Arcadium Lithium plc (ALTM) TD Cowen's 2nd Annual Sustainability Week: Fireside Chat Conference (Transcript)

Arcadium Lithium plc (NYSE:ALTM) TD Cowen’s 2nd Annual Sustainability Week: Fireside Chat Conference May 23, 2024 1:45 PM ET

Company Participants

Paul Graves - CEO

Conference Call Participants

David Deckelbaum - TD Cowen

David Deckelbaum

Thanks everyone. Appreciate everyone's time during TD Cowen's 2nd Annual Sustainability Week. For our next panel, I'm joined by Paul Graves, CEO of Arcadium Lithium. As many of you know is the combination of former Livent and Allkem Companies, which was completed earlier this year.

Paul, very pleased to have you here today. Thanks for the time.

Paul Graves

Great. Happy to be here. Thanks.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - David Deckelbaum

For those of you on the line, yes, I see several of you in the queue on the dashboard. So, if you have specific questions, you'd like me to ask, Paul, you can feel free to send through there. But else just to kind of get things started, maybe just talking about the merger itself, which closed in January.

I think we understand the strategic rationale that went into it and fully support that. Have there been any like incremental surprises that are you really didn't see coming either positive or negatively? I think I would probably highlight from my perspective the only incremental changes it seems from the initial deal deck would have been the rationalization of production at Mt Cattlin, which was more price driven, which wasn't, but it was more of reactive in nature and then perhaps the slow playing of the second phase of expansion at Salar Hombre, which again was also just seemed to be more macro conscious than anything else in balancing the balance sheet. But beyond that, have there been any notable changes to what you would have observed?

Paul Graves

No, it's the short answer to that. I mean, clearly, there were degrees of difference. In some cases, it's marginally better. In some cases, maybe a little bit more challenging than we would have thought. But pretty much, the advantage of having two goals at this is we spent a year and a half dancing, right, before we put the merger together. So, we spent a lot of time looking at each other's operations, understanding what was going on.

I think all the changes between when we announced the deal and when we closed up in market driven market focus, they haven't been a function of either of the two organizations that came together or the management that came together. As you said, the strategic rationale still completely holds up.

As I expected, we would far more outreach to us by potential customers as well as existing customers who see that we have more scale and therefore can see us in their supply portfolio in a more meaningful way and are therefore willing to engage with us in a different way. And that really obviously was a big piece of the rationale for the deal.

I think we also see a lot more interest in the assets that we have from various places. I think people look across our portfolio. Some people have specific interests or interest in specific assets and are reaching out to us to see, if there's ways, they can partner with us and others like the broad portfolio or maybe just the region as we have assets in Argentina and Canada primarily on the resource side.

I think it's generally been as we had hoped in terms of engagement, I mean, clearly, it's a very different scenario. We different market we're in today. It's still by the way, a much better market than the first time we tried to put this merger together two years ago, but not as good a market as the one that we're in when we announced the transaction.

From our perspective, the market creates some challenges. It forces to make some decisions that are quite normal capital allocation type decisions with no fundamental change to the merger rationale or what we're trying to do as a result of that.

David Deckelbaum

Can you talk a little bit about the synergies I guess as well and how those are progressing? Because I think, it seemed like on the capital synergy side, there were some benefits just with some of the colocation of growth projects in Argentina, and some sourcing there. Obviously, in the operational side, there's some redundancies and efficiency gains that can be implemented.

And in Canada, obviously, I think there were initial conversations around some of the capital benefits of getting to downstream conversion perhaps for James Bay, which now seem to be more -- not necessarily set in stone. Perhaps there's another location that makes more strategic sense. But so, it'd be interesting just to hear your view on that side of things.

Paul Graves

Look, I think the synergies have been actually one of the bright spots of what we've seen. I mean, it's sometimes tough to talk about it as a bright spot when it involves reduction in headcount in quite a meaningful way. We reduced our headcount in the first quarter by about 11% on a combined basis. So really meaningfully tackled opportunities to find synergies and to align these two into a single company rather than two parallel companies.

