Standard Lithium Ltd. (SLI) Q3 2025 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Standard Lithium's Fiscal Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Daniel Rosen, Vice President of Investor Relations and Strategy for Standard Lithium. Daniel, please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone. I'm joined today by David Park, our CEO and Director; Andy Robinson, President, COO and Director; Salah Gamoudi, Chief Financial Officer; and Mike Barman, Chief Development Officer. Before we begin, I would like to start with a reminder that some of the statements made during our call today, including any related to company performance, expectations and timing of projects may constitute forward-looking statements. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our press release, which also applies to this call. I will now turn the call over to David.

Thanks, Dan. And I appreciate everyone for joining us today. We had a very busy and productive third quarter as we successfully executed on multiple key milestones that we had set out to achieve. We completed a Definitive Feasibility Study for our South West Arkansas Project, highlighting both the attractiveness and cost competitiveness of our first commercial project being developed alongside our Smackover Lithium JV partner, Equinor. The SWA project is expected to have initial production capacity of 22,500 tonnes per annum of battery-quality lithium carbonate, producing 447,000 LCE tonnes of proven reserves over its model 20-year operating life or 38% on of the 1.2 million measured and indicated resource. Average lithium concentrations in brine are expected to begin at 549 milligrams per liter and produce at an average lithium concentration of 481 milligrams per liter over the period, demonstrating what we believe to be very small declines in lithium concentration and result in production over the projected operating life. The DFS is highlighted by a 20.2% unlevered pretax IRR with competitive average operating cost of about $4,500 per tonne, all-in cost of approximately $5,900 per tonne over the operating life an all-in Class III CapEx estimate of $1.45 billion, which includes a 12.3% contingency. The project is well engineered, defined and ready to progress to a final investment decision following a few remaining milestones that we will discuss. Construction is expected to commence in 2026, shortly after reaching FID with first production targeted in 2028. We also released a maiden inferred resource report for our Franklin project in East Texas. This report for Smackover Lithium's first of 3 planned projects in East Texas region of the Smackover highlights the size and quality of its brine position with some of the highest reported lithium in brine grades in all of North America. It includes 2.2 million tonnes LCE of lithium at an average grade of 668 milligrams per liter as well as 15.4 million tonnes of potash, a newly added mineral to the USGS 2025 draft critical mineral list and 2.6 million tonnes of bromine. It provides a strong foundation for future scalable production, and it marks a key step toward the ultimate goal of reaching production of over 100,000 tonnes of lithium chemicals per year in Texas through multiple projects. As we've said, Standard Lithium is more than a single project company. We believe East Texas to be a meaningfully underappreciated part of our portfolio, and we expect this report to be a key step towards achieving more appropriate recognition for this world-class asset. Following third quarter close, in October, we closed an underwritten public offering of 29.9 million common shares at a price of $4.35 per share for gross proceeds of approximately $130 million. We received strong support from institutional investors, highlighted by an oversubscribed order book and our ability to upsize the transaction by $10 million, which underscores the confidence in our strategy and the quality of our assets. This fundraise was an important milestone for the company and a key derisking step that will put us in a strong position to reach FID at SWA. Lastly, we expanded our leadership team with the appointment of Michael Lutgring as General Counsel. This addition to the leadership team is critical as we strengthen our capabilities, bring further expertise in-house and continue our growth and development as a company. To provide more detail on key project-related developments and deliverables ahead, I'll pass it over to Andy.

