So we talk here or there about unique companies at this conference. I think no company may be as unique as MP Materials, which is truly a one-of-a-kind business as the owner and operator of the Mountain Pass rare earth mining and processing facility, which is truly the only integrated site for rare earth materials in North America. These elements are critical in the manufacturing of magnets for motors for electric vehicles. I think as you'll hear from Ryan Corbett, the company's CFO, the opportunity here is tremendous as we move forward into the electrified world. The company has 177 million shares , about $3.1 billion equity cap.
There's about $500 million in net cash for about $2.6 billion total enterprise value. So we're lucky to have Ryan Corbett, the company's CFO here, to help walk through an MP overview, and then we'll get into Q&A. So, with that, Ryan, please, the podium is all yours.
Thank you. Morning, thanks for having us. Appreciate it. I got to kick off with the safe harbor. Obviously, we'll make certain forward-looking statements of certain non-GAAP measures, refer you to our SEC filings for reconciliations. This always happens to be right before our Q3 earnings call, so I will be very careful. This is all referring to Q2 and backward-looking . We may do Q&A, we'll stick to that. Maybe I'll start out. I found the last presentation actually pretty interesting, that there was a comment about how , not necessarily the topic of conversation at the cocktail parties. Rare earths often are the topic of conversation at cocktail parties. But, to give you a sense of who we are and what we do, MP Materials is the Western world's only scaled producer of rare earth materials.
Brian, as you mentioned, we're a sort of critical piece of the story of electrification, automation, of our economy. We own and operate the Mountain Pass rare earth mining processing facility in California. It's about just a quick 50-minute drive from here. W e're always happy to travel here from 20 minutes away in Summerlin, where our corporate headquarters is. So that makes it easy. Today, we're the second largest producer of rare earth content globally. This is from a standing start in 2017. We acquired this site with 8 employees. The site was in care and maintenance. We've grown the company to 650, roughly, employees today, about 550 of which are at Mountain Pass. It's a founder-led business.
Our founder, chairman, and CEO is the largest individual shareholder of this company. And we have been on a mission to support the development of a diverse ex-China supply chain for rare earth materials. I'll explain why that's so important, particularly to an audience focused on the automotive space in a moment. Here it is. And I think the important thing that I would mention, a lot of times when we get into the topic of critical materials, there's a lot of confusion. L ithium, rare earths, graphite, all of these things get mentioned sort of in the same breath. So for context on where we sit, rare earths are the fundamental building block for the world's strongest magnets, rare earth permanent magnets, Nd and Dy magnets.
Right now, one of the most critical use cases applicable to this audience in particular is magnets that go into the motors of electric vehicles. However, rare earth magnets have been in ICE vehicles for many, many, many decades. Actuators, power steering, power mirrors, power seats, anything with motion generally is containing some sort of magnet. Generally, when you're looking for weight and power and the right ratio of weight to power, oftentimes the only solution there is a rare earth permanent magnet.
And so what we produce at Mountain Pass are rare earth oxides, and then what we're beginning to produce over time in our new facility that I'll talk about in a moment in Fort Worth, Texas, are those magnets that go into BEV motors in the powertrain, in addition to the actuators and smaller motors throughout the vehicle, including, within ICE engines. I think the other thing that oftentimes is overlooked with so much airtime and focus on electric vehicles is generally, the broad industrial applications for permanent magnets, robotics, wind energy, other forms of transportation, aerospace. All of these things generally require some type of magnet, and, that is the opportunity set that we are executing into.
Brian mentioned that, we sort of stand alone in the Western world as a scaled producer. certainly this is a pretty diverse market. It just happens to be, located for the most part on the other end of the world. China has embarked on a, frankly, quite thoughtful industrial policy in this space over the last several decades.
Mm-hmm.
And has come to really dominate this space. The market share of the Chinese producers, rough numbers is 60% in mining, 80% in refining, and over 90% magnet manufacturing, S o this certainly Rare earths really exemplifies the upstream supply chain risk that exists across our electrification economy. You've seen it, we've seen headlines on gallium, germanium, not actually rare earths, they get called rare earths, but, side point, graphite, other things like that. So having this single point of failure is, a real existential risk for our economic national security. And as we think about what's going on, broadly in the world, true national security. So think about robotics, think about what, what other use cases magnets go into.
Having this single point of failure risk, no matter what country it is, is something really critical and it really supports our mission to grow scale, to be able to compete, with the Chinese producers. And so specifically on the EV opportunity and some of the higher growth, drivers underpinning the growth in magnetics. I think the thing that's interesting here, and I call out on this chart, is, we get a lot of questions. If you just, if you look at broadly the critical mineral space, we get a lot of questions as to, "Hey, why are commodities down as hard as they are?" I think there's, a million different answers to that question.
