Martin Sheehan, MP Materials.
Ryan Corbett from MP Materials.
Rick Galloway from LKQ.
Justin Jude, LKQ.
Joe Boutross, LKQ.
Ian Musselman, LKQ.
Jeremy Amwell, Amwell Partners.
Ryan Nye, Passaic Capital.
I Mario Gabelli, Gabelli.
Roger Saint- Pierre, Northeast Capital.
Derek Fiebig, AutoNation.
Shami Yuan, Chief of Investment.
Chris Kiper, Legion Partners.
Chris Geffing, Ethereum Asset.
Scott Stember with ROTH Capital.
Paul Fanelli, Hildred Capital Partners.
Yeah. Dennis Reiland, Private Management Group.
Stuart Sable with Wells Fargo.
Andrew Coye, Investment Corporation of Dubai.
Henry Morris, Caledonia Investments.
Vincent Amabile, G- Research.
Brian Nagel, Oppen
heimer.
Terrific. As I mentioned, it's going to be a great day. We're starting with a company that I've known for several years. Started out looking at MP Materials when they first re-SPACed about five years ago. Little did I know at the time that the company would soon be on CNBC every single day as a company at the epicenter of and on the right side of trade as it relates to the U.S. and other companies. But anyway, MP Materials is the owner and operator of the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mining and Processing Facility. It's the only integrated site of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.
The company is also in the process of a three-stage transformation whereby they will take the rare earth materials that they're able to mine at Mountain Pass, refine it, and become a supplier of permanent magnets for a host of industries, not only auto, but those that are clearly incredibly important for national security. The company's been in the news for its investment and backing by the Department of Defense, and so we'll get into that. But the company is about a $16 billion Equity Cap Company. About 14 billion or 15 billion or so total enterprise value, and we're delighted to have Ryan Corbett. It's also the only company that we have here that's a Las Vegas company. So the commute was relatively easy. Ryan Corbett is here. He's the company's Chief Financial Officer. I don't know how big the traffic is, but I appreciate that you're here, Ryan. So please join us. Thank you. After your slides.
Morning, everyone. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks, Brian, for the introduction, and Mario for having me again. Happy to be here. Get into it. Timing of this conference is always interesting. We do have our earnings call coming up here in a couple of days, so we will be sure to stay away from any quarterly-related commentary, and of course regardless, I will make forward-looking statements. Please refer to our SEC filings, and we'll refer to non-GAAP measures that are reconciled extensively in those filings. As Brian did a good job of laying out, certainly the rare earth topic has become very, very newsworthy of late. MP Materials sits at the forefront of leading the U.S. and North American industry in Rare Earths. We are the only fully integrated producer of rare earth products globally.
In fact, we do have scaled mining and refining capability in Mountain Pass, California. It's about 45 minutes from here. We have Texas. There, we do all of the major process steps from rare earths to finished magnets. One of the things that's generally underappreciated about this space is the complexity of going from rock in the ground to a finished magnet and the scale and capability that is needed to actually perform all of those process steps for a secure supply chain. MP Materials is the only producer that does all of those at scale today. We are embarking on our journey to scale magnet manufacturing with this audience in particular of relevance with our foundational customer for our magnet business, General Motors. We'll begin commercial production at the end of this year for magnets out of that facility for General Motors.
One of the things that's been very transformational for the business, as Brian referenced, is our transformational public-private partnership with the U.S. Department of War that we announced. I'm still getting used to saying that instead of Department of Defense. But you will see we have updated all of our materials to the new name. That really is such a unique transaction for the United States, for our company, and for national security writ large, and really the security of the supply chain for the companies that all of you here at this automotive conference are most focused on.
What we were able to structure with the U.S. government is truly a win-win-win for the company, for the taxpayer, and for the supply chain, where we have partnered to really combat the non-market forces that have been consistently present in this space over the last many decades, from a very long-term and thoughtful industrial policy from the Chinese to take over this space. We have one of the world's absolute best assets and have built some of the most incredible capabilities to secure the supply chain in the United States. With this transaction, we've removed the non-market forces effectively that have impacted the industry and set up a transformational economic platform for us to continue to invest to ensure that we are able to meet the significantly growing need for rare earth magnets in the Western world. This is just a quick view of some of our assets.
