Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Matt Summerville here with D.A. Davidson, the covering analyst for MP Materials at our first D.A. Davidson Critical Minerals Conference being held virtually on Monday, November 9th. With me today from MP Materials is Ryan Corbett, the company's Chief Financial Officer. For the next 40 minutes, I will be hosting a fireside-style chat with Ryan. Should you wish to submit a question, you should be able to do so electronically, and it will register on my screen, and I will be happy to ask on your behalf. Ryan, why don't we go ahead and get started? With NdPr production, I want to start in the midstream.
With NdPr production recently exceeding a monthly run rate of 450 tons for portions of the third quarter just reported late last week, your expectation is to operate above 5,000 metric tons in 2027. What are the most important remaining steps to consistently reach that initial 6,000 ton, I don't want to use the word nameplate, but that initial 6,000-ton target? Is it the separation cell circuit uptime recoveries? Help understand the remaining pieces to that puzzle, so to speak.
Sure. Yeah, and thanks, Matt, for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, happy to dig into that. Obviously, we covered a lot of this on the earnings call last week, and I think overall, to put in perspective where we're at, I think we're incredibly pleased with the progress. I think Michael gave a great assessment of progress to date. I think his point really in operating north of that level for portions of Q3, I think from our perspective in looking at the progress that we've made on de-bottlenecking, in a lot of ways, we're effectively there.
I think the guidance for next year of between 5,000 and 6,000, the major delta between being at 6,000 versus being at 5,000 is not really indicative of confidence in continued de-bottlenecking, which, for context, if you look at a production line chart from when we started in very, very late 2023 to where we are today, it's basically up and to the right with the typical sort of step backs for the biannual plant shutdowns and turnarounds. I think that we feel very good that we continue to be on that path. The typical remaining items that you see primarily for us are materials handling that we've talked about.
With any complicated process like rare earth refining, what always ends up happening is once you reach sort of your targeted throughput levels and you take another step up, you always find maintenance items to address to ensure that you're maintaining the uptime that you want at those increased throughputs. That has sort of been the consistent story over the last two years of getting to this level. There's nothing new here. This is sort of just a continuation of what we've been executing on, and I think executing very well for the last couple of years. The major item that we will see early next year, which again, is not really impactful from a throughput perspective, but of course, the numbers that we report out are a combination of throughput and uptime.
What we will be doing early in the year is bringing the first train of our chlor-alkali facility online, which is a project we've been talking about for quite a while, and we're very, very encouraged by the progress, and looking forward to getting that online. That will involve incremental downtime, particularly in the early part of the year. We talked about our progress on heavy rare earth separations as well, which as that ramps up and we add incremental capabilities there, could have some impact, I think, much less meaningful than chlor-alkali. You put all of that together, and that's sort of what led us to that guidance level for next year.
Let's spend a minute kind of double-clicking on chlor-alkali. Can you walk through how that sort of phases in over the course of 2027, and if round numbers, you were at an all-in production cost of somewhere around $65-$67 a kilogram, just round numbers, this last quarter, where would you think you can get to in 2027 as a function of chlor-alkali?
Sure. I think that to give background on chlor-alkali, right now from the perspective of our current cost structure, hydrochloric acid and caustic soda are a very, very significant portion of the cost structure for rare earth refining. We are benefiting from hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in an existing chlor-alkali facility, and we've continued to invest in that, literally taking the thing apart bolt by bolt, put it back together for recommissioning. We're at the point where the facility has three trains. We're going to bring the initial train online early in the year, and it's a major project. If you think about how we're dealing with waste right now, we talked many years ago about the salt crystallizer and the brine purification processes we'd put in place.
We will tie this into existing brine purification and brine treatment because the beauty of chlor-alkali is you are effectively using the waste off of the refining process as your feedstock to recreate the chemical reagents that are critical to feed the process. It creates sort of this beautiful closed-loop system. We wanted to ensure that we did that thoughtfully and didn't do it all at once in order to ensure that we maintain the types of uptimes that you see us reporting today. What we will see early in the year is bringing that initial train on. We need to do those tie-ins into the existing shared infrastructure for the plant. In addition, chlor-alkali is a pretty significant power consumer.
That is one thing that in order to get all of these tie-ins done right and launch the process safely and effectively, we will have to take parts of the plant down where there is shared electrical infrastructure and then bring it back online. That really is driving the view early in the year. I think from our perspective, we are a very significant consumer of these reagents. We are one of the largest in the U.S. Having the redundancy and resiliency of producing these chemical reagents ourself and, of course, doing it from product that is effectively salt water that otherwise would get evaporated, I think is a fantastic improvement to not just cost structure, but security of supply chain, redundancy, resiliency, et cetera.
