Sigma Lithium - Q2 2023

Transcript

Speaker 0

Hello, everyone. Good morning. I want to welcome you to the second quarter presentation, earnings presentation for Sigma. Without further ado, I'm gonna go through these materials. We're very proud to present to you the results that we just did, which means we're back on schedule, back on time, back on track as far as financial reporting.

So please kindly read the disclaimer. We're gonna make a number of forward-looking statements here, and, and they're all in the disclaimer. This presentation is gonna be available on site. So here is, again, a video. A picture is a thousand words. We're gonna close with a video that Gabriel was going to host for us, but here it is. Oops! I apologize, there's a bit of a technical issue here, just let me go back.

So as you can tell, we are very proud, very, very proud, of what we've achieved. And, essentially, the operational video shows everything. The ramp-up has been a success. We've been steadily, as always, marching towards getting to our guidance of 130,000 tons for 2023. I want to remind all of you that this is not arithmetic, meaning this is incremental steps. Remember, in July, we were going at 50%, and then we jumped up to 75%. We can go over 100%, as we've shown. We've done 150,000 tons. This DMS can go to 50 tons an hour.

So don't do arithmetic math, because once we feel that the dry stacking circuit is to our liking, and it is, and we'll show you, you know, a few more videos of that, because this is our mission. We're just gonna ramp up this plan and get to 130,000 this year by the end of December. The second shipment is gonna be quite special because we are starting. I don't want to break the news, but we're starting to build what we call a zero, zero supply chain for lithium. In other words, there's a scenario where we're gonna ship carbon negative material to a processor, to a best-in-class processor, who himself is doing 6 tons of carbon per ton. We are doing zero.

We were doing 0.25, and we're gonna ship him the credits. And we're gonna deliver zero, zero, meaning zero carbon chemicals, which is the holy grail of this industry. We're working with a best-in-class trader, and we're hoping to achieve the results very quickly. Now, we're also advancing detailed engineering for the expansion towards final investment decision, which should be achieved by September. We have been working very, again, steadfastly to get us to the final investment decision. As we shared before, there's a scenario where we're gonna build two additional plants. There's a scenario where we're gonna build three additional plants to four line trains, which means quite a lot. And then we are gonna be shortly, and, I mean, within a week or so, announcing our phase IV.

Remember, the purpose of what we're doing now is to bring as much material, as much of this triple zero fantastic material to the supply chain as possible. Again, we continue to deliver on every front. I mean, on export, we've been able to count with the partnership with Santander Brazil on the first green ACE line, which is an advancement on export material, produced material. As you can see, we got stockpiled everywhere with the advances, working capital for $10 million. It's a revolver. We end the second quarter with CAD 45 million. We expect to recognize revenue and report positive operating profits already in Q3.

And again, for those who were looking for the final numbers, we delivered phase one construction on budget with CAD 126 million CapEx dispersed and CAD 8.1 million still remaining of all these fine-tuning means that we're doing on the plant. On the operational update, here we go. Again, a video is a thousand words, and this—a thousand words, and this one focuses on that circuit, the third plant, meaning plant one, the constant, the crusher, plant two, dense media separator, and then plant three, the dry stacker, which is the first in the world, and we have been hailed here in Brazil as a paradigm for all mining industry, which has been our objective when we started. So here it is, the dry stacker.

For those who visited when we were still fine-tuning, it's. So, again, I took this video actually yesterday. I'm here on site, and you can see how beautiful. Here to the right is the beautiful Dry Stack. And why do we keep on focusing so much of it? Because that's, those are the brains, right? Imagine a car. This Dense Media Separation plant is a Ferrari. We can accelerate it to the. The capacity of the cyclone is 200, 200 tons an hour. But then, you know, if we need, as we showed, we can actually go faster, but we need to be able to trust our brakes, meaning we, we need to be able to do it exactly as you have it on the pictures, without any mud, any mess. Beautiful, beautiful, clean site.

In the back, you see the dry stack, stockpiles we've got. So we're gonna be doing separate ships. So here it is, and I encourage all of you to physically come and visit us, right? So again, production ramp-up, meeting every milestone. As we discussed before, we were on first shipment, done, second shipment, done. We're on the way to third shipment, and we're gonna be sequencing them, basically, you know, one after the next, increasing capacity. And we just focus of building this, zero, zero carbon product to the clients' benefit.