Certainly, it all begins with scaled mining and refining capabilities, which you see the Mountain Pass rare earth mine on the left here and our separations facilities, or at least a snapshot of a few of them in the middle. On the right-hand side is the initial magnet manufacturing facility that I mentioned, which we refer to, I think, fairly aptly as Independence. That also happens to be the street name that it's on, which was a very, very good coincidence. It certainly, from our perspective, is what this symbolizes from a magnet manufacturing capability perspective. I touched on this in my opening, but I think the thing that's really critical to understand about MP vis-à-vis the pretty significant attention that's been paid to various players in the market and start-ups in the space is that this is a highly complex process.
Where you need to be able to demonstrate economic viability and technical capability at each step of the process, both mining, refining, metal making, and the various process steps that go into magnet manufacturing. We have been on a multi-year journey, as Brian mentioned. We're about to celebrate our fifth year of being a public company. Mountain Pass has a multi-decade history. It was discovered in the late 1940s. There was the beginning of mining and refining capabilities there in the early 1950s. And so we've been able to leverage a tremendous amount of historical technical depth and operational data to transform the Mountain Pass site into the world's leading producer of rare earth materials for the Western world.
In terms of the transaction with the Department of War, that certainly, as I mentioned, is transformational for us and I think critically important to understand from the perspective of supply chains writ large, but certainly automotive supply chains, is what this has enabled us to do is meaningfully accelerate our build-out of magnet manufacturing capability that is critical for not just automotive, certainly, but everything that we hear in the news, data centers, physical AI, every single robot actuator has many, many rare earth permanent magnets that enable the translation of energy into motion. The same way that that is sort of the linchpin going from battery technology to motion in an automobile. Similarly you have that critical connective tissue, if you will, from a robotics standpoint. And given the number of automotive companies that are also robotics companies these days, it's particularly relevant.
As I mentioned, the way that we've structured this deal is the Department of War is providing a price floor for all of the material that we produce at Mountain Pass, the NdPr content within it. And so that allows us to continue to generate very attractive returns on our upstream business, which we have been reinvesting into the downstream business to scale magnet manufacturing in the U.S. To give a sense of the scale of what this has enabled, the Independence facility that I showed a bit ago was initially spec'd out to be 1,000 metric tons of capacity. That was targeted for General Motors primarily, and following very quickly behind our DoW transaction announcement.
Completely unrelated, in fact, we've had an ongoing relationship and technical collaboration with Apple for almost five years now, but we were able to seal a very exciting deal with Apple as well to expand that facility where they will anchor an expansion of Independence from 1,000 tons of magnet manufacturing to 3,000. The new facility that we are bringing online in partnership with the Department of War is an incremental 7,000 ton magnet manufacturing facility, which is by far the largest of its kind in the Western world, would be among one of the largest globally. And that takes our total capacity for magnet manufacturing from 1,000 tons to 10,000 tons.
We devised this in a way where the Department of War and the U.S. government is able to ensure that they have visibility and security of supply for their magnet needs, but also sets us up in an interesting upside-sharing arrangement where we are able to go out and commercially syndicate a significant portion of those volumes for this new facility and share in the upside from an earnings perspective with the Department of War. In order to build this facility out at the scale and capability that we believe the U.S. needs, they provided a minimum guaranteed EBITDA for this facility. So the four walls of this facility has a guaranteed $140 million of EBITDA. We believe, as we go out and commercially syndicate significant portions of that volume, the earnings power of that facility is well in excess of that minimum guarantee.
But the way this was structured was to enable us to move with a warp speed mentality to bring this capacity to bear with much of the risk controlled for, while still building out very thoughtfully our customer and commercial relationships, while also ensuring the U.S. government has the needs met that they are focused on. When you put all this together from an investment perspective into MP Materials, I think the thing that is completely unique in the space is the fact that we have contracted cash flow visibility across all of our segments, which enables us to continue to invest to lead this space for many days to come. If you look at our current production profile at Mountain Pass, we're producing approximately 3,000 tons on a run rate basis of NdPr oxide. We will be scaling that to 6,000 tons.
