Sigma Lithium Corporation (NASDAQ:SGML) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Sigma Lithium Corporation (NASDAQ:SGML) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript April 1, 2024

Sigma Lithium Corporation isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good morning, everyone. My name is Dennis, and I will be your operator today. Welcome to the Sigma Lithium Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded and is broadcast live on Sigma's website. On the call today is company CEO, Ana Cabral Gardner; and Company Executive Vice President, Matthew DeYoe. We will now turn the call over to Matthew.

Matthew DeYoe: Thank you, Dennis. This morning before market opened, we announced a final investment decision for our Phase 2 expansion, as well as preliminary, unaudited 4Q and full-year 2023 financial results. Before we begin, I would like to cover a few items. First, during the presentation, you'll hear certain forward-looking statements concerning our plans and expectations. We note that actual events or results may differ materially given changes in market conditions and or our operations. Additionally, earnings referenced in this presentation may exclude certain non-core and non-recurring items, and have been based on unaudited financial statements. Reconciliations to the most direct comparable IFRS, financial measures, and other associated disclosures will be made available. The slides will be posted on our website, and following the call, we'll post additional slides with added financial performance information. With that, I will pass the call over to Ana.

Ana Cabral Gardner: Well. Hi, everyone. Good morning. We are absolutely delighted that we are announcing the final investment decision and the initiation of construction to double our production capacity from 270,000 tons of lithium concentrate per year to 520,000 tons of lithium concentrate per year. 2023 was just a transformational year for us. We became a major lithium producer and as an investor operating team, we own more than 50% of Sigma. So we are all in together with all of you, our shareholders. I'm going to walk you through the key items, the five key competitive advantages that gives us so much confidence to make this investment decision. First, we are large-scale. So we became the fourth largest mineral industrial lithium complex globally.

Secondly, we are the sixth largest global producer, that includes brine and rock. So we got scale. More importantly, we have low cost. We have achieved the second lowest cost in the industry amongst our peers. In parallel, we are producing a premiumizable material, we call Lithium 5.0, which is the Quintuple Zero. It is irrespectively of environmental and social sustainability, physically and chemically is the best chemical grade, and most sustainable lithium in the world. It has unique metallurgical properties. So as a result, we made the final investment decision to build double scale to deliver more of that material. So the Phase 2 is going to be the same build team of Phase 1, which delivered Phase 1 successfully on budget and on time. More importantly, and I think lastly, a key point in this confidence behind the investment decision was that, as a result of the very successful drilling campaign of 2023, we managed to increase the project life to over 25-years.

So we have now permanence and longevity at 109 million tonnes of mineral resource. We have forecasted 150 million tonnes of mineral resource. On the next slide, if you can see, we want to demonstrate quantitatively that we've surpassed every lithium industry record, and we've achieved full production capacity just at the beginning, just at our second quarter of operations. We reached 270,000 tonnes of material from September 23 to September 24. Meaning, on an annualized basis, we have 12 months -- we have reached 12-month capacity and again, within just six months of commissioning. We have managed to produce and deliver in those six months of 2023, 105,000 tonnes of this material. We caught quite a lot steel of the very great market of last year and as a result of the superior properties of the material, we achieved a $1,333 per tonne of average price, premium price for the material.

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