But I think the thing that's interesting to see, and you see it from this chart, and certainly with all the headlines that I'm sure all of you guys are following very, very closely with, some questioning of the immediate term, near-term electric vehicle targets that have been set by some domestic OEMs and things like that. I think the reality is, no matter what your forecast is for the next 1-3 years, the medium and long-term secular trend is obvious and is intact. And, I think the position that we sit in, powering the magnets and motors, as opposed to being somewhere else within the powertrain, being in the battery, we really like where we sit because it's hard to change the laws of physics.
Almost anything you can do without a rare earth magnet, you can do more efficiently with one. And so that puts us in a really unique position. And So what we've seen over the course of the last, year, though, with, our commodity price being down, 50%+, we get a lot of questions, how is that possible when you see, electric vehicles, even with these most recent headlines? I think units are up something like 40% in Europe this year. China, more than a third of their new vehicle sales are electric vehicles. T his is real significant growth despite some of the headlines.
The answer to that, at least in our view, is when you look at this chart and you see, the orange portion versus the blue portion. Right now, the high growth segments of the magnet market are, less than a third of the market. About 25% of the market is electric vehicles, wind, and things that have a clear secular underpinning. The rest are GDP-ish. And when I say GDP, given, the fact I mentioned a moment ago about China having 90% of the market, it's Chinese GDP. And, I feel like you could have looked at our commodity price six months before all the headlines on the slowdown in the Chinese economy and, probably predicted what was about to happen.
so what we've seen, our view is really a near-term pullback in... if you have 75% of your market that's flat to down and 25% that's growing gangbusters, those can completely offset in today's market environment. I think, the law of compounding will tell you if that 25% of the market continues to grow and, if it's not 50% next year, but 40%, in terms of, EV penetration, growth, it's still the law of compounding will tell you that will start to make up a much larger portion of the market, and some of these more GDP oriented parts of the market will be less meaningful.
But, just to put in context what we've seen and sort of why we are where we are and why you see some of the results that you're seeing in our space. What this all means, though, when you put it all together, is if you take the forecasts for EV penetration, you take the forecast for wind power, and you take the forecast for robotics, and look at the amount of Ndpr that is required to meet those needs, we're way off the mark. And what we've talked about, many times in the past is that it is not likely that you will see, 2, 3 more projects of the scale of Mountain Pass come online in, this forecast period.
What's more likely is you need to see some supply growth and some adjustment to the demand for there to be, a meeting of supply and demand. What it, what it does mean is, we feel that the way we are positioned with the assets that we have, with the cost position that we have, with the balance sheet that we have, with the opportunities that we have, it is a—this is a great company to be the CFO of. The, the list of very high return organic opportunities is quite long. And so it puts us in a very unique position in this market. And again, you can, you can trade these bars in a couple of different ways.
I think the reality is that what we're seeing, no matter what the immediate headlines are, is that our materials are absolutely critical as we electrify, and MP Materials is in a very unique position to capitalize on this trend. To give a bit more context on how exactly we're tackling the issue, we've broken up our business strategy into three stages. Stage one is production of a mixed rare earth concentrate, which we've been in production of, since 2017, 2018 in full scale. And we've turned into the second-largest producer of this product globally. We take a high single-digit rare earth grade out of our Mountain Pass ore body. It's one of the world's preeminent rare earth ore bodies, incredibly unique asset.
and we take that, let's say 7 or 8-ish % grade, and we upgrade that to a 60% mixed rare earth concentrate that is sold overseas, primarily into the Chinese market, to be refined into the separated rare earth oxides. As I mentioned, the whole strategy of this business is to, create and seed an ex-China market for these materials, and that's where stage two comes in. Over the last several years, we've been investing into, a multi-billion dollar site at Mountain Pass, to separate these individual rare earths that are contained in the mixed earth concentrate. We have just really hit an incredible milestone for the company. It's a very, very exciting time for us, where we've begun separation of individual rare earth oxides in Mountain Pass.
This is the first time this has been done on U.S. soil in over a decade. And so, our CEO is on this is the one thing we have said about Q3, so I can talk about it. We've said it publicly, that we produced 50 tons of separated NdPr oxide last quarter. And so there's been a ton of focus, and, rightly so, over the last several years on our progress to production at scale of separated rare earth oxides. And, the dedication of our operations team, and all of the team behind them to get this, construction project done, get the facilities commissioned, and then begin our ramp has been absolutely incredible.
And so, this is a really exciting base to build upon, and we'll talk a lot more about that on Thursday on our call. The, last stage of the strategy that we've laid out is forming a real beachhead and center of excellence in magnetics in the Western world. With stage two and producing separated oxides, that solves a lot of the problem, but not all of the problem, given, what I mentioned about the dominance of the Chinese in the magnetic space. And so what we really hope to see is not just, us going from making an upstream product to making a midstream product and seeing all of that exported, is to have a real domestic, vibrant, domestic business in magnetics in the Western world.