So quite meaningful savings in terms of headcount we were able to achieve. We've also made some pretty significant strides with regard to some of the common inputs and the whole buying power being a larger organization is often met with cynicism and understandably so. But we've actually seen some real traction there in some of the key inputs in Argentina particularly, but also elsewhere.

I think in capital's actually been -- capital's a difficult one sometimes to get credit for because it isn't always about massive dollar savings and if you do, they're one off. They don't repeat. But I'll give you a couple of examples where I think it really does, we've really seen the benefit, I think bringing together our capabilities in James Bay and how the former Allkem developed that resource ready for development and bringing that know-how and knowledge into Whabouchi and Nemaska.

And it's an ongoing process, but there's no doubt we feel much more confident about Whabouchi project as a result of being able to bring expertise in from the James Bay team. I think in Argentina, it's a slightly different perspective, but when you got Sal de Vida and Fenix, Hombre Muerto right next door to each other, we were competing for talent. We were competing in a very scarce talent market. We were competing for contractors, et cetera. We were having separate conversations with communities thinking about permitting and product flow as independent entities.

And when you start to put those together, there's actually some pretty significant savings. I mean, it certainly helps us with moving labor force between those two. And as they're at different stages of development, whether that's construction or pre-commissioning or commissioning phases, we start to get synergies amongst people, we can keep the same people engaged for long periods of time. So, there's no doubt we're getting some ability to execute benefits and in fact, there's some capital savings from that process.

We're also starting to see, I think some of the benefits we've talked about optimizing our network, which is a great phrase, but what does it really mean? I mean, one area that we're now looking to optimize is the ability to because Hombre Muertos and Sal de Vida are in the same Salar del both in Hombre Muerto. The ability to move brine between them. And we've seen this before, you know, when you start a pond-based system up and you can actually fill the ponds and you can probably get product in the ponds ready to be processed before you've actually got your carbonate capabilities in place.

And that's kind of dead time, if you will, but we're able to move potentially that brine from Sal de Vida into Fenix and actually process it. We're able to free up some of the brine from Fenix into lithium chloride and create more lithium chloride because we have surface capacity, but insufficient LCEs. We're already starting to see progress in those areas. And so, I think as we go into later this year and especially early next year, there'll be volume benefits, there'll be cost efficiency benefits from some of these synergies.

So, it's complex. It's complex when you take two independent organizations and try and truly integrate the operations, but there's a lot of benefits from doing so.

David Deckelbaum

Yes, now, for sure. I'd be curious from your perspective, we have our own beliefs and narratives around what drove some of the stock underperformance subsequent to deal close relative to some of the peers, particularly just given your financing position. Obviously, the macro had a role to play in things, but you guys have pointed out even with some of the merger closing one-time items, you have quite a trove of cash on the balance sheet and the growth CapEx can largely be supported with organic cash flows even with this low cycle pricing or that's for somebody else to determine. So, how do you kind of decompose what happened and where you kind of think that the opportunity is?

Paul Graves

Yes. Look. It's, you can imagine that, yes, we ask that question a lot at the moment. Maybe the best way I can describe it look. I'm not an investment expert, but it feels to me that what we have today in Arcadium is a bit of an unusual situation. We are very focused on, and I think our Q1 and demonstrated our ability to do this to reduce the impact on the business of lithium prices. Well, you can never completely insulate yourself, of course, because if you do, you lose so much upside to do that. It's just not worth it. But I think we averaged over $20 per LCE in the first quarter.

So, we sort of demonstrated what we've been trying to do and what our philosophy is. It's designed to protect us in times like this. So, we have a business that is probably, one of the more, defensible lithium businesses out there in down markets. But we have an investment thesis that is maybe the one that is most sensitive to people's perceptions of the impact of the lithium price on ability to fund. So, we're sort of in this weird place where the business is quite well insulated against prices.