I mean, and there are a lot of Western automakers and Eastern automakers who actually would like to see this triple zero, and now double zero, because we're gonna zero the chemical as well, working in partnership with a best-in-class trading company globally, who's becoming an enabler of hopefully getting to a zero-carbon or low-carbon cathode. This product is a commercial success. I mean, IRA and CBAM have increased our interest significantly. So we ship the material to China with a defined end user. We've been working in partnership with the Chinese refiners, which are just terrific. They're incredible. And so the carmakers who have been procuring sustainable and responsibly sourced battery materials aligned with the expectations of their customers about this car, have been working in close partnership.

We've been aligned with refineries that, just like us, have done quite a lot of homework on the hard to abate. So they are best in class on their categories. As I said, they are at 5 tons-6 tons per ton of hydroxide, which is quite low, quite low. And if we send zero with a, with a deficit, we can actually offset the lot, so we'll be zero at the end. And why? Because offset works when you have a company that's willing to work on scope one. And this is what our partners are doing. So we've done 15,000 tons is already at port. We're now gonna do the 30,000 tons of the byproduct that you saw, part of that, trucked to port, part being trucked.

So the upcoming shipment, and we'll be a bit conservative, 15,000 ton imminent, 30,000 tons is a by-product mid-month, and then 18,000 by the end of the month, perhaps more. Here is again, a video, a thousand words, a thousand words. Look how beautiful this plant is working. So you can see, you can see the, you can see the materials going through the plant, coming out like first phase, second phase. For those who know, this is just stunning, right? And then here is the data. So I just showed you what backs the data. Visually, it's easier to see, right? The quality of the material, again, it has been steady, which means the plant actually has been working.

The DMS has been working really well, but as it is connected to the third plant, we call the dry stacker, it works efficiently as one circuit. We can't just turn one stockpile and turn off another. These are symbiotic twins, Siamese twins, they're connected. So, recoveries, which are on the left, which is lithium oxide grade, have always been pretty steady. In fairness, we actually recover above 6%, we have to bring it down to 5.5%. The feed, which is what goes into the first plant, which is the crusher, again, very steady. So we're not playing games, high grading. We're keeping the feed steady, which is the feed in the feasibility studies you saw. So feed steady, recovery steady, the system works.

And then, you can clearly see, like, the months, right? June, when we were adjusting. Sorry, I go back. June, when we were adjusting, July, when we started to hit the stride, and then in August, we're on stride. On stride. Next phase, again, picture is a thousand words. The material is now- of the material, right? Here, this material. 6.5 mm-9.5 mm. Fantastic material. So here it is. So those pictures I took inside the, I took those pictures inside the DMS this week. Here is the magnetic separator, which recovers the dense media, meaning the ferrosilicon, from the dense media. So here it is. Magsep. The two Magsep.

We like all these videos because it's kind of a virtual tour, but again, I highly encourage to look for our team and, you know, come see this. Come live, see this. We're always here. So as we were saying before, we've achieved the successful commissioning and calibration of the Dry Stacking in August. And then, as I said, these are Siamese twins, right? Plant two, plant three, DMS, and dry stacker. So that just shows the strides of recovery and the yield. On the left is yield. What is yield? Is what we get in concentrate per ton of ore. So this, you can see the average yield of this plant, how are they working well. So it's kind of from the beginning, plant one to the end, the yield, the overall operational yield.

Here you've got the recoveries. So the recoveries significantly increased. So with the optimization of the whole, we were able to stabilize the plant to a cadence. So we're now reaching a cadence. Again, considering we started in April and we've done this by August, so April, May, June, July, 4 months. Beautiful. It's quite an accomplishment, and we should be very proud of ourselves. The team is incredibly proud here, and so are we, because we've been working very hard for this to happen. Here is again the wash, right? Which actually becomes value. This is our dry stack, dry stack ultra fine, is the first of its kind. Here is how it happens.

So you can see it coming out. And then it goes into a circuit where it's dry stacked, and you saw that end-to-end, the cake and the pile at the beginning of the video. So this is our triple zero. We showed you the insides of the dense media separation, and this is how and why it's zero hazardous chemicals, because we utilize dense media to recover the lithium. Dense medium made of ferrosilica, among other things, and that ferrosilica is reused, right?

