Good morning ladies and gentlemen and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Aqua Metals’ First Quarter 2016 Corporate Update Conference Call. During today’s presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. [Operator Instructions]. This conference is being recorded today May 16, 2016 (sic). Before we get started, I’d like to turn the call over to Greg Falesnik who will read a disclaimer about forward-looking statements.

Thank you, operator. This conference call may contain, in addition to historical information, forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Federal Securities Laws regarding Aqua Metals. Forward-looking statements include statements about plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events and performance and underlying assumptions and other statements that are different than historical fact. In the forward-looking statements during this conference call include statements concerning our intentions, expectations and believes regarding anticipated growth; market penetration and trends in our business; the timing and success of our plan of commercialization; our ability to operate our AquaRefining process on a commercial scale; our ability to maintain our competitive technological advances against competitors in our industry; our ability to have our technology solutions gain market acceptance; our ability to maintain, protect and enhance our intellectual property; and our expectations concerning our relationships with suppliers, partners and other third parties. These forward-looking statements are based on current management expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties and may result in expectation not being realized, and may cause actual outcomes to differ materially from expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements. Potential risks and uncertainties include the fact that the company has not yet commenced revenue producing operations or developed its initial commercial recycling facility, thus subjecting the company to all of the risks inherent in a pre-revenue start-up; risk related to Aqua Metals’ ability to raise sufficient capital as when needed; to develop and operate its recycling facilities; changes in the federal, state and foreign laws regulating the recycling of lead-acid batteries to company’s ability to protect its proprietary technology, trade secrets and know-how and other risks disclosed in the “Risk Factors” included in the Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on March 28, 2016. All such forward-looking statements whether written or oral made on behalf of the company are expressly qualified by the cautionary statements and such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and we caution you not to place undue reliance on these. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Dr. Stephen Clarke, the company’s Chairman and CEO. Steve, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Greg and welcome everybody to today’s first quarter 2016 update. Before I go any further, I and my team would just like to take a moment to acknowledge the sad passing of Stan Kimmel, a dear friend of the executive team and one of the independent directors. It was a very painful loss and he is very sadly missed. Despite this loss, we’re excited to be commercializing the first - lead recycling technology ever and today we will cover the progress that we’ve made to that end. A press release accompanying this conference call went – early this morning and joining me today is Chief Financial Officer, Thomas Murphy who will walk through the financials later in the call. The brief agenda of what we intend to cover today is an overview of the company to the luxury of new investors joining today, so first few slide is a repetition somewhat of previous presentations we’ve given. And then we’re going to move on to the value proposition, our market, business model and our growth plans. And as you may be aware, we made an announcement last week covering the strategic relationships with Interstate Batteries and we’re going to talk a little bit about that, it’s a pretty significant event and a pretty good endorsement of our business and what we’re trying to achieve here. Then we’ll review the financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2016, I’ll summarize the management and the board and then we’ll round up with some media coverage, not least of which was the happy event last week in which Aqua Metals was awarded the prize for the Rising Star in the metals industry at the Platts Global Metals Awards in London last Thursday and we’re very proud of that endorsement of…

Thank you, Steve and good morning. I’m going to start with a brief recap of the first quarter 2016 results. For the three months ended March 31, 2016, we had an operating loss of $2.2 million. The net loss for the first quarter of 2016 was also $2.2 million. We had $23.1 million in cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, 2016 compared to $31.8 million as of December 31, 2015. I’d like at this time to point out a few key highlights since our IPO which was in July 31, 2015, less than a year ago. On that date, we listed on the NASDAQ and sold a total of 7.24 million shares at $5 per share for $36.2 million gross proceeds. In conjunction with the IPO, our convertible notes were redeemed for $2.5 million shares of our stock. On August 17th of last year, we broke ground on the construction of our 138,000 square foot McCarran recycling plant as today we continue to complete the building and equipment installation as Steve just explained. In November of last year, we received $10 million loan from Green Bank in Houston, Texas. This loan was made in conjunction with the 90% loan guarantee from the Rural Business Cooperatives Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We signed a lease for 20,697 square foot of mixed office and manufacturing space in Alameda, California. Tenant approvements were begun in 2016 and removed in February of this year. And the big announcement we had last week, on May 18th we signed a strategic partnership with Interstate Batteries. In addition to the supply contract Steve just talked about, Interstate Batteries has agreed to purchased 702,247 shares of the company at $7.12 per share for gross proceeds of approximately $5 million. Interstate Batteries has also agreed…