I would say if you look at where we sit today from a cost structure perspective in the low 60s, I think the two meaningful drivers that we expect to see over the next several quarters are, right now, in the last quarter we reported producing just above 1,000 tons in the quarter. There continues to be really significant economies of scale from fixed cost absorption as we get closer to that 1,500 tons a quarter. We have sort of given some rough detail on fixed versus variable.
You can do the math on, given the scale of Mountain Pass and all of the shared infrastructure that is present, power plant, water treatment plant, the maintenance team, et cetera, there is a really significant amount of fixed costs that will continue to get leveraged across a much higher production number, which I think will continue to drive the cost down.
The chlor-alkali plant, from a direct cost reduction perspective, we haven't given specific numbers. The reality is we want to get the plant and the initial train running before we get into a ton of specifics. Just given the significance of that input to our cost formula and our confidence in our ability to produce those reagents at a much lower cost than we are able to buy from the market, that will have a significant benefit. The thing to keep in mind, of course, as I mentioned, there are three trains here. We are starting with one, so we will need to feather in the incremental capacity over time and continue to monitor the external market to make sure we are doing things efficiently and effectively.
But undoubtedly, you look at the combination of those two things, particularly as we get into the back half of the year where some of the incremental downtime and things like that will not be a part of the equation the way they are in the beginning of the year, we have a lot of confidence in continuing to drive the cost structure down. The last element to that from a cost structure perspective is, you think about all the other things that we're doing at Mountain Pass. You've got recycling, you've got heavy rare separation, you've got the early costs for chlor-alkali that aren't producing a benefit yet.
And you've got all of these incremental products that we've been talking about. We have gadolinium separation coming online in 2028, samarium separation coming online in 2028.
You have existing dysprosium and terbium production that will be in commercial form this quarter. None of those products at this point are absorbing any of the shared infrastructure costs that's present at the site. And so, every dollar of cost is being costed into the NdPr equation. And so, as you sort of broaden the product portfolio, I think the reality is if you look at this and you look at, for example, the sale we made this last quarter of our SEG+ product, you see the fact that in a lot of ways, NdPr has been carrying the cost of some of these other products over the last several years. And the margin profile of some of these other products is excellent.
As we get into production of some of these other products, naturally, you will start to get some benefit on the NdPr side as well. So, there's really three obvious vectors for us to continue to drive the cost structure down on an NdPr basis.
That's very helpful. Let's maybe pivot into the downstream here for the next few minutes. MP's moved from mining and separation into metal, alloy, now magnet production. You've received your GM qualification recently. What have been maybe some of the more significant learnings from the 10X plant down in Texas so far in terms of things like yield, how to get qualified by extremely demanding customers, labor automation, all that stuff?
Sure. Well, we have learned a ton. I think we talked a little bit about this on the call where it was asked kind of, "Has the qualification process made you better?" The answer is a resounding yes. Frankly, it is part of the reason that we are so pleased with our engagement with General Motors and sort of how we have been able to approach this together in partnership, understanding that this is a greenfield site and we are going from nothing to being in the automotive supply chain, which is one of the most demanding applications from a quality and repeatability perspective.
One of the things that I think sometimes gets lost in the mix of, quote-unquote, "qualification" is it is not about making a part that meets specifications only. That is table stakes. It is how you make it. It is, are there proper standard work instructions at every single workstation?
Proper industrial hygiene, how you are testing and doing QA/QC, how material flow looks across the plant. Almost every single piece of equipment gets individually qualified and approved. It is a pretty painstaking process. Undoubtedly, there has been an unbelievable amount of learning from that process that has made us more effective and efficient. There are some similarities in parts of the process downstream to sort of what we see at Mountain Pass, but ultimately, what we are looking at here is primarily a series of discrete manufacturing process steps, which is different than process manufacturing at Mountain Pass. Obviously, you need to worry about yield at each step within the Mountain Pass refining facility.
But at Independence, when you stack 14 different steps on top of each other, it makes you realize that every 10th of a percent of quality is so critical because they just stack and compound. That has taught us a lot about how we manage material flow, how we ensure that we ramp production thoughtfully, not to just jam more parts through, but to ensure as we are increasing throughput, we maintain the same level of yield and quality. We have always been focused from the beginning on not starting out with too much automation such that we are locked into a way of doing the work.