And it's recovered back through the magnetic separator I showed you. So this is how we achieve creating this beautiful product without using acids, without using hazardous, harsh chemicals to the environment, right? And our recoveries are quite good. I mean, so no use to damage the environment at the expense of higher recoveries. We're achieving this with this amazing plant.

In my hand here is a picture of the product. It's valuable. There's a bit of lithium here, 1.3%-1.5%. The bit that doesn't get recovered because of the dense media separation plant, so we sell it for a value. Typically, it's about 10% of the value of the main product. That's kind of the ratio. Again, it was—it's free. It's waste, so it's clients paying us for waste management, and that's how we become zero tailings. The other part of the tailings that we call coarse gravel, we utilize to cover and pave roads.

So, we basically monetize the green by-products in two ways, by either selling it to be upcycled to become more lithium concentrate, or by monetizing, helping our communities build rural roads, where, you know, they will gain access to the towns and to services like school, health, during the wet season, where they would become isolated because the roads would jam with mud, and they would be stuck in their communities without access to health, education during the wet season. That's how serious it was. So this paving with the coarse that we don't use, the coarse without lithium, coarse gravel, is essential for community well-being. And then the zero carbon, we've done a lot of work on abatement.

We got to 0.26 tons of carbon per ton of lithium. We'll have more slides on that later, but for those who don't remember, the average project in hard rock is 13 tons of carbon per ton of lithium. Lepidolite is 45 tons of carbon per ton of lithium. People are already thinking it's better to keep the diesel cars if you use lepidolite because it's nonsense. In the salars, best in class is 5 tons to a ton. So we're doing quite well here. Again, working with a best-in-class, a hard rock refiner to make lithium hydroxide, hopefully 0. Uh, so another question I got from all of you is these related party transactions, what are those? Well, it's very simple: it's surface.

As we become operational in phase one, as we're ramping up phases two, three, and four, we actually created a surface-specific company with new properties. We had Mical, which was legacy properties that were at Sigma before it went public. We had Arqueana, with legacy properties that were at Sigma before it went public, because those are the initial companies. This is a specially created company that's run always by Sigma's statutory officers. We have a former chief legal officer, the former chief administrative officer, and the objective is to have extra safeguard because the lithium valley is booming to a point where there's been quite a lot of speculation on farmland. So we decided to just buy it all, and that's what we did. We got a board-approved and TSX-approved, a stock exchange-approved, CAD 12 million loan and leaseback.

So it's a loan and leaseback, so the value of this company is zero because all the property is basically utilized as hard collateral and a mandatory leaseback. So debt and equity go. So if Sigma once it calls back all the property, so zero value, but an important vehicle for land acquisitions. So here there's more material. I'm just gonna change books, if you give me one second, because it's so heavy the file that I had to change the books. The file, close. Okay, so here is the second book. Okay, here. Just make sure I got the right book. Yes, second book. And this, again, I highly encourage you to read the disclaimers. We're gonna talk about expansion and overall num-- this is the numbers portion, right?

So the ability we have here to scale up organically is unmatched. Unmatched. Remember, we had nine former producing mines, and we're methodically going one by one by one. So we're now basically 130,000 tons expected in 2023. We repeated this, it's a typo, but it's gonna be over 530,000 tons in 2024. And then phase four, there's potential to build up, you know, a fourth line. So we have line one, line two, line three, and line four. Because the, the idea, the, the commercial success of the product is such, with car makers, that we wanna basically bring as much of it as possible during this ramp between now and 2027, 2028. Because, you know, no one's really producing this.

Actually, very few majors, very few parties are producing, just the majors, and us, right? And I call Albemarle and two other majors too, right? So we got, like, a very small group of producers of scale. And we are the only ones doing this triple zero product, and the newcomers will just come kinda later in the decade, 2028, 2029, 2030.

So we wanna just bring in as much of this as possible now to take full advantage of this commercial success that it is our product. And here it is again. I'm showing you again, we've just finalized FEL 3. We're, you know, it's ongoing because you're looking at this, you know, we have one here. We're looking at putting one, two, and three together on that other side. We're kind of thinking about the configurations.

