Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the IBAT Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press Star followed by the 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press Star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Siegel, Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter fiscal 2026 financial results call. I'm Brian Siegel of Hayden IR. With me today is our CEO, Joe Mills, who will provide a business update, and our CFO, Michael Rutledge, will review our financial performance. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that except for historical information, the matters discussed in this presentation are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Words like believe, expect, and anticipate refer to our best estimates as of this call. There can be no assurances that these will actually take place. Our actual future results could differ significantly from these statements. Further information on the company's risk factors is contained in the company's quarterly and annual reports filed on SEDAR+ and now with the Securities and Exchange Commission on EDGAR.
Now I'll turn the call over to Joe.
Great. Thank you, Brian. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We appreciate you joining us today to review our third quarter fiscal year 2026 results. It's been a very busy quarter for IBAT as we continue to progress our business plan and work to deploy our existing modular direct lithium plant and to help our potential customers with their analysis of how our technology solution can help them unlock the lithium potential in their brine resource. IBAT is still fundamentally in a positioning and execution phase. We are really pleased with the progress being made. Today's call is to discuss the progress and to reinforce where we are strategically, how the lithium market is evolving, and how IBAT fits into that evolution. Well, what a difference the past six months makes in the lithium world, as we've seen a meaningful shifts in the broader lithium environment.
The long-term projections for lithium demand growth has continued to gain momentum, prices appear to be following suit to incentivize supply. EV adoption globally continues to expand, especially in China and Europe, the AI build-out and data center demand for battery energy storage systems are now the fastest growing source of incremental lithium demand. At the same time, governments and industrial players across the world are increasingly focused on securing domestic and allied supply chains for critical minerals. We believe those forces are fundamental and structural shifts and not short-term cycles. What has changed compared to a year ago is that project evaluation activity is accelerating. During the downturn in lithium pricing, many projects were delayed, engineering studies became stale. final investment decisions were halted.
As pricing has recovered toward more sustainable levels and demand visibility improves, resource owners are reengaging and looking to move forward with investment decisions. That is an important shift because we are no longer just a concept. We are not just a laboratory technology. We're focused on advancing direct lithium extraction from idea to meaningful commercial supply. IBAT is one of the only public DLE companies with real-world field deployment experience, and we're leaning heavily into that message with our potential customers, and they are responding. As you know, we successfully operated our modular DLE plant in 2024, running more than 8,000 cycles over 83 days and producing 25 tons of high-purity lithium carbonate equivalent at the Utah site. That experience validated our core media performance, our column design, and most importantly, it generated operating data that informs how we engineer the next generation of plants.
We learned a lot and continue to develop the commercial technology of our media and our DLE plant. That experience taught us what works at commercial scale, how we can improve flow rates and optimize uptime, and most importantly, how we can continue to improve as the low-cost, most efficient DLE operator, which will allow us to compete in any pricing environment. Which brings me to what I believe is the most important industry shift we're seeing. Many customers no longer want a single piece of equipment. They want solutions. Many want a complete flow sheet solution. What is a flow sheet solution, you ask? It is the complete solution to extract lithium from brine water.
That means from the brine pretreatment handling, where we extract all the heavy elements or solids from the brine water prior to it entering our DLE plant, then to the lithium extraction process through our DLE plant, and then finally through the carbonation and refining operation, resulting in battery-grade spec lithium carbonate product. IBAT's DLE technology is key to that flow sheet solution but is only part of it. We recognize that our customers don't just want the DLE solution; they want the full flow sheet solution from pretreatment all the way to the refining process where lithium carbonate is generated. IBAT is responding to that opportunity, and that is a meaningful evolution in how projects are being structured. IBAT's core competency still remains in our proprietary extraction media, our modular DLE design, and the architecture, which, combined with our process, gives us what we believe is a low cost......
efficient and differentiated offering with strong selectivity, kinetics, and durability. We also understand that to win projects in today's environment, we must be aligned with the full value chain. That's why we're actively evaluating strategic partnerships that allow us to participate across the broader lithium flow sheet, not just the extraction or DLE step. Now, let's talk about the competition, because it is intense. There are a number of DLE providers in the market today. Some are bidding projects at economics that, in my opinion, are not sustainable. We're seeing proposals that appear to be at breakeven or worse, loss leaders. That is not how we will operate. I've spent my entire career in a commodity business. If you're not a low-cost operator, you do not survive the cycles, and lithium is cyclical.