We talk a lot about well-publicized sort of the Tesla Model 3 production and production hell that Musk spent a lot of time explaining of incredible amounts of automation that ultimately were counterproductive.
We embraced that framework where right now there is a lot of parts on carts going to the different production areas within the plant, and we already are making a tremendous amount of progress on automating a lot of that material handling and inter-process material handling. That is one thing where I think we absolutely did the right thing because the way you think you are going to launch and the way you think you are going to maximize efficiency and quality and production at each individual process step, it is always different when you are actually in production. I think that we fortunately did not lock ourselves into any which way to do the work, and then we are building automation on top of it now.
Undoubtedly, that finds its way into how we think about ramping production over the next year plus, and it will make it easier for us as we go to continue to increase throughput while maintaining the right quality metrics.
Understood. Let's stick with magnetics. You recently highlighted that specific customer inquiries and RFQs for magnets are now exceeding the planned capacity of 10X. As these conversations become more concrete, how are you thinking about prioritizing customers and applications, particularly given potential differences in pricing, margins, long-term growth vectors across things like robotics, automotive, defense? I know I've just asked a lot there, but I think it's an important question.
Sure. Yeah, look, I think that what we've seen in the last, frankly, few months, and I think Jim said it well, is it sort of went from theoretical to actual, right? I mean, we have customer conversations constantly happening, and we've always said that if we wanted to announce a bunch of deals, we could announce a bunch of deals. But I think the reality is we've put ourselves in a strategic position with the way that we've designed the offtake agreement and the framework with the Department of War for 10X, that we have no proverbial gun to our head to fill this plant. The plant is full. We've aligned with the Department of War on the initial product specifications, and we're making great progress towards those.
The reality is we have the luxury of taking our time and sort of picking our spots from a commercial perspective on where do we see the best risk-reward, where do we see the best long-term trajectory, to your point. Some of the early indications of this transition of the conversation of AI into the physical world, right, robotics, et cetera, we've always been very bullish on that opportunity set. But again, what we're starting to see from many, many customers is the numbers are starting to become real. It's not just robotics, it's what powers all of that infrastructure. We've talked about hard disk drives and other parts of the data center build-out and things like that that are driving real incremental demand beyond what we expected.
A significant portion of those products, I think it plays into what we have been saying for the last couple of years, I still think that there is, frankly, confusion in the market about what is the bottleneck to growth in magnetics. We have been consistent in saying, the limiting factor is access to secure NdPr supply. We see some of these robotics applications and physical AI applications that require no heavies and are thousands upon thousands of tons of demand that we could serve out of the 10X facility. The question becomes, where are you getting the NdPr feedstock? We see lots of strategies out there that are focused on heavier earths, which have their place, but not really articulating security of supply for the element that is 30% of the ultimate magnet.
I think ultimately it puts us in a great strategic place. Your question on sort of margins and pricing, at the end of the day, the way we think about this is, we have put the company in a position to be strategic here, we expect our shareholders to benefit from the groundwork that we have laid. We want to be very, very thoughtful about who we partner with, I think we have done that so far, we will continue to employ that strategy.
Understood. With the GM qualification now complete, as I mentioned, initial magnet deliveries are slated to begin this quarter, Q4. How should we think about the pace of ramp of your initial 1,000 tons of capacity over the course of 2027, to what extent is the ramp dictated by internal manufacturing yields and throughput versus customers incorporating magnets into their supply chains? Which is something you guys talked about on the call, I think it is worth spending a couple minutes kind of going through that, because it is not like a switch goes off and all of a sudden you are supplying GM all of their magnet needs. That is not how this works. Maybe talk about that.
Sure. We have always planned for a very methodical ramp in line with our expectation of how the customers will adopt the products into their own supply chain, which is obviously a pretty complicated supply chain. From our perspective, what we have laid out for 2027 in particular, certainly starting this quarter in Q4 2026, is I would expect the next couple of quarters to be quite modest. What we are doing at that point is, while the products have been qualified, there will be the first sets of orders going into product A at plant A, then the first sets of products going into product B at plant A, then you do A and B in plant B, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is not sort of, to your point, you turn the spigot on and you start throwing magnets out the door and that's it. There is a lot of automation involved in the downstream customers' facilities. They want to make sure the magnets are flowing through their machinery the way that they expect, et cetera, et cetera. There is a pretty methodical feathering in of supply that we need to keep in mind, and we've always planned to sort of match production to that cadence. To my comment earlier about automation, it's given us a great sort of view over the next several quarters of what do we need to do in Q1, Q2, Q3 to increase efficiency to sort of meet those goals.