Remember, we need altitude. The plateau is here because we're to put our own pads. We're moving plans. These are planned waste piles; they're not physically here. So we're replanning the waste piles, and we're fully funded by cash flow. We're also looking into an alliance with development banks for going further. You know, once we have these three plants, we're probably gonna go a step further.

The step that we can make best in the world, probably a technical-grade carbonate, lithium sulfate, we're debating, but it will be basic chemistry, right? Here is a live picture. So it just shows to the back here, the extension where we have the areas, so we can line them up in perpendicular to the current structure. So this is what we're actually studying now.

As you know, I mean, commissioning a plant in four months to the specs that we set out for ourselves, which were quite hard in terms of dry stacking, getting these incredible recoveries with a density of separation. We set the bar really high, and sometimes we didn't realize how high it was. So it took us all of our concerted efforts. The entire team was focusing on this, and this takes quite a lot of bandwidth from the technical team.

So we're back on expansion, and here is the expansion sort of timetable expected. We're planning to release pretty much all of that around September, October. We're gonna be ordering long-lead items in October for sure. Earthworks start immediately because land is ours, everything is ours. No vegetation to suppress. As you can see, it's pasture, so very straightforward.

And then we start, you know, equipment delivery, initiating equipment delivery, around first quarter, end of first quarter. Now, the beauty of what we've done for Brazil is that some of our largest suppliers are setting up factories here in Belo Horizonte. One of them is Metso, and some of their cycling suppliers are also setting up factories here, which is enormously proud for us.

So we're bringing with us the industrial supply chain, the suppliers to our industry, our lithium factory, right? And so we're planning to commission this by July. Again, we learned a lot in this commissioning, and then initial production expected in Q3 next year. Here is growth. Growth, growth. I mean, as you know, I mean, just don't forget, we got, like, all of this, right?

The south is a nature preserve, called Chapada do Lagoão. We're not going there. You know, we made a choice. If you can see here, it's green. We have quite a number of areas here. We're not going there. We've been confused as going there, but it's just not us. But between Grota do Cirilo, Genipapo, and Santa Clara, there's a lot to do. Here alone, I wanna show you the details.

There's Barreiro, there's Noventical, and then there's one, two, three more ore bodies which were former mines, right? So we're looking at, you know, this string over here, basically, north of NDC, which is phase three, and we're drilling this string. So we're going to come out with the first part of that homework shortly, which is this portion, and then the second part of that homework, which is this.

Then there's another ore body which merges with NDC called Maxixe, which we haven't even gone there because NDC is open to the north. So this whole thing here is quite significant. So expect news soon. Soon, meaning days. I mean, there's a long weekend in Brazil this week, so probably right after the long weekend, we will publish news on phase four, and there's gonna be a lot of detail here.

Financially, so again, more financial detail. We closed the first green advancement of export credit which means produced product, right? Tailings produced, material produced, stockpile. This doesn't go on non-produced material for Santander Brazil. We just got a fraction of the line that we could take.

So it demonstrates that we're now getting credits from banks, meaning our credit worthiness, the operational strength, the social and environmental reputation. We became the new operational paradigm for all miners here. All miners. And for us, it's very humbling. It's incredibly humbling because when we set out to do this, we didn't think it was going to happen.

We set out to do, hoping this was going to happen, but, you know, there were years, especially during the downturn, when we wondered whether we're gonna get there. And we have a resilience of team. We have a depth of operational technical bench that's just remarkable because each generation trains the next. So each generation stands on the other's shoulders, and this is kind of where we are, is a training ground, a training machine. People come through Sigma Li, but then they leave the bench trained.

So we built this human capital, human capital, deep bench, which makes us very, very, very proud. We really could have our pick on the best people of the marketplace because we pay our people well, we compensate them well, they receive stock. That's the magic. We run this business like a venture capital technology company. And that's the secret sauce, too.

We ended the second quarter with $45 million in cash and cash equivalents. We have no problem with credit. We expect to begin recognizing revenue and positive operating profit in Q3. We're gonna try to give you more accurate costs by then, but I got quite a lot of data now. CapEx for phase one, as I said, we closed it in $126 million, and then we added there's another $8.1 million remaining.