Our focus is on ensuring that our technology delivers competitive operating costs and that our commercial arrangements preserve capital discipline. As we've previously discussed with you, we're focused on helping our customers meet their development plans by offering three distinct commercial models. First is our asset-light license model, where we provide our technology, media, and columns to customers who have the balance sheet and infrastructure to execute the full project development on their own. Second, though, is our cost plus plant deployment model, where we will build and deploy modular plants with defined margins and licensing components. Third is we will selectively pursue strategic participation opportunities where the economics justify it, and we can participate in the development of the lithium resource.
We have various ongoing discussions with counterparties involving one or more of these three commercial models and hope we'll be in a position to announce a successful commercial contract sometime in the near future. As we work diligently to land one or more of these commercial agreements, it is critical to be a healthy and functioning business with a strong balance sheet, so that our customers know that we will be there for them over the long term. With that in mind, we focused on strengthening our balance sheet and capital position by executing on additional investments under our existing letter of intent with EV Metals. We also achieved an important milestone by obtaining effectiveness of our S-1 registration statement, which supports our longer-term objective of aligning IBAT with U.S. capital market standards and opening up the opportunity to attract institutional capital at the right time.
These steps are not about short-term optics. They're about positioning IBAT to be a durable and profitable participant in this technology space. Over the past 9 months, the company has been and continues to be very active as we have evaluated over 15 different brine resources across North America, which does include the Smackover Formation, as well as opportunities in South America, while our collaboration with NESR continues to provide access to brine evaluation activity in the Middle East region. Some of these projects were not viable or did not make economic sense, while others have progressed, and we are still very active. Today, we have approximately 8 projects in various stages of evaluation. These discussions are detailed. They involve brine testing, engineering studies, cost modeling, and iterative proposal development. This process takes time. It is measured in months, not weeks.
We are seeing strong interest from our customer base and sustained engagement. Our objectives over the next 6-12 months are straightforward. One, secure one or more commercial commitments. That means negotiate a commercial agreement to deploy our existing facility and negotiate hopefully one or two more commercial agreements to deploy IBAT DLE technology in late 2026 or early 2027. We also continue to evaluate resource JV opportunities where we can align the DLE strategy with resource results. Two, deploy a modular, small-scale pilot facility where appropriate. Once we're able to secure a commercial agreement to deploy our existing MDLE facility, we are evaluating constructing a smaller modular pilot facility that we would be able to rapidly deploy to customer locations that have existing brine production.
We would work with them to test their brine on a continuous basis, to accelerate the analysis of the brine quality, and even produce small-scale lithium carbonate in the lab so that they can see the final product. This will help customers and potentially our own resource projects complete feasibility studies more efficiently and prove results to financiers or offtake providers. Collectively, all the information will result in FID-ready projects. Three, we continue to advance full flow sheet partnerships. IBAT has in-house expertise and relationships to manage processes from brine to lithium chloride. We are evaluating post-DLE solutions with strategic partnerships to complete the flow sheet to lithium carbonate. We're in active discussions with a number of potential partners believe offering a full flow sheet solution will be a valuable option for our customers as they evaluate full commercial developments.
4, we continue to enhance our technology and engineering improvements that reduce cost and increase scalability. It is critical to remain at the forefront of this technology race and work to improve our technology, both at the media as well as our column design and architecture, so we can be one of the lowest cost and most efficient DLE operators. Let me turn briefly to our third quarter results. As expected, revenue remains modest as we are still in a pre-commercial phase. We generated service revenue from brine testing activities, and we maintained disciplined operating expenses. Cash management remains a priority, and we believe we have sufficient capital to execute our current strategy. Again, the story of this quarter is not the income statement.
