Nordic Mining ASA

OSE:NOM

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Ivar Fossum, executive]

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this Q1 interim presentation here at Nordic Mining. My name is Ivar Fossum. I'm the CEO of Nordic Mining. Together with the Operations Director, Kenneth Angedal of Engebø, Rutile and Garnet. We will give you the presentation this morning.

Please be informed that you will find our stock press release and the presentation in this morning's release to the stock exchange, but you can also find it on our web page. And note also that after my presentation, we will launch a Q&A session, so you can post your questions as we speak during our presentation.

So let's start. We have a traditional agenda for this interim report. After a brief introduction, I will hand over to Kenneth who will give you a status of the Engebø project. And then I will return and talk a little bit about the market for our products as well as giving the highlights from the financial situation before we conclude the presentation with a Q&A towards the end.

But first, a few highlights. Ninth of March was an extremely important date for our history then we completed and secured the full product financing for Engebø, a total package of USD 280 million, approximately. At the same time, our Board could resolve the final investment decision for Engebø. That made us also in a position to activate our EPC contracts to kick off activities related to procurement and really to put full trottle on construction works, which we will come back to later on.

After that, we have finalized a repair issue also to our existing shareholders in the Nordic. It's good to see that groundworks have continued according to schedule. As some of you know, we kicked off preparatory groundworks work already one year ago. That is now continuing and has come a long way.

As we speak, we are also doing interesting work in the mountain within the deposit of Engebø, which Kenneth will come back to, and we are in the process of erecting several of the buildings on the process plant area.

The world is turning around. So first quarter was -- how to put it, a somewhat weaker world in terms of G&P in general, which has an impact of demand for most commodities, also the titanium space.

On the other hand, we see positive effects on other market segments. We also note that China has strong ambitions to come back on their traditional growth path even for 2023. And then lastly but not least, we are extremely pleased that we have now had physical activity at site on Engebø for over a year without any lost time injuries.

This is not an obvious thing to happen. Physical work always is related to risk, and we are conscious in building a strong culture related to risk at Engebø. We are also active in recruiting and building our staff, both related to the project and to the future operation of Engebø and Kenneth will tell you more about that in a second.

But before I end, I'd like to highlight the macro environment we are into related to minerals. And as most governments, institutions, countries around us are more and more focused on how we shall secure sustainable supply of minerals.

Nordic Mining is about to transform from a long-term project to actually be an industrial minerals producer in Norway. We are extremely proud of having been in that phase in these particular times where minerals are on more and more people's agenda in all political forces.

And we see the EU being a stronger and stronger voice on how to make reforms in order to secure supply of strategic and critical minerals for Europe, for the Western world for many, many good reasons. The green shift being one of them, but there are several others as you are aware.

This strong push was manifested in their new Critical Raw Materials Act that was launched now in March with very specific and strong ambitions for how Europe is going to handle that long-term deficit they have had in supply of minerals. This has certainly impacted the Norwegian government. They are working on their mineral strategy, which will be launched very soon according to the minister then the other conservative party in Norway recently launched their mineral strategy, actually yesterday.

So that tells a story with regard to how important the voice from EU are and also the work that are being done from the government from all politicians here in Norway. So with that, I hand the word over to Kenneth.

[Kenneth Angedal, executive]

Hello. In regards to health and safety, Ivar mentioned that we have just been over 1 year without any lost time injuries. And as you can see on the table on the left side, this reflects that up until now, we have not had any lost time injuries or recordable injuries at site.

We have had a few high potential nonconformances, but we are working with third parties to investigate these nonconformance incidents to make sure we have lessons learned and to not come into these situations again.

We have currently multiple EPCs and sites, which, of course, increases the need for coordination from the owners team, and we are carrying out regular safety rounds and approximately 70 persons are currently in Q1, working at site. This is a bit between EPC 1 and recent activity starting up from EPC 2.

A little bit into the pictures on what's ongoing at Engebø. The picture showing now to you are from the process plant, where you can see that the administration building and the workshop is under erection. And we are also now preparing concrete work for the remaining process buildings.

