a big difference to stating an offtake that say, you say they're binding, but it's subject to qualification. Look, I don't mind putting some of those out as well, and we can negotiate those, but they're not suitable for, you know, haven't been suitable for project financing before.
If we can secure the chunks of essentially, non-debt financing, which don't require that sort of offtake contract but a slightly different one, it'll be a lot easier to land, whereas getting a take or pay type contract in this material to support commercial debt is very, very difficult. I admit that that was a hold up with some parties, and that constraint has been freed from us just in the last few months.
Great. Thanks very much, Mark. That's all we have time for today. Thank you for your presentation and your time answering the questions, and thank you everyone for attending. Keep an eye out for the next investor webinar. Sayonara.
Farewell.