 Hi, today we're going to speak with Konstantin Karinopoulos and he is in Eastern Europe and in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where his company Neil Performance Materials operates the only commercial rare earth separation plant currently running in the Western world. Good afternoon Konstantin, how are you? Good afternoon Jack, I'm well. I am indeed in Tallinn in Estonia and I'll be heading to our plant in a couple of days after my meetings here in the capital of Estonia. You spoke last week at a conference in London on rare earths, in fact you were the keynoter, so I'd like to ask you two things. One, what do you think about the rare supply and demand situation outside of China today and what was the conference thinking about it since you spoke to a lot of people? One thing that intrigued me is that the list of attendees of that conference which I saw did not seem to include any Chinese companies, is that correct? There was one Chinese company, a magnet producer, but it was their European commercial staff that was at the conference. People from China cannot travel easily because of COVID restrictions, they need to quarantine here or they need to quarantine when they go back or both and in fact this is one of our problems. We still can't easily travel to our plants in China and our staff cannot easily travel out of China either. Well on that note what is the current situation with regard to demand and supply of rare earths outside of China? As I said at the conference we're very impressed with the type of growth that we're seeing in demand in Europe which is primarily driven by green technology, energy transition by applications, essentially electric vehicle drive trains and wind power. The reason I'm in Estonia is we're trying to put together our strategy and our plans on how to take advantage of what you said in the introduction that we have the only commercially operating rare earth production plant in Europe, because in the western world I guess Linus is plant in Malaysia, I think we should assume Malaysia. International baseline intervenes. Okay, I stand correct to Jack, but so regardless the fact remains that what the EU and the member states in Europe have done in terms of creating an environment that where consumer demand continues to grow and EV production is growing faster than anywhere else outside of China leads us to believe that this is the market we want to be much bigger in and given the fact that we have the only production site in Europe it puts us in a fantastic strategic situation to take advantage of it. So we would like to expand production in Estonia. Our recent deal with energy fuels and the start of shipments of mixed rare earth carbonate from Utah to Estonia gives us additional raw material security. Our current suppliers in Russia have maintained their level of production and level of supply to us. So I think we feel pretty good about securing sufficient rare earth feed materials outside of China to continue to grow production in Estonia and even go further downstream which is something that our customers in Europe are expecting us to do. So demand is growing in Europe and perhaps more importantly what is growing is the sense that Europe needs to have localized resilient, transparent, circular supply chains and I'm trying to throw all the key words in a simple sentence, but you know last week two weeks rather ago I did the rounds in Europe before the conference in London and I passed on some of them in my comments to doing my keynote address to the conference. I referred to some of my conversations with our big German Tier 1 and OEM automotive customers in Germany where we were told in no uncertain terms that by 2025 automakers in Europe and some of the big ones that is made it very clear to us that they have instructed their supply chains to have 50% of their supply chains on drivetrains located in Europe in a transparent, resilient form. So 2025 is like today, tomorrow. In order for that to be achieved we need to start and the whole supply chain needs to get moving like yesterday. So we're very keen on this. I think that we need to let our viewers know one thing that they're not aware of. The European automotive market and in particular its manufacturing capacity is much larger than US own domestic capacity. In fact, if you look at Volkswagen, Volkswagen actually produces more vehicles than GF and Ford combined so that Europe is I think you're saying the key market and it's certainly the key non-Chinese market for your company at this point. The thing is in the United States we've been talking about this quite a bit but heating the air doesn't do a lot of good in producing wear of permanent magnets. Well, I will put it a slightly different way, perhaps a bit more diplomatically, Jack, that the Europeans started sooner and they started by having regulations that encourage a customer consumer adoption of EVs and the European automotive manufacturers responded very, very quickly because they sense that the market was there. If the market is there and demand is not there, you know, why would anybody move and commit capital if the market uncertainty exists? So I think that's the fundamental reason why the European EV industry is a little further ahead than the US EV industry and that's a bit of a paradox given the fact that it was Tesla that started things moving in a large commercial way but Europe has responded both in terms of government and corporate initiatives and right now, as it's obvious, they are the fastest and the biggest growing and the biggest and the fastest growing market outside of China. And my second question, which you've now elated into, what was the conference? Is this your opinion? Is this your view or do you find this to be the general view of people who attended the conference, which included quite a few Americans? I think there was general consensus that that is the case and if you look at the audience that attended the conference, there were a few tier ones in the drivetrain business and they were all from Europe. And the whole conversation was about producing rare earths, magnets, motors, drivetrains in Europe. I didn't see any North American based OEMs, I didn't see any North American based tier ones. The European presence was pronounced, of course the conference was in London so it's a lot easier for German tier one companies to travel. But that was clearly where the interest was. There were a number of development companies, big producers like MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Linus were there. But in terms of the demand, clearly the demand side of the equation was represented primarily by European tier ones. Quite frankly, I think your company is certainly leading the pack in redeveloping a rare earth permanent magnet industry in the west which will now say it consists of Europe and someplace called North America. So thank you very much and I look forward to hearing more from you in the future about what's going on in this market. Yeah, this is a very exciting time for the rare earth industry. By the way, the other comment that I made is that we need a bigger boat to paraphrase the sheriff and Jaws because there isn't enough rare earth, there aren't enough rare earths, there aren't enough downstream applications being produced today to satisfy the EV needs if you believe in the projections regarding the EV industry. So we're all in this together and we need to do so in a very responsible manner both in terms of our environmental footprints but also in terms of our cost structures and pricing structures which will be necessary in order to take appropriate advantage of the opportunity that's presented in front of us. Thank you very much. Jack as always. Thank you. Okay Tracy.