I think it works well on both sides, but it is an important nuance where one of the things we wanted to make sure was well understood and communicated is, as much as I wish we could just turn it on and magnets would be flying out the door, you got to, in a complicated supply chain like this with an automotive customer, it just takes time as you work through each part and each platform and each plant.
Taking a step back, you kind of hinted to this. There's a significant amount of announced ex-China magnet capacity that indeed may lack a clear source of NdPr oxide. So it's almost like you have this reverse capacitation occurring, which to me is strange. Realistically, how do you expect those players to secure supply? If they can't, could it create an opportunity for MP to potentially acquire underutilized facilities or create some other optionality to expand your NdPr output? Help me with kind of the decisioning on how you guys are thinking about all that.
Sure. Yeah, look, I think you're actually starting to see this now, right? You're seeing a brand new plant built in South Carolina that now is empty. I think we've always cautioned the market on the value of creating a Western supply chain is creating actual supply security. If you can't tell your customers where the product's coming from, ultimately the upstream product or the midstream product, what is the point of sort of paying the Western premium, if you will, for non-Chinese magnets if you're not actually creating a secure environment? I think that that is absolutely critical for the success of Western magnet manufacturing is having a clear source of supply across the board to continue to invest in the downstream.
Ultimately, I think we've set the business up in a way where either state of the world that you just laid out is incredibly beneficial for MP. In a lot of ways, we need to see a diversity of supply in the downstream. On one side of the coin, to your point, there's a bunch of downstream capacity built without upstream, and that could create opportunities.
Then on the flip side, you'll start to see, I believe, a real bifurcation in pricing and a requirement for pricing to be many multiples of where it is on the midstream side of things and upstream side of things to justify bringing incremental projects online to supply the NdPr that's required for these downstream build-outs. I think it's more of a timing thing, and whichever way that it goes for us is hugely value accretive.
I think we sit in a really interesting spot, having built this vertically integrated platform where we have the opportunity to sort of pick and choose where we want to go. Ultimately, we say this consistently, we get asked about, there's lots of M&A that's gone on in the market, and we look at everything. Us not taking an action is an action. That's us expressing a view. From our perspective, continuing to invest in Mountain Pass has always been the higher return, lower risk way to increase capacity. You're seeing it with recycling as another example, where we're going to continue to grow production upstream, and that gives us the optionality of, we've always said we have critical customers.
We support some of the great Japanese magnet makers that have been long-term customers of ours, where we'll continue to make sure they have security of supply for product. Ultimately, medium and long term, we can continue to grow the downstream platform and grow magnetic production to be fully matched. Look, we'll see where things go, but we certainly like the cards that we've been dealt here.
Got it. Let me maybe cut over to heavies. You've made a lot of progress reducing, and you've talked about this for the last couple of conference calls, reducing heavy rare earth requirements in your magnetic formulations through grain boundary diffusion and other advancements. How does this change your longer term strategy for Dy and Tb production, particularly the balance between internal magnet consumption and potential third-party sales?
Yeah, I've actually gotten this question a lot after this quarter in particular, and it's a good one. I think the reality is we'll follow the market. Our focus in the early days is ensuring that we're producing enough of those products for our own internal use, and we've been very clear to the market that that is priority number one. Of course, we have a very exciting downstream business that we want to ensure is powered. There is a world where over time, with continued advancements, the products that we're producing today that consume heavies may not in the future. You could certainly paint a picture where we're producing dysprosium and terbium, well in excess of what our own needs are downstream, and certainly that's what we're hoping for and planning for.
If that becomes the case, obviously these products are in short supply, and so we'll look at ways to maximize value to the business, whichever way it makes sense. I think in the short term, again, to my earlier point of security of supply and providing customers with confidence, we want to ensure that we've got everything we need, including significant growth trajectory for ourselves on the downstream business. To the extent we are successful in some of the strategies we're employing there, we may adjust how we think about that business.
Let's talk about defense for a second. You recently announced a nine-figure long-term gadolinium agreement with a U.S. aerospace and defense customer. I assume that's the one that also was involved in the SEG+ trade during Q3. Have you seen a noticeable increase in interest from defense contractors amidst rising defense budgets, ongoing capacity expansion? If you think about some of the major defense use cases, which might be worth just mentioning given the forum here, how much incremental oncoming defense demand for missiles, drones, et cetera, do you think we could see over the next couple of years?
