 Hi, this is Jack Lipton and today Byron King and I are going to be speaking with Jeff Atkins, the CEO of Vital Metals of Australia about Vital's future in the wearer's market. Good evening, Jeff, or is it good morning? Oh, it's early morning. Hi, Jack. Hi, Byron, how are you? Very well, thank you. Thank you. Jeff, in a recent investor talk, you made the point that your target production in your facility, which is building in Saskatoon, is 2,000 tons a year total wearer. Is that correct? Yes, that's right. So with the product we have coming out of Nechelarcho, that product will, that includes about 500 tonne of neodymium pristinium. That's 25%. That's a pretty rich material. It is. Quite frankly, I've never heard of Basticite that had that level of neodymium in pristinium. So that's very good because it's enough to produce about almost 2,000 tons of wearer permanent magnets. This is quite a bit. Yeah, look, and that's the thing with the North Tea project and actually Nechelarcho itself with the Basticite which we have up there. It really is a unique deposit which offers a large number of benefits and over other projects which we looked at. I think that you also said before you have about 100,000 tons of this material. Yes, so with the initial pit that we have, there was about 100,000, the all resources had 100,000 tons at near enough to 10% wearers. I'm going to put you on the spot for a second and ask questions you probably don't want to answer. Have you been contacted by any automotive companies, either manufacturers of cars or the parts for them? We've had conversations with a number of groups through all elements of the magnet supply chain. So obviously the nature of those conversations is confidential, but we have a number of conversations with a variety of companies through that supply chain. You're going to be sending the output of your Saskatoon plant which I understand will be mixed wearer of carbonate solid to the Norwegian company which is buying them. And since Norway does not assemble cars or make parts for cars, I assume Ritek has some customers in mind. That's correct. So our off-take agreements, we have a binding off-take agreement with Ritek up in Norway and then we're currently working through the definitive agreement with U-Call in the US. Okay, thank you. Byron, over to you. Well, thank you, Jeff. It's a pleasure to speak with you. Since we're talking to an investment-oriented audience here, we were speaking earlier and I'd like you to expand again for the people who didn't hear it the first time on what you perceive as the difference between a sort of niche and that might not be the right word market for the specialty metals versus what other people think is big mining. If I'm mining copper, I can sell my copper to tens of thousands of people. If I mine gold, everybody loves gold. They're all going to buy my gold. If I'm trying to do this rare earth thing, expand a little more on the differences of what you were discussing earlier. The biggest difference is really when you look at who your customer is and the process which your customer uses. So if you look at a base commodity, whether it be copper, iron or something like that, effectively you can sell your product to just about anybody and they all follow the same process. So there's a lot of changeability between customers. With especially materials such as rare earths, because every single deposit is so different and has very different impurities in it and because the final product has to have such high or very tight specifications, the customer acceptance process is very long and it is a complicated process. But also the other thing is you build a real relationship with your customers and you have to work together as you go through and supply them the products. So what it means is that you can't just build and produce a large amount of product on day one and expect to sell it because there's not going to be any plants which are able to actually take your product. If your customer doesn't have their facilities specifically tuned to your product, they're not going to produce product at specification. And when you start talking about materials where you have one part per million of insensitivity or higher, that's where substitution and things like that become very difficult. And it's where end users are very particular around making sure that they need to have a guarantee of the quality of their product that it's going to produce, it's going to act in the way that it needs to. I mean, if you look at a car manufacturer, for example, who's building an electric vehicle where you have the electric motor which has a rated power output and efficiency, they need to have absolute confidence that at every step along the supply chain, it's going to perform the way that it's been designed to. Now, if the performance of that motor depends on one part per million or two parts per million of an impurity level at the mine site, that helps explain the importance of that customer acceptance protocol. And that's something that you don't have in iron ore copper or anything like that, where you're talking about percentage points with impurities. In the 2011 boomlet for rare earths, as I interviewed the company founders, every one of them would tell me, our product is going to be a mixed con. And I would say, and who is the customer? Well, it doesn't matter. It's something in demand and probably the Chinese and they're going to pay us X percentage of the contained material. And I remember realizing that their hopes were way over reality. And so nobody ever produced that mixed con at that period. No one. And so it all failed. And if they had, I knew I was traveling in China at that time, that the Chinese refiner would pay at most 40, 45% of contained FOB China. Now, as you mentioned, Jeff, the world has changed, the rare earth world in particular. And so now I really think we're approaching a seller's market. And so you're in the right business at the right time. Yeah. And I think there's