But what investors are saying is that unless prices go up, we're not confident you can fund or we're not, we don't have any clarity as to what it means for future capital raising in the organization. Now, the irony of that is, these projects take capital over the next two to three years. We don't need an immediate rebound in the lithium price for those concerns to fall away. But to me, at least, I think we have a bit of an overhang on the stock as people are trying to figure out can we actually deliver the growth from the project.

People think the assets are fantastic. I think people buy into the philosophy of expansion and what we're trying to do. The question is, can you fund it? And I think once the lithium share price does start to move, which is, we all know it'll, it always does. And when it does, I think, our stock is probably the most levered to, if that's the right word, or certainly will most likely benefit from that rebound in lithium prices. So, it's a bit of an odd place we find ourselves at this point.

David Deckelbaum

The capacity I guess as well, you talk about getting to 170,000 lithium carbon equivalent tons a year by 2026. And I guess it feel -- and that excludes obviously Mt Cattlin. To me, it sort of feels like that's what you've underwritten to date. And that beyond there, it's kind of like a wait and see. I know that you outlined, I guess like a number that would've been 30,000 to 40,000 tons beyond that at the merger presentation, but I think that that included further expansion at Salar Hombre. It seems like this is much more of -- this is the goal for now, and we'll see what the market will bear like beyond that point.

Paul Graves

No, look, I'm not sure I'd characterize it that way. Look, if you go asset by asset, you look at both of the Hombre Muerto assets, Sal de Vida and Fenix, as well as Olaroz and Cauchari Olaroz, and to a lesser extent, but certainly to an extent James Bay as well. These assets can absolutely be expanded. The issue is not does the assets support it. There's certainly no issue. Can the market vary? These are all super low-cost assets, all low cost first quartile assets.

And so, the question frankly, and I think there's sometimes a little bit of naivety in the world or the investment world, is the capability of organizations like ours to do more than four projects at once year. Be realistic about the cost of running old studies, the scoping studies. If we were to take all of the projects today and be out there preparing studies on them, we needed that another $100 million a year in free cash flow just to fund studies.

And I think our view is, look, the nature of our business is that as it grows. As it goes from today 40,000 to 50,000 tons of product to 170,000 tons of product, the cash flow goes up exponentially. People see the earnings growth, but so does the cash generation. And so, the ability now to pursue additional projects kind of gets turbocharged once we deliver these projects. And so, our focus is very much on delivering these.

We have MDA Phase 1A, you'll hear us talk about up and running today. It's now in full operation pretty much close to nameplate. We have Olaroz 2 still ramping up. Those two together add 35,000 tons a year straight off the bat. And then we have Sal de Vida coming on by the end of 2025, we have James Bay by the end of 2025, and MDA Phase 1B by the end of sometime in 2025.

And so again, we can pretty much add another in those cases over 50,000 to 60,000 tons a year basis. It's a lot of additional cash flow. So, we can start thinking then about how we fund the next phase. There's certainly significant expansion capability in Argentina and frankly even in Canada that we absolutely intend and expect to pursue in the coming years.

David Deckelbaum

Can we talk a bit about Canada? Because it seems to be like an iterative process, obviously. Now with James Bay as Galaxy, you talked about it coming online at the end of ‘25. How do we feel about, can you touch it a little bit more on like the downstream solutions there? Or is it -- look, this is an incredibly vast resource and the economics will support an upstream only development, and we'll kind of figure it out from there, but we need to be incentivized to move downstream, but we can use this upstream cash flow source as a bridge?

Paul Graves

One of the challenges of converting hard rock into spot concentrate is just how expensive it is to build the plants. It's capital incredibly intensive relative to pretty much anything else, probably the most capital-intensive thing that we do. But the truth is also that that as China especially has built a hard rock to hydroxide network being fed by Australian resources. You can't always really easily compete with the with the hydroxide to carbonate in the future. You can when you have legacy assets.

So again, when you build in China, so you've got to stand back a little and say, look, what is the strategy for a Western hard rock asset? And more importantly, who are the target customers and what support the target customers willing to provide. And as they look to build a supply chain for lithium hydroxide that excludes China, there really are very few palatable options for them. It's incredibly difficult to build in most parts of the world.