We have embarked on the construction and build-out of a magnetics business. We have a facility in Fort Worth, Texas, in Alliance, Texas. It's about 240,000 sq ft facility. Construction has just been completed. Our team is moving in, to the office spaces as we speak. Our foundational customer for this magnetics facility is General Motors. We'll talk a bit more about the specifics of this facility in a moment. But it's something that we're very, very excited about and it's a critical piece of the strategy.
In doing all of this, certainly with the transition to electric vehicles, we don't want to do this in a way that, that, is two steps forward, one step back in terms of our impact on, on the environment. So I think the very unique thing is, we get asked quite a bit about, how does it, what is it like running a mining, chemical plant effectively in the state of California? We sort of wear the California regulations as a badge of honor. we feel strongly that we are, in our view, the world's most sustainable rare earth producer.
We have addressed that tailings process, so what's difficult with most mining operations with the, wet tailings and tailings impoundment and tailings dam. We don't produce that. We, in fact, take the water that's contained in our upstream production and recycle that for 95% of our water needs. we're developing a really interesting multi-pronged approach to material recycling, which bringing the stage three business into the fold and having capabilities across all of those different disciplines, really allows us to be uniquely positioned to execute on that. And then we've had a real commitment in terms of how we operate to biodiversity and respecting, the land on which we operate. And so I think that's a really unique element of the MP Materials story, and something we're very, very proud of.
To give a little more context on our upstream business, which has powered, a significant amount of free cash flow for the business, a very high-margin product . We've, since starting this facility, as I mentioned, from a standing start, we have an incredible operations team and leadership team that have focused on, back to the basics operating approach. We operate our upstream facilities with north of 95% uptime. That's including our planned downtime. We have 9 consecutive quarters of producing over 10,000 metric tons of contained rare earth oxide and concentrate. That's through Q2. We're producing a highly in-demand product.
I think the thing that's often underappreciated, even by those that are, more deeply involved in the mining space, is just how critical producing a high-quality, low-cost, upstream mixed concentrate is to enable a low-cost structure in the downstream. And so we're starting, our ramp of our midstream facilities, our refining facilities, with a tremendous base under us, with, many years of experience in producing a very, very high-quality upstream product. To give some context on, what we've invested in over the last several years to enable the ramp-up of our separations capacity, we've done sort of what I call a back to the future. Mountain Pass has been in existence and has operated in some way, shape, or form, kind of since the fifties.
There have been different elements that have been targeted from production in Mountain Pass, but it's incredible the rich history of this asset. And much of the IP for separating and leveraging rare earth materials was created and started in Mountain Pass. What we've done since we acquired the facility is reintroduced a process flow that had been in operation for many, many decades before the last operator of the site. It's a proven process. It's one that we are, proving out ourselves yet again at a much larger scale, given the higher scale of the upstream production that we've been able to bring to bear. But we've reintroduced a refining process flow that allows us to leverage the inherent benefits of the ore at the Mountain Pass mine.
And so you see here a picture of our drying and roasting circuit. That's one of the investments that we made in addition to salt crystallizer on the right-hand side. That allows a certain redundancy for discharge of waste brine and recycling of water. What we've laid out is, from a target production perspective, about 6,000 tons of Ndpr oxide. And we've also begun, what I think is a very exciting journey and transition to being able to produce both oxide products as well as metal products, which opens up the market for our materials to areas other than, purely China. Certainly, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, broader Southeast Asia has, significant demand for these types of materials. Some further information on the downstream strategy.
We broke ground on this facility in April 2022. We've built an incredible team of nearly 50 folks across, engineering, R&D, operations, leadership, EHS, et cetera. And so we've built from scratch, over the last several years, a really exciting team in the magnetic space. This Fort Worth facility is, what we consider our magnetics engineering headquarters. Eventually, as we scale production, this will represent about 150 jobs. As I mentioned, we're underway in our move into this facility. To provide some context, though, on the size of the downstream business versus the upstream and midstream business, this initial facility in Fort Worth has a targeted initial capacity of 1,000 metric tons of finished magnets.
What that represents is less than 10% of the Ndpr oxide that would come out of Mountain Pass when operating at run rate throughput. So the opportunity set on the downstream side is very, very significant. We've approached this, however, with a really disciplined mindset. Not very different than how we approached, the upstream and midstream transition, where we fundamentally believed in order to remain low cost and remain competitive and build scale in order to compete with our Asian competitors, we needed to walk before we run. with the upstream and midstream business, we started with concentrate production, and we really perfected that. Not that there's not more room to run there, but we really got a great operating cadence there before turning to and tackling the midstream opportunity set.