Thanks, David. The release of 2 technical reports since our last earnings call is a tremendous achievement and a testament to the hard work and dedication of our joint venture project teams over the last few years. For the Franklin project and East Texas more broadly, we intend to continue to improve the definition of our resource positions through additional drilling and process test work in the coming quarters. Our general goals for 2026 are to move towards a preliminary feasibility study for the Franklin project and demonstrate the project economics, that world-class resource, work on maiden inferred resource reports for our other potential projects in the area and to continue to expand our leasehold footprint in East Texas. However, my comments today will be more focused on the SWA project. We have successfully completed a number of critical milestones that we set out to achieve as we push closer to reaching FID. This includes completion of the final regulatory approval required from the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission, which we obtained about 2 weeks ago. We received unanimous approval for our integration application for the Reynolds Brine Unit where the initial commercial phase of the SWA project is planned to be developed. Integration is the formal process, which combines any remaining nonleased mineral interests into an approved brine production unit and is a key derisking step for any future production from that unit. Looking forward, the key remaining milestones between here and FID relate to environmental, construction, funding and commercial items. On environmental, as required by our $225 million grant from the DOE, we continue to work closely with the DOE on completion of an environmental assessment for the project. The assessment has been drafted and submitted for a review with our designation as a FAST-41 transparency project under the federal permitting dashboard. We expect to be in a public comment period later this month, and the overall estimated completion date is currently around year-end. With respect to construction, we are in the final stages of selection and contracting with an EPC who will lead the building of our central processing facility as well as a separate EPCM contractor who will lead the development of our well field. We intend to have these finalized prior to year-end. Turning to the ongoing dual-track project financing and customer offtake processes, we've made significant progress in advancing these negotiations alongside our experienced financial advisers. We look forward to being able to provide an update in short order on the leading potential debt financiers that have expressed support for our project and providing confidence in our ability to secure the approximately $1 billion in debt that we are targeting to build the project. Additionally, we have allocated a material portion of our projected annual production volumes to parties where customer offtake is steadily progressing towards binding contracts. We expect to have many of these key deliverables squared away before year-end with a formal FID in early 2026. A parallel execution of multiple work streams means that we are aiming to start construction very shortly after FID with the goal of first production in the second half of 2028. Now I'll turn it over to Salah to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Andy. To begin, I want to clarify that all numerical financial references that I will be making are in U.S. dollars. For the third quarter ended September 30, 2025, we reported a net loss of $6.1 million as compared to a loss of $4.8 million during the quarter ended September 30, 2024. For the quarter, as compared to the quarter ended September 30, 2024, G&A increased by $0.3 million, driven primarily by increases in employee-related expenses associated with expanding our team as we continue to mature and transition from early-stage project development and derisking activities towards construction and eventual production. Share-based compensation expense increased by $0.9 million period-over-period, reflecting our increased focus on structuring incentive plans to more closely align employee compensation with share performance and value creation. Below operating expenses on the income statement, we recorded a higher investment loss from joint ventures of $0.9 million for the quarter versus $0.4 million in the prior period. This increase reflects expanded operational activity at the Smackover Lithium JV level and related expenses in 2025 as we advanced towards the release of our 2 technical reports. We also recorded a $0.5 million gain on the fair value of our contingent FID payments to be received by Standard Lithium from our JV partner, Equinor, should we reach a positive FID at our SWA and/or East Texas projects. As we continue to achieve milestones and approach target FID decision dates, the value of our contingent FID payment assets have increased as reflected by the gain. Moving on to our balance sheet. We ended the quarter with strong cash and working capital positions of $32.1 million and $29 million, respectively. This cash position does not include the follow-on offering we completed in October, which generated net proceeds of $122.2 million. As a reminder, the sole funding requirements by Equinor into the JVs as part of the original agreement were exhausted during the second quarter of this year with Standard Lithium and Equinor now making their own respective capital contributions based on a 55%-45% ownership split. As a result, Standard Lithium made JV capital contributions of approximately $11.2 million during the third quarter, bringing the total year-to-date up to $19.5 million as reflected on our cash flow statement. Despite this contribution, through active cost management, cost sharing, cost recoveries through our DOE grant receipts and liquidity provided through prudent use of our ATM program, we were able to maintain our cash position during the quarter. This was further bolstered by the follow-on offering last month, which helps support our expected equity contribution into the SWA project at FID and continuing to progress development work in East Texas. Securing an attractive and comprehensive project financing package is a critical component of the final investment decision for SWA. The $1.45 billion of project CapEx is expected to be financed by a combination of senior secured project debt, the $225 million grant from the DOE as well as respective funding contributions from Standard Lithium and Equinor. The JV is targeting approximately $1 billion in total project debt, supported by leading export credit agencies and commercial lenders. The remaining contribution required by Standard Lithium will be reduced by the $40 million FID milestone payment due from Equinor as well as proceeds from the recent equity raise. I will now turn it back over to David for closing remarks.

Thanks, Salah. On a final note, I wanted to share that we recently played a leading corporate role in organizing the Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit that took place in Little Rock 2 weeks ago. The event was highlighted by a strong keynote address from Arkansas Governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The excitement around developing a domestic lithium, upstream and midstream supply chain centered around the Smackover formation was remarkable. Standard Lithium continues to be extremely well positioned with a portfolio of high-quality and scalable assets, and we're excited by the prospect of being a domestic champion for securing critical minerals production in the United States. We're highly encouraged by the critical milestones we delivered in the third quarter, and we expect to provide multiple updates in the coming months as we seek to conclude our ongoing project financing and customer offtake processes, finalize selection of our key SWA project vendors and approve FID before moving to construction at SWA in 2026. Thanks again for joining us today. Operator, back to you for questions.

[Operator Instructions] There are currently no questions at this time. So this concludes today's call. Thank you for attending, and you may now disconnect.

Sorry, Aaron, it looks like we may have had a question.

I do see a question come in. Your first question comes from the line of Joseph Reagor with ROTH Capital.

Just one quick thing. On the FID payment, the $40 million, how does that work from a structure standpoint? As soon as you make the FID decision, you triggers the $40 million payment? Or is it part of like as the funds go into the JV, they just contribute an extra $40 million?

Joe, this is Salah. I'm going to take that question. As soon as we -- the JV Board between us and Equinor decides to take FID and move forward at South West Arkansas or for that matter, East Texas in a further year, Equinor will owe Standard Lithium parent company USD 40 million. So that will be a payment from Equinor to us upon taking FID, which would be approved at the JV Board level.

Okay. So if you guys make an FID and then for any reason, it changes at a later date, you still get the $40 million upfront?

I would say correct because we took FID. However, I don't believe that we would take FID and then back out at a later date.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. And this does conclude today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.