 So, ladies and gentlemen, the next part of our program is an interview by CMI Founder and Founder also of Investor Intel, Tracy Woslowski, who will be speaking with Konstantin Karinopoulos, President CEO, Director of New Performance Materials, Inc., and I understand there may be a couple of little surprises for you. So, Tracy, Konstantin. Sure. Well, some of us have been around for a while and it's great to see old friends in this environment where it's fashionable to be talking rare earths and critical materials and minerals. Now, how we all make money, it's a different story, but we're in the news frequently. So, yeah, it's a good time to be chatting about this. Speaking of being in the news, he's kind of pushing my face and he's like, Reuters wants to do an interview with me tomorrow. Why does Reuters want to do an interview with you? Could it be the breaking news you just put out two hours ago? Most likely. Well, for those who perhaps are not aware of it, we announced this morning that the government of Estonia and the European Union awarded us up to, and I'm trying to be very careful here. Up to 18.75 million euros to go towards our capex of a new magnet facility in Estonia, which will be next door very close to our existing rare earth processing facility in Estonia. And we're very thankful about it. So I think this will be a very meaningful addition to the Western world's magnet capacity. So if you don't mind kind of explaining to some people who are new to the industry what this actually means about your position in the supply chain in the rare earth, you know, in the rare earth supply chain. Sure, the Neil, excuse me, we've been around for 30 years. We started with two rare earth separation facilities in China. Fast forward, we have a third rare earth separation facility in Estonia. So we are part of the rare earth industry and the rare earth supply chain. But in addition, our Magnequench division takes those rare earths, converts them into metals, alloys, magnetic powders and magnets in a magnetic material facility in China, another one in Thailand, and two magnet plants, one in Tianjin and one in Chuzhou in Anhui province in China. So this is our first foray into making magnets outside of China where we do, these are different magnets, mind you, but we already do about 90% of what a flow sheet looks like for a magnet facility. So we'll transplant that to Estonia. And we're doing that because that's where we're under tremendous pressure by our customers in the European EV supply chains to be making these magnets by 2025. So what it does is it stretches our presence in the supply chain a little further downstream and together with an investment that we're a very modest investment we made in Greenland on a rare earth deposit, eventually in the fullness of time, perhaps Neil will be a fully integrated magnet producer all the way back to the mine. So not to be too cute about it, but the narrative is all about mind to magnets. Again, 10 years later, Jack, if you remember the original mind to magnets narrative from 2010, I prefer to use magnets to mine. I mean, whatever we do is driven by our expansion into magnets and the demand that that creates, and we need to backfill that with mining. And we currently have separate rare earth separation, metal making, and all the way to magnet production. So it makes us still a bit more unique if you want than what we were up to recently. Okay. So you touched on Greenland and of course Jeff Bezos, a number of large billionaires all of a sudden are interested in critical minerals in Greenland and then you announced it. You know, tell me why Greenland today? Gee, I never thought I would be mentioned in the same sentence. Well, no, I'm going to mention this because, you know, five years ago, you know, everyone was telling me you can't develop anything in Greenland. They won't allow you to. The environmentalists will not allow you to. Now it sounds like everybody's looking at Greenland. What's changed? Well, I don't think that's an accurate description of what goes on in Greenland. I mean, they have a very responsible government that has made very clear rules and at least in terms of resource extraction, they will not allow any oil and gas extraction and they will not allow any uranium extraction. And the definition of uranium extraction is any deposit, any metal that contains more than 100 parts per million of uranium in the ground they will not approve. Well, this deposit, and there's a couple of folks in this room that are very familiar with this deposit, is less than 10 parts per million uranium so there's no issues. You know, like every other jurisdiction, you really need to understand what the lay of the land is and to make sure that you do all the right things locally. I mean, if you walk into a new geography and expect to do business just like you do in downtown Toronto, that doesn't exist. So you need to take the time and spend the money and talk to the right people and eventually things work out. I mean, we did this in China for 30 years, right? So we're going to use two challenging geographies. One of the themes we've been going over is the attraction of capital that is happening in the sector right now. Would you say that's correct? We kind of put energy fuels on the, you know, we ask them what are you going to do with all the money that you have right now? And I know you have a very tight relationship with energy fuels. What are you going to do? I mean, you just raised another 65 million? Canadian, yeah. Canadian, thank you. Yeah, we have, you know, and I guess I don't want to preempt our earnings release Friday morning. But yeah, we're sitting on round numbers, $100 million US and we, all of it is earmarked for growth projects. I think in this industry you really need to keep growing simply because, not because of, you know, ideological