FREYR Battery (NYSE:FREY) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call February 29, 2024 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Jeffrey Spittel - Vice President of Investor Relations

Tom Einar Jensen - Executive Chairperson

Birgir Steen - Chief Executive Officer

Jeremy Bezdek - Executive Vice President of Corporate Development & President of FREYR Battery US

Oscar Brown - Group Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Tyler DiMatteo - BTIG

Jeffrey Spittel

Hello and welcome to FREYR Battery’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Conference Call. With me today on the call are Tom Einar Jensen, our Executive Chairperson; Birgir Steen, our Chief Executive Officer; Oscar Brown, our Chief Financial Officer; Jeremy Bezdek, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and President FREYR Battery US.

During today’s call, management may make forward-looking statements about our business. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Most of these factors are outside FREYR’s control and are difficult to predict. Additional information about risk factors that could materially affect our business are available on FREYR’s S-1 and Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website.

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

Tom Einar Jensen

Thank you, Jeff and welcome everyone to this fourth quarter earnings call; FREYR’s 11th earnings call since we went public on the New York Stock Exchange on July 8, 2021. I want to thank all of our investors, shareholders and stakeholders for their continued support, even as we have been navigating very challenging times of strong headwinds, both in the markets and as a company. I want to take this opportunity to provide some overall strategic reflections and perspective on where we are, where we're going, and why we're confident that we're on the right track to succeed as a company. Even though it is extremely challenging to build a battery company, we have been able to turn adversity into advantage and we now see that the actions we have undertaken since the third quarter reporting are starting to yield significant operational and commercial traction.

First of all, let me underline that the energy transition is happening faster than most realize, and most are able to estimate. EV sales momentum seem to be back on-track, with EV sales now showing 69% growth year-over-year from January ’23 to January ’24; and now surpassing 1 million cars in January for the first time ever. All markets are growing and year-end estimates keep trending upwards in most markets. The ESS market in 2023 was furthermore twice as high as initial estimates by reputable agencies, and closed above 100 gigawatt hours per year for the first time, and solar deployment continues to develop at record pace. Everything else that can be electrified will be electrified, and be driven by continued energy density improvements and strong cost reductions. All of this requires massive amount of automotive, domestic commercial and industrial scale storage solutions, and everything else that will be electrified for balancing out the variability of the renewable energy generation.