As a result, we're very confident James Bay has a future as an integrated asset. We are looking at different locations. We certainly have the ability to build a Bessemer City. We have loads of space. We have all the infrastructure in place at Bessemer City. We are looking potentially to add a second line at Bécancour in Quebec, which is also another option.

And we're also looking at other locations including in Ontario in Canada. So, I think I would sort of say just watch this space over the next 6 to 12 months. It's work that we're very focused on. What is the downstream option? Now, will we bring James Bay on and sell some hard rock into the market? Possibly, probably for a period of time, but it's certainly not the long-term strategy for that asset.

David Deckelbaum

Can we talk a bit about just Nemaska, just first on Whabouchi, you've laid out the timeline and then developing the Nemaska and Bécancour. How did you all get your arms around sort of your first spodumene to hydroxide conversion facility? You obviously have vast experience in conversion, but it's a different process obviously. So, how did you get your arms around that technical challenge?

And I suppose, I guess I'm just curious from that perspective. Is it inclusion of third-party science if it's reliance on your flow sheet in Bessemer City and your own internal capabilities or I guess it's also how do we assess the risk of like efficiency in an area of higher cost?

Paul Graves

Well, I mean, first thing I would say is the predecessor companies of Arcadium actually produced lithium hydroxide from hard rock in the past at Bessemer City, I mean, a few decades ago. And so, we still have, bizarrely, we still have actually a lot of technical know-how, a lot of very few people still, although we do have a few people still date from that time. But we do still have a lot of know-how flowing around in the organization.

But I'd also say, I think sometimes people overcomplicate and people exaggerate the challenges of building a hydroxide spodumene to hydroxide plant. There's no doubt there's been some high profile. I'm going to say failures. It's maybe a harsh word, but they've certainly not come online and delivered as rapidly as they would have done. But I think our understanding of those projects is that the issues to them are unique to those particular assets.

People forget that China's built multiple of these assets, multiple of these plants, the know-how is there. It is not that complicated. I will say the back end of the process is not that different to what we do today when you think once you've got the hydroxide and now it's about creating the battery-grade version of purifying and creating a version that's capable of being qualified and produced consistently, that's really no different to what we do today.

So, I don't think we're complacent. I hope we're not complacent, but we're quietly confident that we have the know-how and the capability to bring that plant online. And, look, there is external support. There are plenty of vendors out there, plenty of people out there, engineering companies that are bringing their own insights into that process as well.

David Deckelbaum

I'm curious just given especially now the pro forma as Arcadium. Livent, I don't know if you would characterize it as betting on hydroxide, right. But it certainly positions strategically to be hydroxide converter. And in one point was long conversion capacity. Is there like an ideal strategy that you think about in terms of hydroxide versus carbonate for Arcadium in the future and that balance of upstream versus midstream?

Paul Graves

One of the benefits that we saw clearly from a Livent perspective is how Allkem brought to us the ability to get imbalance more quickly. There was no doubt we went through a phase where we couldn't build hydroxide capacity quick enough to meet customer demand. And we definitely couldn't expand carbonate capacity quick enough to meet the hydroxide demand.

But we were fortunate that this was at a time when it was actually relatively simple, cheap to build a hydroxide facility in China. And that model's not as simple to execute. Today, I think we're very comfortable with the assets that we have there, and they're very low cost, completely sold out. Customers are certainly keen to still take that material, but all the growth, frankly in the future is either ex-China or is what I loosely call flexible supply.

I think one of the interesting characteristics that we've said is that. From an operating and a production perspective, we don't want to have to pick one or the other. And that China parts have always helped us with that because of the way we own them and operate them. We don't have to run them and that we don't and they don't carry a big fixed cost burden. So, we can just sell the carbonate, which is battery grade right out the plant down there in Argentina.

But going forward, customers are now starting to say, look, our technology roadmap is flexible. It's flexible and fluid across technologies and across geographies. And so, they're looking for people that can also offer them that flexibility supply. So, I do think you have to be able to serve your customers with meaningful volumes of high-quality carbonate and hydroxide, if you're going to pursue the commercial strategy that Arcadium is pursuing.