So all as planned. Here is a bit of financial information. And again, to the extent that I can, 'cause we're gonna be able to do this on third quarter. But I wanted to give you guys an inkling of how much a cash machine this company is. It's an analysis of various cost assumptions, meaning various cost structure assumptions, right? Assume the price is $3,000. This is certain, right?

So what happens here? We have basically, if I take the DFS operating profit, right, that's the base number. If the DFS is wrong in 50%, so this is like 50% wrong, right? So if we, if we're off, like, if we basically increase costs to these levels here, right? And this is kind of where we end up as far as operating profit. So it's, it's, it's quite significant.

You can simulate this all the way to whichever numbers you would like, right? So we keep on adding, right? We kept on adding simulations to this number and showing you that we're still very profitable. So here's the detail. I'm not gonna spend that much time because it's too much, it's too busy the slide, but to be assessed on here is $355 million dollars. And if we are off, and I kept on doing the simulation all the way down, right? You end up with $2,321 million dollars, assuming price is $3,000.

Now, what if the price is $2,000? Again, this shows how much of a cash machine this is. Margins go down, but again, the same analysis of various costs, cash costs, I mean, which shows what we've been saying.

When you're in a low-cost producer, we're in the lowest cost quartile. That's what matters. And so to really be a major, you need to be able to weather the cycles. This is a commodity. What we do isn't because of the triple zero, hence our commercial, huge success. But lithium concentrate is a commodity, and it varies. And therefore, while we're here, I mean, when you look at this, you can see that if you're a lowest-cost producer of something that ebbs and flows, you're always generating quite a lot of cash. That's the message here. We're gonna give you a lot more detail on the third quarter. But again, here's the math behind this. The tailings, again, at 10%, there's a base market for the tailings always, and the main product.

So we're doing net of all-in sustaining costs, so that's cost at port in China. And here it is. So projected analyzed net-net, right? So earnings, EBIT basically, right? But we'll give you that detail with that denomination at the call, at the third quarter call. But just, just to give you guys an inkling of how profitable this company is, and now that we hit the stride, now that we're marching towards phases II and III, we are actually going to close the gap because we have, you know, a triple zero product, right? So we're still being priced as a developer, clearly, right? Or as a really small producer, which we're not, right. So we're gonna start, you know, basically marching towards, you know, what we believe to be our true value.

Look at the capabilities regard. If I put a fourth line train, we'll be at 130,000 tons annualized EBITDA, potentially, I expect, assuming all the decisions are made, so I'm caveating this. So it just shows that there are very few companies, very few companies in the world that can operate at these levels, right? At what we call Pilbara levels, with this one block of properties, and that's what we call the super major block, right? And we belong here. That's where we are. And there's a disconnecting value between us and the other super majors on the block. A third of the value? We don't think so. So again, we are working very hard, as you can see, towards closing that gap, hitting a stride operationally.

Here are the same, the same message shown a different way. You see now, a non-producer valued at $4.3 billion, so it just gives you an inkling of what Sigma could be valued. So non-producer, $4.3 billion, producer, at our capabilities at these levels, $3.5 billion. So there's a clear value disconnect, which we're planning to close with execution. Execution, execution, that's what we do best. We're also ramping up our investor relations and marketing activities because we also feel that that's an important part of our business. Again, everyone is super focused on the business. I went on a 30-day global roadshow last time in April, May, right at when we started to produce. We're planning something similar.

Again, Australia, Europe, the U.S., we're gonna hit the road to communicate this to, to all investors because there's only one way of understanding it, is seeing, seeing the numbers and deliveries. And this is it. Phases II, III, and IV expansion highlights. We're strong in capacity. We're bringing this forth. The idea is to potentially, potentially do four line trains, one, two, three, four. We got the capacity, we got the back, so we have this advantage now. This product is unmatched. We're gonna pull all of it forth. That's what we're going to do, and possibly doing zero basic chemicals as well in partnership. So this is what we're looking at. And why now? Because this is when the industry needs it the most. The industry is closing the supply gap with lepidolite. It's 45 tons of carbon per ton of material. That says enough.