or sort of other considerations, but you've got to grow because the demand is exploding for, especially for magnets. I mean, this decarbonization transition is one of those forces that come across our lives once in a lifetime. And I think there will be huge fortunes created because of it, decarbonization, energy transition, electrification. And in order, you know, beyond our own greed, because we all want to make fortunes. At the same time, decarbonizing and becoming more energy efficient is good for the planet. In fact, the imperative is really urgent to do that. And you can't decarbonize without rare earths. I mean, you can, but you won't be very efficient and very good at it. So, you know, rare earths are back in sort of the category of becoming almost indispensable, just like they were 15 years ago, until 2011 drove very smart people with very deep pockets to design rare earths out of their systems and created a three to four year gap in development. So, we're back in the forefront. And then this time it's a lot more, the debate and the narrative has become a lot more intense because you have geopolitics superimposed on top of the industry in a way that is almost as, perhaps it's a little greater, it's a little bigger than what it was in 2011 when the Japanese coast guard messed around with a Chinese fishing boat near the Senkaku Islands. And then the Chinese cut off the Japanese from rare earths for seven weeks, that's all it lasted. So, but today the geopolitical environment is much more, I guess, serious than it was in 2011. You know, we're in the middle of war in Ukraine. We have an energy crisis. And I think the world's balance is being remade. And part of that equation, I think, is unavoidably rare earths. So, in discussing the Ukrainian invasion, how is that impacting you and your shareholders, I mean, Estonia, I have received more than a few emails about what's happening with neo-performance and how you're managing those political issues. Well, from a share price perspective, it has been a disaster because investors have run for the exits the moment Russia invaded Ukraine, run for the exits in our name because we have a plant very close to Russia, it's in Estonia. In fact, when you can walk along the beach to the Narva River, which is the northern border between Russia and Estonia, the Estonian border. And you can see the Russian guard stations on the other side of the river, and they still wear these big hats, and they still have AK-47s, and they're still there. In fact, when Estonia built a bridge over the Narva River to connect Narva, the city of Estonia, to the Russian side of the town, the Russians objected to the bridge and they made sure that the bridge cannot sustain large tanks going over it, which is now not a bad thing to have as they made other geographies. So the moment that happened, it was a disaster for our stock. We've lost 50%, 60%, 70% of our market cap because of it. And to me, it really doesn't make sense because it's business as usual. We've given up maybe a couple of customers in Russia, but we still continue to receive a good portion of our raw materials from Russia. The balance, of course, being energy fuels, thankfully, which is getting bigger quickly. So I was at a seminar with Prem Watson recently, and he said when he was a young guy sort of learning the ropes in the financial industry, he had a mentor who told him that when the cannon starts, that's when you buy, and then you sell before the peace dividend. In our case, it was the exact opposite when the cannon fire started, everybody was selling. I've been buying myself. As soon as I'm out of, you know, whenever I'm out of blackout, I have been buying new stocks, so I'll continue to do that. Because the fundamentals, everybody knows what the fundamentals are, and the specifics have enough confidence in our ability to execute a growth strategy that I think I have a lot of faith in. So let's just jump to this one. Jack was talking earlier. Obviously, Jack is one of my most esteemed colleagues in the industry. And he says that the EV demand that is currently out there is not realistic with the scarcity of many of the critical minerals listed in the battery materials, for instance. Do you have any thoughts on that that you would like to add? Do you agree with Jack? Absolutely. That's about as... I mean, if there is one truism about critical materials, that's it. Today, we're not extracting and processing enough to achieve the targets that governments and OEMs have set around the world. Which means that over the next year, we will need to increase by order Z, plural of magnitude, and the investment... I mean, I was reading an article in the South China Morning Post. One of the big banks came up with a $50 trillion capital investment necessary for China alone to achieve its decarbonization, electrification, clean energy targets, and so on. That's a mind boggling amount. And if that's only for China, again, I may be off by a factor of tenors. But even the level of investment that the world needs is in the trillions. It's not in the billions. So there's a massive task ahead of us. And I don't think governments around the world really appreciate how complex the solution to the decarbonization problem is. You will need an extraordinary level of investment. You will need an extraordinary level of capacity expansion for all the critical minerals. And I consider myself an environmentalist, but you can have your cake and eat it too. If you want to decarbonize and if you want a clean energy transition, we need more mining. We need more factories that will take whatever comes out of the mine and make it into the products that will allow us to decarbonize. Maybe there's a magic way to do it that I don't know about. But the level of investment and the level of activity of capacity increase for all of these materials