Sure. Yeah, I would sort of bifurcate the conversation between magnet and non-magnet use cases. You see some pretty significant growth in the non-magnet use cases for products like gadolinium and yttrium. Our gadolinium deal is a good example of that. Sometimes they're actually used for very similar applications, which is interesting on the defense side because the non-defense applications are actually quite different between those products. But you see use cases ranging from optics, lasers, coatings, all sorts of things like that, where the attributes of those finished oxides are critical to the technology that's being employed.
It is something where, again, it is a sort of a fault line within the existing supply chain where, for the last many decades, if you just traced back where our own defense industrial base is getting these products, they have been getting them almost exclusively from the Chinese market, ultimately, when you trace it all the way back upstream. That is a position that I think the magnet issue really better informed the decision makers within the Department of War and within the companies in the defense industrial base to ensure that there is no longer that single point of failure across the range of products that utilize rare earths.
I do think that whatever products have been in the market for the past couple of decades, there is a major market share shift in that product coming out of the Chinese market to now needing to come out of the Western world. I think that that is hugely beneficial for us. Then you think about magnets.
Overall, defense magnet needs are a relatively small market now, but when we think about the technologies of the future, and some of the things we were talking about before, robotics is one of them, but certainly drones, and this plays into Project Swarm that we announced a couple of quarters ago, is those use cases are growing dramatically. Any of those use cases are generally defined as dual-use technologies, where the ability to be able to get products out of the Chinese market is basically nil.
There has to be a secure source of supply for these magnets for those applications in the Western world, and I think we are poised to be the supplier of choice for those product categories. It is where we spend a whole lot of our time looking at what the mix of products may ultimately be over the long term in 10X, and I think that that is a great set of opportunities for us to execute on.
When you think about it, Ryan, I am just kind of throwing this one out there. Beginning January 1st, our U.S. defense complex is effectively forbidden from sourcing.
Right.
Adversarial material, things like rare earth, things like tungsten, and other critical materials from China. Yet there's this waiver process that historically has allowed the major defense contractors to kind of circumvent this a bit.
Yep.
In your mind, because you're talking with all of these constituents, how is the waiver process going to function, quote, "this time around" versus what historically could be viewed as a head fake restriction?
Yep. It's a great question, and I think that fortunately, both this administration and lawmakers on Capitol Hill recognize this issue, and I think they're tired of it. It's best summarized by an executive order that was put out that, in not so many words, basically said, "This is your last shot. If you're getting a waiver or if you're attempting to get a waiver, you will not get one unless you have a very clear and executable path to never need a waiver again." I think that that's a very reasonable way to approach this, because again, we're excited about 10X, we're making tremendous progress. It's not ready, right? I can't handle an order coming in on January 2nd out of 10X to supply these customers.
I think it's a totally reasonable way for the administration and the department to approach this is, we're not playing this game again. I think that they're taking it very, very seriously, which I think is critical to supporting growth in the Western magnetics market, given the fact that there is this visibility to, this is not going to be the perpetual waiver cycle that we've seen in the past.
Understood. Let's maybe pivot over to pricing. Can you give us an update on how you view the current NdPr oxide pricing environment and how you think about the factors that could drive material upside or downside versus today? I mean, longer term, we think about several different industries as ultimately needing qualified magnets. We've talked about some of these humanoid robots, EVs, eVTOL, defense, tech, aerospace. Where do you see a longer-term price settling out?
I mean, for those that didn't have the benefit of attending the Adamas Intelligence event that I know you guys were at, I was at, certainly the Adamas guys are pretty bullish on potential demand scenarios. So, why haven't we yet to see another sort of parabolic leg up like we had when there was a bit of supply tightness? I want to say it was back in 2022.
Yeah.
Maybe just some thoughts on that.
Yeah, look, I think what you're seeing play out right now is a lack of appreciation for sort of our fundamental view of the market, which is NdPr oxide scarcity is sort of the limiting factor in growth. Certainly since the middle of last year, we've seen prices go from $60 to $110. I think that $110 is probably a convenient position for prices to settle out. But I think it speaks to the fact that we believe that geopolitical factors have played a real role in suppressing true price signals in the NdPr oxide market.
But if you look at the development of the ex-China magnet market, you're just seeing these announcements, you're just seeing real action here. And so you haven't really seen a true bifurcation in Western versus in-market Chinese pricing, and I think that will likely change.