If you folks think the energy transition will happen in lithium on the back of lepidolite, think again. So here it is, Sigma delivering on every front. Consistency and focus, this is what we do, right? So every single milestone, dry stacking, zero chemicals, zero carbon, first shipment, second shipment, ramping up, this is what we do. And I'm gonna close with something that's really dear to me. This is why I'm here. This is why I've been here for six years, putting up with all sorts of things, as now you publicly know, the importance of our legacy. We are transforming an entire sector. We're changing the way metals and mining thinks in Brazil, and it's an enormous source of humility for us when we see some of the giants coming to us for: What's your social program?

What have you been doing with carbon? You know, it's really this is very humbling, and we do this with humility, and we help everyone. So we help with the dry stacking. We show suppliers we're here to help, basically. And here it is. What is the importance of being net zero? These are voluntary credits. I didn't have to do it. This is a salmoneira. I'll tell you this story 'cause I visited this project just last weekend, in the north, in the Amazon. This is a salmoneira. This tree is 150 years. The man that guards it is very poor. Very, very poor. Didn't wanna put a picture of him nor his house.

Now, without the carbon credits, a few, not one, not two, not three, a few illegal timber companies, they're called estancias in the north, right? Offer him BRL millions, which for them is huge profit. So it would have been $ millions of profit on this tree to cut it, just like that. Just like that, illegally. But for a person who needs to eat, somebody needs to pay to keep these trees up. And that's the initiative we're championing in Brazil, like, for the whole mining sector to embrace this forest, because, yes, we have a great government who's focused on conserving the forest, it's focusing on tough laws and all of that, but by the time they see this, the damage is done.

So it has to be top-down, bottom-up, meaning the Amazon, man, this is a person standing on the roof, and this is the heart of the tree, right? So, so that's transformation one. We're preserving, doing our bit, preserving this forest. Transformation two, these women were in situations of domestic violence outside of the economic productive systems. Today, they are proud ambassadors. In the same conference, in the annual Brazilian PDAC, it's called Exposibram, it's the biggest mining conference in the country, they went in there to show what we've been doing. I mean, I cannot describe in words the huge success that our projects were. And again, we're gonna be adopted. This not-for-profit that is part of this group that I helped found the civil rights movement for women in Brazil, it's gonna help the giants now.

We're gonna bring microcredit to the whole country, right? So this is it. So this is, this is the importance of what we do, and this is why we do it. This is why we work relentlessly. And yes, to deliver to all of our investors who have trusted us, who have entrusted us with this, the profits and the profitability and the lithium and the volumes and this incredible competitive advantage we've built on quality first, premiumized coarse triple zero, but also to change people's lives. I mean, this is what this is about. That's what makes us so special, right? So, here. Questions, questions. I'm gonna be brief on questions. So, targets for yield and recovery. Yes, we are on target for yield and recovery.

The plant recovery, remember, the plant recovery, we published something very few people do, right? I'm answering live here. Plant recovery is over 70%. It's amazing. However, we publish global recovery. We have a lot of transparency in our communications, which means we factor in for that loss in science that happens when the material gets into the DMS. So 65% is the global 62%-65% are the global recovery. Plant recovery can be up 70%, 72%. This DMS, with demineralization of phase one, is a machine, is incredible, and it works beautifully, not only to recover, but to also concentrate, and again, concentrate coarse crystals. So the competitive advantage of the product isn't just environmental, isn't just environmental, it is the coarseness. It's 6.5 mm-9.5 mm of this very coarse material.

Let me show you this. Oh, it's in book one. Yeah, it's in book one. So of this very coarse material that we produce, right? So essentially, let me see. Let me take this down, and I put book one here. We'll share. Okay, let me see here. Hold on. Open recent, part one. Okay, book one. Oh, here. Yeah, we'll share. Okay, we'll share here. Share. Can you see this? Yeah. So this material, this incredibly coarse material, is actually the same, right? So it's high purity, low potassium, low sodium, coarse. So it's a DMS that works, of course. What is the importance of this? So let me say, when you own a flotation plant, you got a mill to pulp, meaning to microns, to a 150-micron powder.