If you take our price floor agreement with the U.S. Department of War, which guarantees us $110 per kg for our sold or stockpiled products, and you add on to that the guaranteed minimum EBITDA from the 10X facility, the new magnet manufacturing facility I mentioned, as well as our expectations for the initial magnet manufacturing facility, we have visibility to a minimum of $650 million of run rate EBITDA. That does not include several very material potential upside levers over time. While we do have a price floor, we continue to benefit from upside in commodity pricing as well. We maintain 70% of the upside above our floor price to the extent the market moves in that direction. We have various other initiatives, including further magnetic growth.
And when we put this sort of package of guidance together, we had not yet actually announced our transformational partnership with Apple as well, which is allowing us to build out a scaled recycling capability. One of the things that often is not well understood about magnet manufacturing is up to 40% of the material when producing a magnet can be lost from cutting, slicing, and grinding the magnet to its final shape. So having a scaled capability to take that product back and turn it into its original constituent parts to then go through the magnet manufacturing process again is absolutely critical from an economic perspective and a security of supply perspective to really create a closed loop.
The ability for us to be able to do that and take in third-party end-of-life, both post-consumer and post-industrial feedstocks, is another really exciting growth opportunity where, despite often being labeled as a mining business, we believe that, in fact, we are and will lead in the rare earth recycling space in the Western world. Some quick facts about that Apple partnership that I mentioned a moment ago. That expansion will anchor our independence capacity expansion. The recycling capabilities that we will build out will be co-located with our Mountain Pass refining facility. And so with many billions of dollars already invested in Mountain Pass, the ability to be able to build a scaled recycling capability that is economic is really hinging on the fact that we have incredible amounts of shared infrastructure that we can leverage at Mountain Pass.
There are a lot of potential point solutions out there that are just focused on magnet recycling or just focused on metallization. It really is difficult to make the economics work with a point solution. We believe having a scaled capability across all of these various process steps is an incredible differentiator from an economic perspective and a security of supply perspective. This relationship with Apple, frankly, we had always viewed recycling as a real opportunity for us. Given what I mentioned about magnet manufacturing a moment ago, it was certainly a strategic imperative for us. But having a scaled customer to bring post-consumer and post-industrial feedstock to bear in this facility allows us to go much faster and much bigger in order to really establish that lead in this space.
I think the other thing that we're very excited about, which is relevant across all disciplines, consumer electronics, automotive, defense, aerospace, is a technical collaboration that will be part of this agreement with Apple, where we will continue to bring to bear our best-in-class technical capabilities, but certainly leverage a much larger scale and very talented team at Apple to work together to bring increasing magnet technology to the space in the U.S. We can move into Q&A.
That's terrific. Just as a reminder, anyone in the audience who has a question, please don't hesitate to raise your hand. We will have a microphone around. I want to start with just the environment in general. How much of what you believe or what you see MP is going to be providing is coming from just organic growth for the industry, or is actually conquest business from other sources?
Sure. Given what we see in the market, I'm sure there's a lot of focus on EV penetration here in particular and sort of what that means for various commodities, various things throughout the supply chain. I think the interesting thing to keep in mind is today, if you look at the spread of what makes up magnet demand, less than a third is automotive, and a much bigger portion of that is actually internal combustion and general use magnets used within the automotive supply chain. I think for context, when we saw these initial export restrictions put in place from China in the April timeframe, within weeks, we saw the first automotive plant shut down in the United States, which was a Ford Explorer plant that was not able to get magnets for their speakers.
And so that just gives you a sense of how ubiquitous rare earth magnets are throughout the automobile. And so looking today, just shy of 10% of the market is magnets going into some sort of EV powertrain, including hybrid, plug-in hybrid, et cetera. So traction motors writ large. Teens percentage up to maybe about 20%. Is broader automotive, internal combustion, speakers, et cetera, et cetera. And so regardless of your view of the pace of penetration growth, that certainly continues to be a growth story. On top of that, what we're seeing from physical manifestations of AI, so robotics, data centers, et cetera, that has been a tremendous pull from a demand perspective as well. And you look at the market broadly. Magnet manufacturing is roughly a 250,000 ton market today. The third-party research has that reaching nearly 900,000 tons by 2040. So the scale of growth is pretty astronomical.