It is that IBAT is transitioning from proving its chemistry to positioning for commercial execution in a market that is once again seriously evaluating lithium development. We believe we have a differentiated technology. We believe our modular deployment provides capital efficiency. We also believe supply chain reengineering creates opportunity. We believe disciplined execution will separate long-term participants from short-term entrants. I want to thank our employees for their tireless efforts and continued focus to move IBAT to commercial success. We're still a small team. We are deeply committed to moving this company forward profitably. We understand the urgency, we understand the competitive landscape. We are determined to build IBAT into a meaningful participant in the next phase of lithium development. With that, I'll turn the call over to Michael to provide a more detailed review of the third quarter financials.
Thank you, Joe. Unless noted, all comparisons are for the third fiscal quarter of 2026 compared to the same quarter last year. As we discussed in the past, IBAT is still effectively in the pre-revenue stage of development. During our most recent fiscal quarter, we did recognize $30,000 of service revenue related to testing brines. Operating expenses remained roughly flat at approximately $450,000 in the current quarter, compared to approximately $468,000 in the prior year. Our SG&A used in day-to-day operations consists primarily of compensation expense, both cash and stock-based, professional and legal fees, engineering costs, and office costs. SG&A expenses for this third quarter were approximately $1.8 million, compared to approximately $2.1 million last year. The primary causes of the decrease were lower non-cash stock compensation and lower legal fees.
This year, changes in our warrant liability, net of non-cash cost of modifying certain warrants, caused income of approximately $3.8 million, which is a non-cash item that is mark to market each quarter based on the change in stock price. This compares to a $7.6 million loss recognized in last year's quarter. Fluctuations such as this will continue until all the warrants that have previously been issued either expire or are exercised. Net income for the fiscal quarter was $0.8 million, compared to a loss of $10.9 million last year, with the major driver in the quarter-over-quarter reduction being the non-cash warrant liability fluctuation. Our operating loss for the quarter, excluding the warrant liability, improved by approximately $300,000 compared to last year.
Earnings per share was 0 in the current quarter versus a loss of $0.04 per share last year. Turning to the balance sheet, at December 31, 2025, we had approximately $9.1 million of cash on hand, compared to approximately $10.7 million at March 31, 2025. During the quarter, we successfully completed a private placement for the sale of approximately 12.5 million units, each unit consisting of 1 share of common stock and 1 warrant for $2 million in gross proceeds. During this quarter, that we're currently in, on February 23, we closed an additional private placement for the sale of approximately 26.4 million units, each unit consisting of 1 share of common stock and 1 warrant for $2 million in gross proceeds.
This funding was in connection with a private placement agreement entered into in February 2025. With the cash on hand on December 31, 2025, and the proceeds from the private placement, which we closed after the end of Q3, we believe the company has sufficient operating cash to continue through at least the next 12 months. At this point, I would like to turn the call back to Joe.
Great. Thank you, Michael. All right, with that update, I want to thank each of you for your time and attention this morning. More importantly, I want to thank you for your continued interest and support of IBAT. As we push to move IBAT forward, we are intent on becoming the first true DLE player to operate at a full commercial scale. I want to assure each of you the sense of urgency is and will remain very high with the board of directors and the management team to aggressively move forward with bringing on new customers. I truly believe we have something very unique here at IBAT, and I'm excited about the potential and the journey ahead of us. Now I'm going to open up questions, open up the call to questions from the audience.
I'll start off by reading a few questions that were submitted in writing to the company in advance, and I appreciate that, and I'll answer those, and then we'll open up the call to questions from the audience. The first question that we received. I'll read the question first, and then I will answer it, and hopefully that will either generate more questions or answer questions you may already have. The first question says: You mentioned on the last call that there were upgrades you would make to the plant before deploying it as a customer. Have you made any upgrades yet? Can you provide an update on the potential plant upgrades you're evaluating and whether you are still planning on waiting for a customer before moving forward?