Thank you, Tom. So now I’m just going to wrap up with couple of points may be a repeat for people who have followed us, but just to those who are new to the company. Just going to talk about the management and the board, so this is not a company that was developed by some – management team had guns brought in, this is a company that’s developed by its management who are founders. So the executive team here is myself, Selwyn Mould, Tom Murphy and Steve Cotton. I started like working with Rolls Royce aerospace in the UK, I spent nine there and I left with a degree in engineering and MBA, and the position running the entirety of Rolls Royce’s engineering group worldwide, - to consulting spent several years in doing corporate turnaround work and mergers and acquisitions and de-acquisitions and 20 years got back into technology which has always been a passion of mine and operate in developing materials, electrical chemical base, businesses overseas and proud to be working with Selwyn Mould who’s our Chief Operating Office, self-started out in the industry. In his case, it – under UK with a degree from Cambridge in Chemistry, I actually worked with him in the consulting company but he also has a background in manufacturing and logistics with time spent at Pilkington Glass and Lotus manufacturing and supply. We – consulting and joined Tom and myself 10 years ago now in technology development and commercialization. Tom Murphy CFO who’s been talking is now the somewhat considerable expertise in IPOs for international finance, and he’s a CEO/CFO somebody absolutely closer – on the numbers and finance their business. And last but absolutely not least is Steve Cotton, our Chief Commercial Officer. Selwyn, Tom and I have known Steve for…

Thank you, sir. We’ll now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. And we’ll go first to Collin Rusch with OPC.

Thanks so much. It’s Oppenheimer & Company. Guys, could you talk a little bit about how much equipment has been installed and when you expect the equipment set to be fully installed?

Right now we are in the process of installing battery breaking and separation equipment. We haven’t got modules assembled but we haven’t the shipped the – what we have shipped is the test that – to make sure that when we do the supply the modules that it can line up and the electrical equipment lines up and – as I said earlier, we are on schedule to have the plan, installed, running at main capacity by the end of this year.

And when do you expect the first start up to happen when the first test runs?

Well some of them have already been completed, there isn’t a first test run, it’s a continuing operation. So, in one sense we’ve already done it. In the sense of when will the first module will be running in base in Reno, we’re projecting late July may be early August. The timings of first runs aren’t that critical, the more critical items are getting the much larger scale equipment installed and getting to the battery breakers and get all the support equipment. So there’s little risk associated with the actual – themselves, the important point is just the scale of the operation. Once you start processing 160 tons of batteries per day, you better make sure that all the support processes are there and operating. So we’re spending the time making sure that everything – all the support stuff is working as it should before we attempt to ramp up the lead production.

I think that point is well taken on my questions around the amount of time you have for problem solving which sounds like there is ample time for problem solving as these things get put into place. And then the last question for me is really about the application of the lead that’s going to become – facility, is your understanding that this lead has been used in pace or is it really primarily focused on – and how much visibility do you have into battery, you’re supplying the raw material or how so you move into this alloy opportunity, are you looking at the further applications for the metal and any sort of detail [indiscernible]?

So the amount – there’s two types of lead, specific grid alloys for specific battery customers and we make pure lead which is more typically used as an active material, although some modern batteries use relatively pure lead in one of the plates. The amount of lead that we produce in terms of active material to the plate lead will vary somewhat depending on the mix of batteries that have come in. But we specifically are making or plan to make specific alloy grades for specific customers and pure lead for specific customer and for the auto market. The auto will be outside of what we are making – it’s equivalent to – I’m not really getting into who or what our commercial relationships are with.

Okay, great. I’ll probe into that for couple of directions offline. But thanks a lot guys and congratulations on the progress.

Thank you.

And we’ll take our next question from Jeff [indiscernible] Capital Markets.

Good morning. Question one the Interstate Batteries agreement, can you guys talk about how you’re thinking about tolling versus merchanting and how many initial conversations you guys have had internally in that regard?

What I can tell you it has been very detailed discussions are ongoing, what I’m not going to be doing is revealing the commercial nature of those. What we’ve got is a very open dialog of what is optimal for them and what is optimal for us, our policy is not to disclose commercial contracts, pricing and ratios.