And so new capacity is absolutely needed. The reality of how this industry has shaped up over the last several months in particular is China dominates this space. They have 60% share of rare earth reserves. They have roughly 70%+ share of mining. They have 90% share in refining, and they have 95% share in magnet manufacturing. And so you have U.S. and Western customers that certainly have been buying all of their magnets from China, at least 95% of them, and are really focused on ensuring they have visibility and security of supply. And so I think the answer to your question is it's both. There are certainly customers that are focused on their existing applications and ensuring that they have visibility and security of securing that magnet capacity. But undoubtedly, we are seeing really tremendous market growth as well.
We've seen some other companies pop up as far as potential other sources of NdPr. Talk about any other potential areas, and could those be effectively acquired by the company to help accelerate this?
Sure. Yeah. Look, I think from an upstream perspective this is kind of what makes a cycle, right? You see a tremendous amount of excitement in the space. The reality, for those that understand the economics of rare earth mining and refining, our tailings are likely a more valuable and lower-cost source of rare earth products than almost any of these new upstarts that you're starting to see crop up. And so the bar for us is extremely high in looking at M&A from an upstream perspective. The other thing that is relevant is having scaled capabilities at each of the process steps, as I mentioned.
I think what is unique about the transaction that we entered into with the Department of War is it allows us to emerge as a scaled national champion, which in certain instances will allow us to bring along some of these other point solutions. But in reality, if you look at the structure of this industry, you need scale to be able to compete. And I think, fortunately, the Mountain Pass resource is absolutely one of the world's best. I mean, there's always this view of, "We need more mining. We need more mining. We need more mining." We don't. In fact, we are exporting the vast, vast majority of our current production of NdPr oxide to Japanese magnet makers and Korean magnet makers. And obviously, over time, we'll fully vertically integrate. But from that perspective the growth trajectory that we have organically is pretty exciting.
When you get to that point where you have the manufacturing capacity in place, do you plan on still selling NdPr oxide to third parties once refined? Yeah. If you do the math, roughly, the rule of thumb for magnet manufacturing is take a magnet ton and divide it by two to get to the amount of NdPr oxide you need, including all the process losses, et cetera. So 10,000 tons of magnets is 5,000 tons of NdPr oxide requirement. We are targeting producing 6,000 tons of NdPr oxide at Mountain Pass, and that's before layering in opportunities for recycling, third-party feedstocks, et cetera. And so there is absolutely an opportunity for us to continue to supply the market with commodity products or further grow our magnet business or a combination of the two.
Do you foresee, we'll talk, I guess, blue sky scenarios. A scenario where you go beyond the 10,000 metric tons of annual magnet production?
We're certainly focused on executing what's ahead of us at the moment. But to my point a moment ago. We certainly have the depth on the upstream and midstream side to support a broader business over time. And I think as recycling scales up. That provides and bringing third-party feedstock into the facility as well, which we've talked about over time, that will allow us to continue to grow the business. And so we are very much in heads-down execution mode, ensuring that we meet our obligations to our stakeholders. The U.S. Department of War is now the largest shareholder in MP Materials. We certainly want to make them happy and continue to foster the partnership that we've built with them. And so the focus for the moment is executing on what we've laid out. And then certainly, I'm sure we'll see opportunity over time.
I have one from Stember here .
Thanks. I'm just curious. You mentioned a lot of the new relationship we have with the U.S. Department of War. Just mechanically, I mean, how much communication is there? I mean, are they a strategic advisor now for the company, given the stake they own the company?
I think, importantly, our transaction documents with the U.S. Department of War were filed publicly. You can sort of see the shape of that relationship. I won't go into specific details of our back and forth with them, but I would say the way this was structured is certainly a partnership, right? They are an economic stakeholder, not just in the form of being a shareholder, but also sharing in the upside, both of commodity price upside on our upstream business.
And in earnings upside for the magnet manufacturing facility that we're intending to build called 10X. And so without a doubt that this is sort of set up like any good partnership is with good collaboration and a very good relationship.
Just a quick one right here right in front of you. Basically, at 5,000, how many years of capacity can the mine generate? What's the life expectancy?