Also, comment on the development work underway for your Gen two columns and media and how that fits into any upgrades you're contemplating. A lot to answer there. I'll try and unpack each one. First off, have we made any upgrades yet to our plant? The answer is no. The reason is we can't really make any upgrades until, A, we have a customer, but B, more importantly, we need to know where the plant is going. I think it's really important that each of you understand, you know, water chemistry is very unique and candidly varies wildly over really small areas. You could have two wells in the smack over that are four or five miles apart from each other, and the water quality will be different. Obviously, water in Saudi Arabia is different than water we'll be seeing in Argentina.
It's critical that we first know where is the plant going? You know, who's our customer? What's the PPM content? At 100 parts per million, that's one answer. At 500 parts per million, that's a different answer. Then third, and this is very important for you to understand, we also need to know what does our customer want? What I mean by that is, what's the output, right? If a customer wants 300-400 tons a year, that's one answer. If they want 1,000 tons a year, that's a different answer. If they want 2,000 tons a year, that is a completely different answer.
The reason I talk about that, and this is also very important, when we talk about, and I'm going to use 1,000 tons as an example, that's 1,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent, LCE. We say that all the time. What does that mean? What's really important is we've worked through these challenges, this full flow sheet solution that I talked about here a few minutes ago. It's really important for you to understand what customers want is they want lithium carbonate at the end. Lithium carbonate plants, right, the refining process, the carbonation facilities that would be put behind our DLE plant, are not very efficient, right? A good plant has kind of an 85% efficiency. What does that mean? It means that they're gonna lose 15% of the lithium in that process.
When a customer says to us, "We want 1,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent," we first have to know what's the PPM, what is the efficiency of the plant behind us? Because in a situation like that, we actually have to generate 1,200 metric tons of lithium equivalent because there's going to be loss in the process. All those variables are needed. We have to know those things before we can start to upgrade our plant. No, we've not made any upgrades until we know for sure where the plant is going. Next, the next part of that question, can you provide an update on the potential plant upgrades you're evaluating and whether you're still planning on waiting? Yes, we're waiting for a customer.
You know, in terms of we know for sure that our filtration, the front end of our plant, needs to be upgraded. That we know for sure, we are actually commissioning. We have an engineering firm that we're working with right now to redesign the front end of our plant. That's something that we know we need to do. You know, when we talk about, and we said this in our S-1, we've said it in our latest Q, you know, the plant upgrades will range from anywhere from $1 million up to $10 million. There's a lot of variables that, as I just touched on, whether it's $1 million or it's $10 million.
If somebody wants the plant as is, you know, which today, at let's use 400 parts per million to generate 300-400 tons, candidly, our plant pretty well is ready to go except for the filtration unit. That would, that would end up costing kind of in the $1 million-$2 million range. Obviously, if it's going to go to Saudi Arabia and be in the middle of the desert, where temperature, daytime temperature is 140 degrees during the day and 0 at night, that's a different answer. There are certain things we'll have to do to, you know, make sure the plant can operate in those conditions. If the plant were to go to Argentina, it would be operating at a very high altitude, 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 feet of altitude. There, it's exactly the opposite.
You know, in Saudi, we're worried about 140 degree temperatures. In Argentina, it'll be very, very cold, we'll have to put heat tracers in order to keep the plant warm. Short answer is, until we know who our customer is and where this plant is going, we cannot do those upgrades because it all depends on those variables I talked about. The next part of that question was the work that we're doing on our Gen two columns and our media. I'll talk about the media first. Dr. Burba continues to work on this, the next iteration of the media. It is complex. Progress is being made, it's going to take time. You know, it's kind of like, you know, you do one thing and that works, or maybe it doesn't.
We're still working through upgrading our media. I don't anticipate any breakthroughs on that until possibly even 2027. I mean, that's not going to happen. Our current media is more than adequate for the purposes that we need. More than adequate. It is very, very good media, so we don't need a third-generation media. What we have works very, very well, and our customers are super impressed with it. In terms of the column, same answer. I've mentioned last time we were testing the larger 6-foot, about 6-foot diameter and 6-foot tall columns. Same answer. We're pleased, but there are some engineering issues that we discovered as we tested them that we're going to have to go back and redesign, in particular in our header systems. It's not discouraging. That's part of technology. That's part of working through. Same answer.