Sure, fair enough. Okay. And then just in terms of that agreement with them, obviously these guys have a broad footprint across the country. Does that kind of give you lease in terms of markets for a future AquaRefinery predicated on finding other partners or how are you guys thinking about broadening the footprint?

The former, we are focused on building out additional facilities with Interstate has the strategic partner, that doesn’t preclude us building facilities elsewhere but our focus right now is that we have a strategic partner who is essentially walking towards to expand rapidly sort of that can take advantage of lead produced that isn’t subject to a smelter. So at that time focus -- what it gives us is the surety of we’ll not only supply a battery of locations so it allows us to accelerate. And as I said earlier, we talked a lot about with – 10 facilities a year which was a great statement and how do you validate and move towards it and this relationship provides us the pathway to do that. That’s exactly what we’re focusing on.

And just to expand a little bit on Interstate Batteries reach, they have customers in every single county of the United States. So they are everywhere.

Yeah, obviously, given you guys have tremendous amount of flexibility there. And then a last one from me is you kind of touched on it during the presentation on looking to develop your own brand on the LME. Could you guys just talk about the strategic benefits of progressing on that front, is that a marketability standpoint of your product or kind of what’s the I guess strategic benefit that you expect to gain from that going forward?

Yeah, there’s – to it, the first one is that if you’ve got a hell of a brand, you’ve got a – product which would essentially liquid cash at the – reduce the [indiscernible] your inventory holding cost dropped to the minimum because you’ve got a – you’re essentially in the same place as the people who produce crude oil. So it’s important from a trading standpoint, but we actually think it’s more important than that in the sense that we are very keen and humble to differentiate our products, but wasn’t produced in a smelter. Some that were produced with next to zero environmental impact and every – refined lead is a ton of lead that was produced at a lead mine and wasn’t produced at the smelter, we think that’s a good thing.

I absolutely agree. Great. Appreciate the time guys.

[Operator Instructions]. We’ll go next to Robert Romero with Connective Capital.

Hi Steve. Congratulations I’m really I know that shareholders are very, very happy that you’ve made a progress here with the Interstate, it’s great to see I mean I can’t imagine a better partner worth the company to help rule out the business beyond this year. So yeah congratulations.

Thank you.

So the question I had is really obviously there is key proof points obviously continuing to roll out successfully this year and ramping up to the initial production of 80 tons a year which you’ve committed to this year I’m sorry 80 tons per day. And then as far as you’ve put out there, as far as the benchmark is 160 tons per day in 2018 which is two years later, my question to you is I mean obviously it’s going to be conservative with the goals but just want to understand that to the extent that they rule out continuous well and you’re able to ramp up 80 tons per day at the end of this year, since your Alameda plant can make 800 tons per day per year of equipment, would it make sense if things go well to expand faster? I mean certainly I’d imagine if you roll out successfully and if things are going well at the facility you’d go to 160 may be next year and certainly with the Interstate agreement, there’s a lot of other places that you could do, small facilities to refine lead. So again, I’m not looking for commitment, if things go well, is it reasonable for you to roll out faster?

Absolutely. I’m a firm believer on planning on what you know and what we know is what – the thing that’s been fascinating to us is we had ongoing discussions with numerous battery company and recycling companies. Battery companies do their own recycling and recycling companies operate smelters in North America, pretty much everywhere in the world. And the intensity of those conversations takes up pretty enormously since we made the announcement, it’s been surprising and both very pleasing impact on the seriousness of the conversations around supplying equipment to third parties. What we don’t want to do is over-accelerate, I mean we took a very serious look and a very serious decision to build own and operate first before we roll out, very specific reasons and advantages in doing that. So we’re mindful that we want to execute on that plan and it might not dramatically impact the starting point of we should be supplying the equipment but I think we may be able to accelerate how many customers and how quickly we will supply equipments.

Okay. Thanks for that. I obviously I’m looking forward to the ramp up going well and things do go well, you’ll be able to move up quicker next year.

Okay. Thanks, Rob. So I think at this point, we’ll conclude the call. Thank you very much, appreciate the interest in the company. Thank you very much.

That does conclude today’s call. Thank you for your participation.