So the mine life is just shy of 30 years with current drilling campaigns, which admittedly, those drilling campaigns were primarily done 10+ years ago. The mine is so rich that it has not been a necessity for us to further define the ore body at this point, just given how much mine life we have. It is something that we are looking at.
And frankly, as we look at bringing in other feedstocks, including what we'd call alternative feedstocks of our own, tailings, things like that, that will get better defined over time. But this is one of those things where you look at it and it's...
You haven't stated it, but has anyone in the past 20 years ever said the life of the mine at X is 20 years of reserve, 10 years, 30 years?
Yeah. So no, we followed the reserve statement. So it is just shy of 30 years from a resource and reserve perspective. I think my point was really just that this is one of those things where what happens is it's 30 years, it ticks down to 25 as time elapses, you do more drilling, you find another five years. So it's a typical cycle.
So then the next question is, if you take constant volume, constant mix of cars in the United States for the next 10 years, what's the consumption just for that market narrowly defined as you defined as the automobile industry?
It's probably, if it's a 250,000 ton magnet market right now. About a third of that is going into the automotive space. That's globally. I think the thing that is interesting to see, though, is the vast majority of that magnet demand is being served out of China right now. And so from the U.S. perspective. As evidenced by our relationship with General Motors and obviously ongoing conversations we have with tons of different OEMs, there's pretty significant demand. And I think a lot of that demand will find its way into Western supply chains, whereas right now, they're almost exclusively sourced out of China.
Okay. And the CapEx that you laid out is about $2 billion, and it bubbles down, everything constant?
Rough order magnitude, we laid out that our initial budget for the new magnet manufacturing facility is $1.25 billion. We have a few other projects that are ongoing. And so pro forma for the DoW transactions, we have nearly $2 billion of cash on the balance sheet. And so we're very well funded to execute on our program. Thanks, Brian.
As it relates to growth beyond stated. So I mean, I guess I'm getting even more optimistic here. All subsequent production facilities, those are essentially yours, correct? There's no tie-in for once your obligation to the Department of War is satisfied, if you start expanding your customer base, they're just effectively an equity holder. They have no claim on.
Yeah, that's right. And our existing magnet facility, obviously, is not part of the upside sharing mechanism that the 10X facility is. And so it's really focused on that initial new build of 10X where there's upside sharing. And so I think one of the important things about our relationship and transaction is DoW saw our strategy. They saw our capabilities. They did a tremendous amount of due diligence. And I think what they saw gave them the confidence to partner with us. They do not have special governance. There's no golden share concept. In fact, other than items of critical national security, they've given proxy to our board. And so governance really is something where I think they see confidence in the team and the business that's in front of them.
And so we have complete flexibility to be able to pursue whatever we see fit to create shareholder value and build out the supply chain. Last one for me, just biggest operational execution risks as you ramp these facilities. Sure. I think the exciting thing that we've been able to do over the last several quarters is within the Independence facility, this was a first-of-its-kind fully integrated facility going from taking oxides in, doing metal making, alloy production, powder production, press, sinter, finish, coat, slice, grind, all of it in one facility. It's really the first of its kind that's doing all that under one roof. What we've been able to do is when we built that facility, we decided to build almost a factory within a factory that we call new product introduction, NPI.
And so that is all of the same production equipment, but just smaller scale, not pilot or lab scale, but smaller scale so we can iterate, build out our capabilities. It's where we've built out a significant amount of intellectual property. And so the thing that's been very exciting is our ability to produce automotive-grade magnets, which a lot of you, if you know magnets at all, you probably know the EV traction motors are some of the most difficult specifications to meet. The heat tolerance is very significant. The power requirements are very significant. And so we wanted to start with the hardest quadrant, if you will, to be able to then build a business around that. If we've accomplished EVs, we can accomplish a lot.
Within new product introduction, we have been producing NdFeB magnets from Mountain Pass feedstock to specifications for our customers for the EV supply chain. And so we've got a lot of confidence in our technical capability. What we have to do is translate that to commercial production. The Independence facility is in various stages of commissioning of all of the commercial-scale equipment. And so we'll talk a bit more about this coming up. But it's really just about getting that commercial equipment running at rate over the next little bit here.
Well, we're up on time, Ryan. Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you.
Great presentation and great Q&A. So appreciate it.