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| But lot of puts and takes, but I think it's something that obviously is a very positive measure of success of ours as we go through the course of the year |
| To be clear, we remain extremely confident in our ability to achieve our targeted throughput levels and production costs, but how we get there really matters in a low-price environment |
| This progress bolsters my confidence that production volumes and quality will continue to improve |
| One bright spot has been the dramatic acceleration in hybrid sales, which is bullish for NdPr demand relative to existing ICE penetration levels |
| Recently, we've made several key breakthroughs with NdPr yield increasing more than 5% while at the same time driving a 5% plus absolute improvement in cerium rejection |
| And I have no doubt that we are positioned very well for the coming months and years ahead |
| So we're very confident that we'll do that because we see every day, we see the progress every single day |
| And I just wanted to reiterate that despite what is clearly a tough pricing environment, I think the execution across the board across all stages of our business has been really remarkable |
| The difference will be made up for by higher concentrate production, but from 2Q on, we expect the volume of un-spec oxide we produce will grow materially, which will also result in more obvious improvements in our cost of production |
| Our existing low-cost concentrate operation affords us the flexibility to take this prudent approach that maximizes profits and cash generation while ensuring we drive towards our integrated model and market-leading cost structure for separated products |
| At MP, though, we are in a unique position as a low-cost producer with a world-class resource and significant assets already in place to economically grow our upstream substantially through the down cycle |
| As you just heard from Michael, the team at Mountain Pass is doing an excellent job |
| In our upstream concentrate business, we exceeded 40,000 metric tons of REO production for the third consecutive year |
| These improvements benefit NdPr production volume per ton of concentrate produced |
| Lastly, on the far right, we produced 200 metric tons of NdPr oxide in 2023, closing our inaugural year of Stage II production with a nice sequential lift in the fourth quarter as we guided to on our last call |
| In addition, 2023 resulted in our highest level of REO production per hour of uptime, demonstrating our continued efforts to improve efficiency and productivity |
| This means we expect Stage III to start producing revenue and modest positive EBITDA later this year, which is very exciting |
| In all, our upstream operations had another solid year with over 92% uptime |
| We are thrilled with our early progress and expect early revenue and modest positive EBITDA contributions from Fort Worth metal sales starting later this year |
| With our strongly cash-generative concentrate business, a thoughtful ramp of Stage II and normalization of the relevant working capital investment, as well as achievement of milestones in Stage III leading to certain product prepayments and the receipt of initial 45X production tax credits, we see strongly positive operating cash flow funding a significant portion of our capital plan |
| Within this capital plan, we expect to continue to make strong progress on our previously disclosed initiatives, as well as further some of the early stages of Upstream 60K and other potential high-return investments in Mountain Pass that will further strengthen and improve our production cost profile |
| We are very confident from the early results that we've seen in being a low-cost producer to the world, and we continue to build significant confidence in reaching our target production |
| Despite the lower average price during the year, EBITDA margins were still quite robust at 40% |
| That said, peeling back the onion and looking at the circuit-by-circuit cost profile gives us further confidence in achieving our expected per unit cost profile as we ramp towards run rate levels |
| As many of you have heard me say repeatedly, we believe expansion at Mountain Pass is the quickest, lowest risk and highest return on capital source of rare earth growth in the western world |
| So think of this as mainly just a 2024 model consideration, but MP is uniquely positioned with added downside protection by ramping more methodically in a low-price environment |
| There is still opportunity to improve further, but we believe the gains to date to be sustainable and will be more evident in our Q2 production and financial results |
| That's incredible |
| We have small equipment expansion to our grinding circuit, which we think will help release some additional capacity there and also result in more efficient grinding, which we think will be a key contributor to better flotation recovery |
| In our upstream business, concentrate production per operating hour was up year-over-year |
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| We have all seen the press reports around the disappointing EV sales versus expectations and the rising inventories |
| Concentrate production of 9,257 tons was down year-over-year, primarily due to higher downtime, both planned and unplanned in the quarter |
| In any case, for a variety of reasons, the timeline to electrification has been extended, and therefore the near-term prospects for critical materials are now worse versus recent prior expectations |
| But again, I keep going back to at these levels, at some point, the macro headwinds around 75% associated with sort of basic industries like HVAC or consumer electronics and some of the pullbacks that we've had in China, coupled with the 25% maybe disappointing in EVs relative to what prior expectations were, is sort of some of the demand destruction |
| And by that, I mean if you look at what's happening out there, where there's sort of a lot of talk about is the EV, sort of concern about the EV and you're seeing a lot of concern around the landscape, hybrid sales are going crazy, right? You're seeing hybrid sales go up 80%, 90% in some cases |
| Sales volumes were down around 6,000 tons year-over-year, primarily due to the initial charging of our Stage II circuits with REO, as well as the consumption of REO in concentrate in the downstream circuits to produce NdPr and other separated products in the third and fourth quarters |
| The flow-through of pricing was the primary driver of the decline in adjusted EBITDA, in addition to the fixed cost absorption just discussed |
| Again, if you take any amount of medium or long-term view, the ability to get this supply online, it's really challenging |
| On two consecutive weekends, two ancillary instruments in our power plant failed approximately four months prior to their planned replacement |
| Admittedly, there's just a lot of pain and challenge with -- from a capital and execution standpoint to make all of that happen kind of writ large |
| Unfortunately, addressing these issues required a comprehensive process of de-inventorying, repairing, curing, and re-inventorying circuits, which led to a slower recovery from the outage than planned |
| We actually saw -- we saw some headlines this past week of a big project in Australia with government funding that is having huge cost overruns and is potentially uneconomic |
| Concentrate sales volumes fell around 2,000 tons sequentially as we consumed more concentrate in Stage II circuits to produce NdPr and other refined products |
| With regards to concentrate pricing specifically, assuming current spot prices hold for the remainder of the current quarter, we would expect a mid-teen sequential decline in first quarter realized concentrate pricing |
| We are seeing some stress, and my guess is we will see some distress out there |
| It seems like, obviously, it's a challenge, but maybe it's a fact -- a critical price level |
| The price of NdPr has collapsed nearly 70% from its peak in 2022 |
| Approximately four of these were the result of unexpected power plant outages |
| However, several factors combined for lower operating hours and therefore concentrate production |
| And so I think in this environment, what we've seen is that there's been a lot of supply destruction as well as there has been demand destruction |
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