Similarly, with the magnets strategy, we're starting with a relatively, let's call it bite-sized opportunity, at least as it relates to, not only the production of our upstream business, but putting 1,000 tons in context. The NdFeB magnet market is nearly 200,000 tons. So this is, a relatively small facility as it relates to the broader magnetics market. However, it's many, many, many multiples of what has been done in the Western world for many decades. So, this is the approach that we're taking. a very disciplined approach.
We've found a great foundational customer and partner in General Motors, in, having them really be, a critical partner as we build out this supply chain in the Western world and in the United States. So with that, I don't know if I left you much time.
Enough to ask a couple good ones.
Sure.
And again, I just want to say that questions are clearly available to the audience if you'd like to ask. There have been some headlines about suppliers developing motors or magnets that do not need rare earth-
Yes.
Malaysia being one of them. Can you talk about that as a potential threat, if it is at all, and, well, we can kind of take it from there.
Sure. Yeah, it's something that frankly does not give us much pause. It's something that's expected. The reality is that every use case, there are gives and takes with motor design. And right now, when you look at the market share of NdFeB permanent magnet motors versus all the other motor technologies out there, it's mid-90s% market share. That's for a reason. There's an inherent trade-off with weight, size, and efficiency that dictates that in most use cases, you will be more efficient... by a pretty significant margin with a rare earth permanent magnet motor that would allow you to have a smaller battery for the same, given range. In addition to that, there are certain applications, you take a, let's take a Rivian.
4 motors, much closer to the wheels on, on the edges of, of, the application there. From a size and packaging perspective, there is no way to use a different type of motor technology, given how much smaller a motor can be when you use the rare earth permanent magnet technology. And so, if I point you back to that chart of the Ndpr supply-demand deficit, and I'd say there are a lot of ways that we will get supply and demand to meet. Again, I think given that chart, it feels like a very, bullish indicator for pricing over time. Certainly we've , I talked a little bit about the short-term impacts.
Sure.
And I think those short-term impacts are exacerbated by headlines like this. But the reality is that, I sort of said it, the adage of anything you can do without a permanent magnet, you can do more efficiently with one. And I think the really important thing as well is being able to show the market, show, partners and buyers, like General Motors, that we can do this at scale. We can do this in a way that has a low environmental footprint. rare earths, before, MP really rose to prominence, the understanding was, the environmental destruction that occurs in China from some of this rare earth mining, and we're just so different from that.
Yeah.
And so when you, when you have a solution like MP is providing, it makes the trade-offs, really point in the direction of rare earths. But again, there will always be trade-offs in motor design. I think the funny thing, there was an anecdote on there was a large U.S. OEM that, made a bunch of think about maybe moving away from rare earths in their, in their motors. It sounds like maybe that, that factory that would have produced that is not necessarily, on track from a timing perspective. But, in the midst of all that discussion, there was an article that was published recently about in the redesigned Model 3, there's a new permanent magnet in there.
Yeah.
Which is, something as small and trivial as the center console used to be sort of a plastic piece, and now it's magnets. I mean, so the applications here are endless. And I think the reality is that the secular tailwinds are quite obvious, but there's always going to be a place for competing motor technologies.
I'm going to try and sneak just one more in. We've got about 90 seconds here. For stage three, when you're making the magnets out of Fort Worth, it's still only going to be about 10% of what you produce at Mountain Pass that's going there.
Yeah.
Talk about how the rest of that 90% of your business evolves-
Mm-hmm.
If China is such an important part of that now -
Sure.
but maybe isn't later.
Yeah. I'd say that given the dominance of the Chinese and the downstream, it's crazy to think that, no one is going to sell into that market. no Western player is gonna sell into that market. So, certainly, we haven't been left much choice. I think the very exciting thing for us, though, , we've announced a partnership with Sumitomo. They're our distributor for Japanese customers. There's a very significant demand for our products from the Japanese. I think the NdFeB technology was actually started in the U.S. with GM and the Department of Defense, and the Japanese, over many decades, perfected it. And so the Japanese have a very significant NdFeB magnet market, and so, that's a critical customer for us, would be Japan.
Korea and Vietnam, have-
Mm-hmm.
A really burgeoning, permanent magnet business as well. those are real opportunity sets for us. And so certainly there will be a mix. And what we're seeing, frankly, with, while rare earths weren't mentioned specifically in the consumer content requirements of the IRA, I think that was a major oversight. maybe we see that change over time. But you are seeing, despite a lot of these headlines recently, you are seeing a real focus from the OEMs on domestic production of some of these critical things. So , I think that there will be hopefully more players than just MP in the U.S. as well to sell product to.
Great. Clearly a unique asset and a terrific story, and the cash flow has been great as well. So, congratulations and best of luck. Thank you very much for being here.
Thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you for having us.