On the way up to the Engebø Hill, we are 95% complete on the access road and we are missing one last curve before we can complete this work. From the access road, we are coming into the mining service area. We are progressing on that area as well, but this is not work critical on a time line perspective.

The critical point here is that we have full access to our site with raise bore drilling and ore deposit at top of Engebø. The raise bore is ongoing. We have completed the pilot drilling and have recently started and commenced the raise boring of the 220-meter 4.5-meter diameter ore pass and are today roughly 15% completed with this work. This stable ongoing work, and we expect to finalize this within June.

Over to general progress of the project. We see a percentage completion of EPC 1 construction work of around 72%. And as mentioned, EPC 2 has just started their work with buildings and the work related to the administration building and the workshop gives a rough 9% of completion of their work.

They are currently preparing a lot of the concrete design and start-up of concrete works of other buildings in the process plant area within second quarter this year.

On the engineering side, for EPC 3 and 4, we see that EPC 3 is roughly 71% of their engineering and expected commencement work on site in third quarter this year. And EPC 4 is at roughly 54%, also commencing work at the end of this year or early next year.

I think the main point in the progress schedule overall is that we are finalizing the engineering of the critical part that can allow us to progress the work with EPC 3 and 4 in the coming quarters.

Subsequently of this detailed engineering, we are also commencing large procurement of bulk through our EPCs in the second quarter this year. And we are in full detail planning of all the construction work going towards ramp-up of production in Q4 2024. We are not seeing any risks that are not allowing the project to be finalized at the budget.

If you look at our critical process equipment suppliers, we have previously announced that we are partnering up with Metso Outotec for the combination of mining equipment. And we are now announcing that we are partnering up with Australian company, Mineral Technology on the mineral benefication equipment related to physical separation.

We have now signed roughly 78% of all the technical packages of the 30 -- the total roughly $30 million under a price and agreed delivery times. And all of these 78% are equipment related to the equipment inside the processing plant and the remaining equipment under technical clarifications are related to water management outside of building or quality control of our production.

Our owners team are continuously building up. We are coming into a phase now where more activity will happen in sites. We have a large resource pool through our PMC agreement in the engineering that are working now to finalize the detail engineering within Q2. And we are ramping up now to also expect EPC 3 to come at site in Q3. Therefore, we are enabling more people to join our projects and have hired a Deputy Project Director to come in, in a week's time.

We are also, over the summer, engaging commissioning management to be ready and prepare ourselves for commissioning and ramp up next year. In the operations team, we are now onboarding the signed resources from the previous recruitment period and are seeing these now onboarding in the second quarter and into third quarter. And we currently have 5 positions that are in final stages of interview with expectations of them onboarding end of Q3 this year.

[Ivar Fossum, executive]

Thank you, Kenneth. Then a few comments on the market. As mentioned previously, we have seen in the first quarter hesitating world with regard to GNP, which has an impact on commodities like titanium feedstock in general.

On the other hand, we see the other effect on Titan metal which for various reasons are becoming stronger in the times we are into, and we expect it to continue that way. So that is balancing nicely out the market picture for our titanium feedstock from Engebø.

In terms of the pigment industry, there was kind of a mixture of how the kickoff was in this year. We see sign that demand is coming back in China, a fairly stable demand in North America, while the European market remained weaker than the year before. However, over the last couple of years, we have seen a disciplined pigment sector, in particular in Europe, taking action to follow the market cycles, not to build up extreme inventories. So we think they are in line to kick off new production when now the paint season is coming to live in Europe but also in North America.

We see that prices for rutile are maintained at a decent level. The overall reason for this is that supply of rutile is continuously dropping because we see reduced production from current big suppliers and resources ending while there is a time transient for new project to come alive as rutile producers. So that macro picture continues towards our production start in 2024.

On garnet, we see the same pattern in a way, responding to the somewhat hesitating G&P path globally. However, on some issues, it's still a strong market. for example, in blasting where we have seen an upswing due to cyclical turns in the shipping industry. And we expect generally the market for Garner to be stable going forward. It's good to note that we have secured our sales for the first 5 years, fixed in volume and fixed in price for garnet. And Nordic will be one of the few large producers of high-quality garnets in the world and the only one in Europe.