a couple of things which have really changed. One is China is now a net importer of rare earths. And whereas back in 2011, they were a net exporter. So there wasn't one for one thing for selling mixed rare earth carbon, but if you're selling mixed rare earth carbonates, there wasn't that real demand in China. It was definitely a buyer's market. The second thing was that one thing you're seeing now is there's a real push for independent separation facilities outside of China. So if you're looking in Europe, you're looking in North America, there's a number of independent separation facilities. And there's also a real push from governments around the world for the establishment of these refineries, magnet manufacturing, which means that all of a sudden, they're not available today, but over the next three, four, five years, you're going to start to see more of these separation facilities start to be developed, which for us means that for our business model, it's really about guaranteeing the supply of feedstock to those facilities, because the more of those facilities which are built, each one of them is going to need feedstock. And the difficulties in having a fully integrated supply chain all the way through from mine right through to separation and then magnets. When you're talking about such different technologies and different processes, inherently, that brings far greater risks. So I think you'll see more companies move away from that and focus on one or the other. And our focus is obviously on the supply of that feedstock. Larry? Yeah, great, great points, Jeff. Thank you so much. I want to get back to something else that we were talking earlier. And again, it's been since people are watching this who are from the investing side and a mining investing side. I want to reemphasize the difference between what we would call big mining versus the specialty metal mining. If I'm mining copper, I want a big deposit. I want a big mine. I want a big mill. I want a big everything, even if it's really high grade stuff. This is a beautiful specimen of cuprite, for example. Can't get better mineral ore from the ground than cuprite. This is mostly copper, a few other odds and ends from down the gorse grusher. And then this is the end product. There's a nice little chunk of copper from a copper refinery. This isn't pure copper. It's got a bunch of crud in it. That's okay for copper. But why can't I apply the copper model to your rare earth? Explain why you need a certain different approach to what you're doing. So I think the biggest one is when you think about the time it takes from starting building a plant to actually having your customers accept your full production. So if you look at a typical copper project, you build your plant, you ramp it up. Fundamentally, the product coming out of it will be at specification as you ramp up. The throughputs recoveries aren't going to quite match up until you hit nameplate, which in a typical copper project, you might be looking at nine months, something to 12 months. So rare earth is very different. When you ramp up your project, you're not only trying to get recoveries, you're trying to get throughputs. You're also trying to get specifications. So that ramp up process is going to take minimum two years, just off straight off the bat. Now, after you manage to get and produce product at specification, you then have to send that product to your customers to go through your acceptance protocols. You can't do it before you hit specification. You've got to do it after. And then your customers will then start their acceptance protocols. So they will gradually start to increase the amount of product that they accept over a period of time. So that might take another year, two years to go through that. So then all of a sudden, you're at a point where if you built a large plant, say I've spent a billion dollars on a rare earth plant, which has a capacity of 20,000 tons, you're then looking at another four years fundamentally before you're actually getting full return on that. Now that's a lot of money to spend on a plant, which is sitting there, not getting a return. And then think about the working capital, which you have to spend during those four years when you're not getting a full return. So that leads to, and this is, if you look at the history of rare earth projects from 2010, 2011, that's fundamentally what happened where these companies, you start running out of working capital, you need to go back to the market. And as you go back to the market, your investors are getting further and further diluted. So you don't get those same returns to your shareholders. So the approach which we're taking is saying, okay, instead of going for that big plant on day one, we're actually going to scale our project at the very start based on what our customers will accept for their acceptance protocols. So we reduce the timelines and straight away everything we're producing is able to be sold. And then as the customer wants to accept more product, we can then build and expand our plant to feed into that then. But it means that our shareholders aren't being diluted through. And the funding of that expansion occurs during, through cash flow. Thank you, Jeff. You've actually articulated exactly what I think the answer would have been wanted. And I just, we're going to close this with just one little story that I have. I can tell you from personal experience of decades that the automotive industry takes three years for PPAP production part approval process. And they don't like the military way of saying, well, this is, this is similar to a three year test. They give it a three year test. So you're absolutely right about the timelines. Look, Jeff, we'd like to stay in touch with you. Absolutely. And do do this as reasonably frequently because I think you're moving very fast. And I think you're ahead of the pack. So good luck and thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Jack. Thanks, Bar. I appreciate your time.