is immense and I don't think we're ready for it, not yet. And what about the talent? What about the professionals? Where are we supposed to get these constant team? Well, it reminds me of, I think the first time we met was at a conference in D.C. and I spoke at that conference and I said that it has taken two decades for the supply chains to migrate from North America to Asia. It will take at least as long for them to come back. And it starts with education. I also remember another presentation I gave where I said that China graduates more engineers than in North America were graduating graduates. So we're not graduating enough science, technology, engineering, mathematics, grads and this world that we are trying to get to will need an awful lot of skills. And they started the university that were way behind the eight ball and will continue through the industrial world. So right now there are not enough skills to do it. Now what we're doing is we're training our people in Estonia from our tech center in Singapore. There's exchanges with our plants in China. So the technology transfer has started to go the other way. For the last 20 years it's been from the west into China. It's now coming the other way. One last example and I'll shut up Tracy. Today if you look at all, you know, the only meaningful magnet manufacturing jurisdiction outside of China is Japan. Look at what the latest expansion of the Japanese manufacturer of magnets was into Vietnam. Shinets high end, high quality, high price. The whole Japanese Japan. Every single piece of equipment that went into Vietnam by Shinetsu was bought in China. The metal furnaces, the alloy furnaces, the strip gas furnaces, the sintering furnaces, the slicing and dicing setups, the coating facilities, they were all made in China because no one makes these types of engineered systems in Japan or anywhere else in the world. So and in our plant in Estonia, well guess what? The critical pieces of equipment are all coming from China. Which is absolutely kosher by the way. Don't freak out. I promise Constantine we would keep a strict structure and he has to run but we're not going to let him loose yet until I put you on the spot. We know you own a lot of your own shares. We know you must own some shares of energy fuels but you have a deal with them. What other critical mineral company are you currently following? That's a lot of the question. You can speak in beggaries if you like. A tech company with a known technology application? Well I was big in Lithium and I'm not big anymore. I was invested in Lithium because by virtue of the company I was chairman of. Constantine was chairman of Neil Lithium. Timing being what it is I guess worked out for a shareholder really well. There's a few companies around the world that I follow because I like the project. I learned about rare earth in China so I and Alastair Neil in the back was part of that experience when the heavy rare earth industry was completely revolutionized by Ionic clays in the south. We spent a lot of work trying to train folks of the department of chemical engineering in University of Toronto how to recognize Ionic character and how to change it. So there's a bunch of projects right now that are being developed. I like the hogchild project in Chile, the Aclara project I've lost my shirt on that but it'll come back. It's a good project but the environmental, there's a new government in Chile as you may know and it's not very friendly towards resource extraction but I'm told things are changing again in Chile. I like that project because of its characteristics. I like Cerro Verde in Brazil it's run by a friend who's also my board, Eric Noarez and it will be in production reasonably soon. I like Ionic Verde in Africa but it's a challenge jurisdiction. What are you going to do? I like AR3 Dudley Kings North company which I visited recently in Adelaide. Of course another selling point of that project is that it's in the Warrant District so you can get a decent bottle of wine when you visit the lunch when you visit the deposit. I like exploration companies that are dealing with deposits that have a chance to be competitive against China. Not today's prices or last year's prices but even at prices during the dog days of the industry. So again perhaps I'm too jaundiced by my molly corp experience but molly corp file for bankruptcy when neodymium hit 35 bucks. So you need to be able to survive at prices that the Chinese can survive because guess what? You may have to live in that sort of a world. So these prices I like Ionic as I said I like Ionic materials and I like projects that have a very simple mineralogy that allow you to produce a mineral concentrate and a mixed rare earth carbonate very very competitively. I mean we invested in Greenland for that exact reason and I also like things that are very high in the magnetic rare earths and the distribution. Hastings in that respect takes that box. And DPR ratios 40% or more. So these are the things that I'm looking for and you know there's a few around like I do want to say and I think for a lot of the projects in this room that we're probably talking to most of the people in the room about and what I say usually is if you get to the point where you have a product that we could buy we'd love to buy it. Like that line in the movie. If you build it we'll come. Absolutely. We're a net buyer of NDPR, we're a net buyer of cerium and lanthanum. Raise your hand if you know anybody else who buys cerium and lanthanum these days. We're a big buyer of mixed rare earth carbonate so we'll continue to be a net buyer regardless of what else we do. So if your project looks like it'll get there we'll buy from you a question about it. Thank you so much for joining us today. We've run a little bit over but I think you can, you've got six minutes right to run. Thank you.