I think that the drastic decoupling that we've seen on the heavy rare earth side is a bit more sort of driven by the current narrative, and it's driven by tiny, tiny volumes of highly scarce product that went from controlled to sort of artificially shut off coming out of the Chinese market. And so, for the small amount of ex-China magnet capacity that does exist, people were really willing to pay anything for those products. And there's a reason some of those indices right now are quoted as Rotterdam, because it's a bunch of stuff that's stored in warehouses. I think what you'll start to see is much more of a liquid market. NdPr oxide is a much bigger market than some of these smaller heavy rare earth products.
There is going to have to be a moment of reckoning if the magnet capacity that everyone is talking about actually comes to pass. It is hard to say exactly where it is going to go. We have never really been in the game of trying to predict that in any reasonable timeframe. I think the real answer is, if you are going to see growth in upstream capacity, the answer is many multiples of the current price, is our view.
Understood. I know we just have two, three minutes left. Let us talk about recycling. You have talked about scaling the recycling business in line with market conditions. What would prevent you from dramatically stepping in as a recycler of choice or a circular supply chain provider of choice, whether it is scrap collection, aggregation, pre-processing, removal, or something else? I guess the question is broad, Ryan. Can you play a bigger role in recycling? You obviously have an agreement with Apple.
That agreement with Apple is going to, I believe, consume the majority of the independence expansion, if I am not mistaken. Less than 2,000 tons, but most of 2,000 tons. I mean, you think about just what is happening here on the whole data center infrastructure build-out. What is Microsoft's solution? What is Google's solution? What is Meta's solution?
Because we are talking about a lot of hard disk drives and other electronics-related applications. Maybe walk through that in our last two minutes.
Yeah, look, I think that you hit the nail on the head in terms of the fact that some of these large players are starting to recognize the criticality of this. I mean, you think about some of the names that you named, probably not typically in their supply chain team's purview of going all the way down to the raw material that goes into a magnet, that goes into a piece, that goes into a hard drive, that goes into It is pretty far down, but that is what is starting to happen, which again, sort of informs why we are so excited about future demand growth and trajectory.
Also, frankly, the ease of aggregating some of that demand, I think, is really interesting. From the perspective of recycling, I think that we are very excited about the partnership we have with Apple there.
This was something that we had been working on behind the scenes for nearly five years when we finally announced this partnership that combined the magnet capacity with recycling. It got us to a point where we have a very viable pathway to taking a variety of feedstocks and efficiently converting them into usable NdPr oxide for magnet manufacturing. The piece of the market that we're not involved in at this point is, we're not the aggregator. We're not the ones pulling magnets out of hard disk drives. We're not the ones shredding them. We're not the ones sort of taking end-of-life wind turbines or the like. I think that's probably the area, the sorting collection, et cetera, where you're going to need to see a real kind of reckoning from an economic perspective.
I actually think that ultimately, this is sort of further proof of a needed upward trajectory in overall NdPr oxide pricing, because we will get to a point where not only do customers demand a recycled solution, but the sheer amount of demand growth in NdPr oxide and the lack of hugely viable large-scale, long-lived upstream assets is going to require the market to look more towards post-consumer, certainly, and more post-industrial recycling as a means to add capacity to the market. If that's going to work, I don't think that that piece of the market from an economics perspective has been unlocked, right? I don't know that it makes a ton of sense for me to go be the one collecting and stripping and all that sort of stuff.
You think about the sheer price of what I can pay the mill at Mountain Pass to get a kilogram of contained NdPr versus what the ultimate cost structure may have to be to go and acquire an end-of-life EV to get a magnet out of it. It's a pretty wide delta there. I think that that ultimately has to get figured out, and I think it is indicative of where pricing overall for the commodity is going to have to go. We've positioned ourselves to be able to take advantage of that if and when that piece comes into play. We've got, as you laid out, sort of this foundational framework with Apple where we have a capability set of producing product that is never commingled with primary material.
To the extent the customer has a demand and a need for purely recycled material, we have an outlet for that. Then to the extent, what someone's really looking for is efficiencies and bringing recycled feedstock into the mix, but there's not this requirement of no commingling, we have that outlet as well. This agreement has allowed us to sort of build a base under ourselves to be able to sort of burst up and follow the market on that front as we see recycling become a bigger piece of the business over time.
Understood. Ryan, with that, we are at time, so we will go ahead and close out the fireside chat for today. Thank you very much for your time, Ryan.
Thank you. Appreciate it.