I, we don't need our 6-foot columns in order for our plant to be deployed. Our customers are extremely happy with our 3 foot by 6 foot columns. That's, candidly, that's all we need. You know, the larger columns really don't come into play until we're talking about 5 or even 10,000 metric ton type facilities. We don't need, for 1,000 metric tons, we do not need a 6 foot by 6 foot column. The 3 foot by 6 foot that we have today is more than adequate. More than adequate. Candidly, we really couldn't put our 6 foot by 6 foot columns in our existing facility. It just can't be done. They, those are too big. The framework of our current plant design would not accommodate them.
The new columns will not be used until we are ready to build new plants. They're never going to go into our existing facility, ever. It was just never designed for those size of columns. The new columns, when we're ready, and we're going to continue to work on them, we're not there yet. We have a lot more work to do, but that's down the road. Those would all go in much larger facilities. Okay? Good questions. Thank you. I appreciate that. Let me get to the next one. Is the existing plant currently being upgraded with six-foot columns? No, I just answered that. We are not, we're not going to put those six-foot columns in the existing plant. Thank you, though. I appreciate that question. Okay, let me see.
If you have a question and you're happy to, you know, submit it in writing, you can do that through the Webex. Let's see here. I'm going to read this next question: What is the estimated timeframe as to when you can redeploy the first MDLE unit? Are you anywhere close to an agreement with any companies on this? Yeah, let me touch on that. First off, the estimated timeframe, again, it goes back to what I said. Depending on where it's going to go, you know, the deserts of Saudi Arabia, or the mountains of Argentina, or the piney woods of East Texas, until we know that, we cannot upgrade the plant. We need to know what the PPM is. We need to know what our customer wants.
Is it 300 tons, 500, 1,000, 1,500 tons? Until we know that, we cannot make the upgrades to our plant. Once we know that, and again, let's assume that it's 300-400 tons, which is, you know, pretty much what we have today, and all we have to do is upgrade the filtration unit. That's 3-4 months. If we have to, you know, significantly upgrade the facility, now you're talking 6-8 months. In any scenario, that's why I said earlier, the earliest this plant will be deployed, once we have a commercial agreement, the earliest that it will be deployed is probably third or fourth quarter of 2026, or possibly even the first quarter of 2027. It will take that long for us to, you know, A, do the upgrades.
Again, if a plant is going to Saudi Arabia, we got to get it on a ship. That is going to take a month or more to get it over there. If it goes to Argentina, same answer. You got to put it on a ship. You're going to have to, you know, deploy it to a port. We have to get it on trucks, get it up into the mountains. We're talking about late 2026, early 2027, before the plant is actually deployed and running somewhere else. Are you anywhere close to an agreement? Look, we can't answer that. We are in active discussions. I just said we have 8 active projects that we're working on. We hope we'll have something soon, but I can't predict it. I'd be remiss if I even try to give you a deadline.
Okay, so that looks like that's all the questions in writing. Operator, Morgan, would you now open the line up for any live Q&A questions?
We will now begin the live audio question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star, then the number one again. Once again, to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. At this time, there are no questions in queue. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Joe Mills for any further remarks.
Well, look, thank you. First off, again, I want to say to each of you, I sincerely appreciate your time this morning. More importantly, I appreciate your continued interest in IBAT and your support. Look, I mean it when I say we are working as hard as we can to, you know, bring in a customer. You know, everything I talked about, we have seen deals done by competitors that are loss leaders. I don't believe in being a loss leader, I also understand the urgency of trying to get our plant deployed. We need a customer. We know that. We're actively engaged with a number of large players. I'm hopeful we'll have something soon. Obviously, you know, this company needs to put its plant to work so we can prove our technology.
All of that is not lost on us. Trust me when I tell you, this company is moving forward. We're excited about where we are. It's good to have a tailwind, right? Lithium prices have finally recovered. I think they will come back down, hopefully not back to where they were, but we will see there is a tailwind now, and that's really helping our customers make informed investment decisions, and ultimately that will lead to a customer in deploying our plant. With that, thank you very much for your time and attention, and we look forward to talking to you again soon.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful rest of your day.