When we are now evolving and progressing our projects, we see more opportunities related to byproducts. One of them is related to pyrites iron sulfate, which is easily taken as a byproduct from our tailings towards the end of our process. And we have entered an agreement with Green Trail Holding to develop a market entry for pyrites from Engebø when we start production.

Not a small -- not a large product for us, but quite an interesting niche. And we think it's a good example for several byproducts that may come out of tailings or other parts of our production going forward. Another example is the activity we have on laying out a strategy for how to market and sell the high-density rock, which is part of the Engebø deposit, but not characterized as ore.

So that will be a long-lasting resource as long as we do the open pit mining and represent an interesting product for several activities, and we see that the green shifts by way of ocean winds -- by way of building artificial islands, protecting land from flooding.

We see that we can find market segments where this particular rock can make a difference. So quite some interesting opportunities. We will take the time to develop a robust market strategy for how to develop this as another by-product from Engebø.

So with that, we conclude the status on Engebø, and I'll give you a brief highlight on the financial side. First of all, again, just to repeat that Engebø is fully funded to construct, to commission and to start production of rutile and garnet in 2024. And of course, by the securing of complete financing, we have a very robust financial position as we speak.

And I just ask you to look at the balance sheet to find more details. But of course, with the bond financing, with the equity issue we did in March as well as the royalty agreement with Orion, we are having a very solid and robust project financing for Engebø. In addition also, we have part of the package as a project reserve of USD 30 million.

In the first quarter, we invested approximately NOK 130 million in the Engebø project, accumulated a total of around NOK 420 million invested in Engebø. However, that picture will quickly change. We kicked off a full throttle on construction and procurement and activation of contracts in March.

So we expect investment to radically be increased during the rest of this year. So with that, we end the presentation. And I'll ask Kenneth and Christian to come up to a stage, and we'll have a Q&A and try to do our best to answer your questions. Thank you.

[Unknown Executive]

Yes, Ivar. We only have a few questions here. The first one is now that Engebø is in progress. When will Nordic Mining start developing new projects?

[Ivar Fossum, executive]

Yes. Thank you for that question. I'll try to be general because I can't be specific, but I think overall strategy is not to remain a one-project company.

[Unknown Executive]

Christian, how is the weakening of the Norwegian krone against the American dollar affecting Nordic Mining and the finances?

[Christian Gjerde, executive]

So if we look at isolation, the execution of Engebø, we have a project financing package comprising equity raised in NOK, which we are now spending towards the execution and we have a significant part of the funding raised in dollars. So from a project financing execution point of view, we are offsetting our risks related to the weakening of the NOK. Looking at the implications of Nordic Mining and the Engebø project more long term. Engebø is for us a dollar asset. We will get revenues predominantly in dollars. So a weakening of the NOK longer term would be beneficial for the value creation free cash flow in Engebø, given that the majority or large part of the operational costs are like labor, power, et cetera, et cetera. So for us, this is handled through the financing structure and also long-term positive for the value generation of Engebø.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, Christian. Ivar, there is a question about the AlSiCal project. It says that they announced last week that the game-changing technology has been developed and validated by IFE. It's also state that IFE is the sole property of this new technology. Can you elaborate on Nordic Mining's role in this project and the relationship between this new technology and Nordic Mining share of ownership in the patent.

[Ivar Fossum, executive]

I can, to a certain extent, but we don't have all information related to any new patents. The AlSiCal project is a Horizon 2020 project fully funded by the EU, where any specific detailed technology invented by one of the parties can be subject to new patents. Nordic Mining has been responsible for one package in the project, and we'll see how the overall technology evolvement in that project relates to our current patent together with IFE when the project is finalized in 2024.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you. We don't have any more questions here. But perhaps you just want to sum up.

[Ivar Fossum, executive]

Yes. I just want to thank everybody for listening today. And please, if you have any further questions to us, send us an e-mail or give us a ring, and we'll try to answer you as soon as we can. So thank you again.