I think we're extremely well positioned to do that. I think we're probably one of maybe only two or three companies in the world that are going to be able to do this. And so, I think we are well positioned for sure.

David Deckelbaum

Can we talk a bit about just Argentina and I guess the delay around that Phase 1B expansion at Salar Hombre? I think it was kind of coach as strategic in nature. Was it more about managing the CapEx profile over multiple years? Or was it going back to optimization of when you actually want to bring this product into market and how you could do it the most cost effectively?

Paul Graves

Look, I think it's fair to say that almost none of our capital decisions have been said, let's slow down because we're not sure the market will be there. That's never been a factor in any of the decisions, particularly not for the product that we make because the vantage with Fenix with 1B is it produces battery-grade carbonate. The nature of that daily process produces really high-quality lithium carbonate. So that's not the concern.

I think the simple case is we saw an opportunity to optimize with Sal de Vida on Phase 1B. We had it engineered and it is somewhat linked into 1A. It'll bring some efficiencies to 1A as I say, which is up and running. But there's also opportunities to think about not only how we construct and how we use people, which is a scarce resource in that part of the world, but also how we think about the flow of product and how we think about the flow of brine and how we think about integrating those two businesses.

And so, for sure, the primary driver of the slowdown is the market and lower price, therefore lower cash flow. Therefore, think about managing the timing and the pacing of the capital that we spent. But an opportunity that comes out of that is an opportunity to optimize that 1B and potentially Phase 2 with Sal de Vida 1 and potentially Sal de Vida 2.

David Deckelbaum

I don't know if it's simplistic enough to look at it this way, but is there -- when you look at the conversion or sorry, recovery factors at Phase 1A versus just the prior base Salar Hombre production at Fenix? Is it roughly the same or was there a step down and recovery with this expansion project?

Paul Graves

It's exactly the same. I mean, the brine coming out of the van doesn't change. You know, we're pumping obviously a lot more brine. But by the time we dump twice as much brine, it doesn't change, not at all. There's no change in the in the concentration and impurities and the flow rates. And in terms of recovery rates, they remain the same. I mean, I think every process is slightly different, but generally speaking, recovery rates for lithium tube conventional system might be as low as 30%, 35%. Our process can be as high as 90%. And so, it's a fundamentally different process and a fundamentally different efficiency, which is really what drives the cost because the input costs into DLE are higher, but they're offset by the higher recovery and the higher yields.

David Deckelbaum

Can we talk a bit about just the commercial strategy? I know obviously, why isn't differentiated through the use of fixed price agreements or at least contractual rates? But that I guess was also with at least from my perspective like a small handful of customers where you had very consistent delivery on spec, and we're always producing a better product for your clients or your customers. And now with this broader portfolio, it seems like you've alluded to perhaps continuing to use a similar strategy for some of the product that comes through the Fenix expansions. But I guess, how do we think about like the overall commercial strategy evolving as you're going to be selling multiple different products from multiple different geographies, while also thinking about, like, well, if we were -- if most of our business was towards Tesla and BMW and a couple others like how does that look going forward? And obviously, there's an offtake agreement already in place with GM, but I'm just curious how you think about that from a commercial side.

Paul Graves

Yes. And Ford. Don't forget Ford as well. But look, yes, it's a very important question. The strategy that Livent pursued with regard to commercial agreements, in my view, was only possible when you made lithium hydroxide. Lithium hydroxide because of the nature of the product, what it comes with given how critical it is and how sensitive the high nickel processes are to quality of product and the desire of everybody in that chain to have a consistent supply.

You have customers that are willing to make long-term commitments with you, and you have you have to go long-term. It has to be multiple years. And they're also willing to be to give you economic security with floors. And as you know, we've been willing to give customers a degree of economic protection on ceilings, or in some case ratcheted discounts, higher discounts, the higher the market price goes. That's a hydroxide strategy.

