MP Materials Corp. (NYSE:MP) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 22, 2024 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Martin Sheehan - IR

Jim Litinsky - Founder, Chairman and CEO

Ryan Corbett - CFO

Michael Rosenthal - Founder and COO

Conference Call Participants

David Deckelbaum - TD Cowen

George Gianarikas - Canaccord

Carlos De Alba - Morgan Stanley

Corinne Blanchard - Deutsche Bank

Bill Peterson - JPMorgan

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for attending today's MP Materials Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. My name is, Sierra, and I'll be your moderator today. All lines will be muted during the prepared remarks from our management team, with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Martin Sheehan.

Martin Sheehan

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the MP Materials four quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With me today from MP Materials are Jim Litinsky, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Michael Rosenthal, Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Ryan Corbett, Chief Financial Officer.

As a reminder, today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations that are subject to various assumptions and caveats. Factors that may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation, earnings release and in our SEC filings. In addition, we have included some non-GAAP financial measures in this presentation. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today's earnings release and the appendix to today's slide presentation. Any reference in our discussion today to EBITDA means adjusted EBITDA. Finally, the earnings release and slide presentation are available on our website.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Jim. Jim?

Jim Litinsky

Thanks, Martin. Good afternoon, everyone. Let me begin with a brief overview of today's call. First, I will discuss the highlights from the fourth quarter and full year 2023, while adding some important context from the first two months of 2024. Ryan will then run through our financials and KPIs, followed by Michael, who will review our operational progress. I will then close with my macro commentary before turning the call over to Q&A.

Moving on to Slide 4. Despite facing formidable market headwinds, MP executed diligently throughout 2023 across all three stages of our business. In our upstream concentrate business, we exceeded 40,000 metric tons of REO production for the third consecutive year. The MP team now has over six full years of production under our belt. We continue to learn, increase productivity, and identify new opportunities for value creation. To that end, in November, we announced Upstream 60K, our plan to increase REO production approximately 50% over the next four years with modest incremental spend. This announcement was the culmination of extensive research, development and piloting activity focused on sustainably unlocking even more value from the Mountain Pass resource. We have already begun some of the physical aspects of this expansion.