It doesn't work in spodumene. It will not work in technical grade carbonate in my view. It may work in battery grade-carbonate, but only frankly in this context of what I call stapling it to a hydroxide contract where the customer has the ability to take either hydroxide or carbonate or a mix of both. In many cases, it's also going into in the in the OEM's view, at least the high-performance battery, even if it is mid nickel or maybe even LFP. So that strategy is absolutely a valid strategy, but not for 100% of the volume.

I think there's going to be a continued focus on, I'm not going to call it opportunistic, but market-based selling of some of the carbonate. The nature of producing lithium carbonate with anything other than a DLE process is you get a proportion of off spec material. I mean, you can get, you know, in the case of all arose too, it was designed by Allkem to be a 100% technical grade. There is no opportunity to make battery grade there, but you can make hydroxide with it.

In the case of Sal de Vida maybe 30% will be off spec. And so, you need to find an outlet for that. We'll continue to look to move technical-grade carbonate into hydroxide networks to upgrade it and therefore, free up the battery-grade carbonate that comes out of Fenix. But the contracting strategy for those spaces, it'll be different. By definition, it'll be different.

David Deckelbaum

Can you touch a bit on just the conversion assets in China? The genesis of that, I mean obviously you were selling product into China before, but having your own conversion facility there. What was I guess the ultimate strategy behind that other than obviously it was extremely cost efficient to build?

Paul Graves

If you go back, David, you got to think about this. You go back a few years, I don’t know, it's not massive or different today. All the hydroxides going was going into either Japan or China. Very little into Korea at that point in time. And it was increasingly going into China for western supply chains as high nickel manufacturer headed in that direction. And so, customers asked for it first and foremost.

I think the second critical factor is, this is at a time when we were happy when we getting $8 at kilo for lithium hydroxide. And so, you couldn't invest $1 billion on a 40,000-ton hydro to carbonate -- to hydroxide facility in the west. You couldn't even invest $100 million on one. And so, in the west, on a carbonate to hydroxide, so essentially, we have about $50 million of capital invested in China assets that can produce 30,000 tons a year of lithium hydroxide.

There's nowhere else in the world you can have that formula. And the manufacturing cost is cost competitive, particularly because we feed it with low-cost carbonate, it just made a ton of sense at the time, and frankly still does. These are plants, these are assets that can compete with anybody on cost, absolutely can compete with anybody on quality. But they're built and today they serve Western supply chains. They're not supplying the domestic China EV or cell market. They're supplying international change and I think they'll continue to do so into the future as well.

David Deckelbaum

Absolutely. Curious, with the last couple minutes here, what are some more strategic initiatives that we should anticipate Arcadium to pursue, whether it's continued consolidation up in the Nemaska just curious, it seems like maybe that would be the next priority?

Paul Graves

Look, you could go on longer than two minutes. Clearly, next generation DLE technology we're very focused on. We think there's opportunities to improve yield and quality and sustainability statistics as well. If we're going to go through a different grade of DLE or a different form of DLE and we made an investment in ILiAD to do precisely that.

We certainly focused on the future in terms of metal production and the ability to be ready to supply what inevitably will come, which is higher energy density batteries, which require lithium metal in them.

For all LFPs ability to improve its energy density through the battery pack, the cell technology is not improving. It's what it is, whereas moving to solid metal anodes overtime really makes, that's where the big difference comes next. We're not there yet. We're a few years away, but technology investments there.

And for sure, look, I think from an asset perspective, building networks, we think that -- my own view personally is that I think the days of a single asset lithium company, they're numbered if not over.

And so, building reliable networks that have points of failure in them that can offer greater security of supply to customers can offer different feedstocks, recycled feedstocks, hard rock feedstock, ground feedstock. The future's got to go in that direction if we're going to be able to meet what the industry needs in the future.

David Deckelbaum

Paul, I want to thank you for your time. Best of luck for to you and your team, and looking forward to the Analyst Day in September.

Paul Graves

Sounds great. Thanks a lot. Thanks, David.

David Deckelbaum

Take care.