So the coarse material is instinctive. It brings higher productivity at the calcination. So this is why a client uses less of our material. So a client working downstream can be more sustainable because he uses less lithium as raw material, less gas, less power, less everything. So it's 7 tons of this per ton of a chemical, right? It's typically 9-10 tons of other products per ton of chemical. So the entire combination makes a lot of sense operationally, in terms of efficiency and sustainably, in terms of less impact. That's why we're gonna be able to do zero, zero carbon chemicals very soon. So are we on target for yield and recovery? Yes, we are. So yield, what is yield?

Think about in general, 1.4 million tons of ore, that's kind of steady state, will deliver 270,000 tons of material, right? So when you think about this, and then you think about these ratios, that's kinda how we think yield instinctively, right? So we can push up and down, depending on the grade of the material. We're trying to keep it steady, but we're very much on target, right? So I answered live. We cannot disclose the name of the company. We've had one shipment to Yahua, who's been our environmental partner, and we're incredibly proud of partnering up with Yahua as environmental partner. Meaning, they have partnered with us to purchase three years' worth of these tailings on a six-month revolver. So every six months, either them or us can change this.

But they were the first company, and I understand they supply quite a lot of the large electric vehicle makers in the world, right? So they've been buying this beautiful material over here, and they actually, I mean, they should give themselves carbon credit for doing what they're doing. They upcycle this. In other words, they take waste, and they make lithium. So it's incredible. It's a bit like making shirts with plastic bottles, right? It was gonna go to waste, it was gonna be in a tailings dam, and Yahua is actually upcycling it. So we are planning to develop more of these partnerships. But Yahua is, was commendable. It's a state-owned company in China, commendable for its vision of recycling material, right? Buying this material and upcycling, meaning making more valuable material out of our byproducts, right? So it's, it's, it's magic.

It's environmental magic, right? Carbon footprint. Yes, we did measure carbon footprint with Minviro, and then we were the pioneers, Alejandro, on that. No one had done it, a lifecycle analysis, when we did it. It was back in 2018, 2019, when it was not fashionable. And I actually earned a nickname at the time for doing that, of VP CEO. I think today everyone recognizes the importance, and the whole industry's moved in that direction. What we are planning to do now, I mean, as you know, 59,000 tons × 13 is a lot of carbon. We have a huge task, like the airlines did, which means I have here, I mean, 590,000 tons + 700,000 tons of carbon I could pull literally, right?

What we wanna do now that we've reached steady state operationally, we wanna calculate our LCA operationally, which it probably will be better because we were not planning to sell the tailings. We were not planning to do quite a lot of what we ended up doing. So we're gonna publish our life cycle analysis operationally. That's the plan here. So, at what spot and price it is no longer profitable or attractive to sell tailings? Well, I'll tell you a story. This is Joe, right? AMG in Brazil can actually take up on this conversation. During the down cycle, they were selling to the ceramic industry, their tailings, and they were getting between $100 and $200 per ton.

And that's, again, to your point, no longer for the lithium, that's for the quartz. Because this quartz is enormous quality here, and the ceramic flooring, as you know, it sells the premium one that you're all putting in your homes, it looks like wood. It's about BRL 150, which is about $30 a square meter. That thing is really expensive. So those guys need the quartz. And so in the down cycle, that goes for quartz, basically. And it actually helped. I mean, at one point, our peers, the sustainable peers, like AMG, were actually, you know, evening out on the tailings. The tailings were a valuable source of income. So there's a base bid right here in Brazil; five of the top global premium ceramic floor producers are here in this country.

Right now, we sell for the lithium, but, you know, ceramics industry is right here. So we answered that. So, the price of the second shipment, it's the same kind of metric. It's a value grab on hydroxide. So we are like at 90% of hydroxide. So it's been incredible that we've been able to achieve this value grab. Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball on hydroxide prices, so we float with the market. What we do, we grab value. We know our percentage grab out of the downstream, but we float with the whole industry, and that's a key thing. So, oh, good question. Difference with underground projects. Well, it's all the difference in the world. Again, an underground mine uses fresh water.

It needs to pump fresh water out, and it cannibalizes the fresh water off that you can basically drink, right? So we are using open-pit mines, profitability also. So you have essentially a much more profitable operation in terms of cost to mine when you run an open pit. Easy, easy to mine. Mine is a pan, basically, like ours. We have just done resources and reserves for open-pit portions of our deposits. There's underground potential, but we just don't go there. Again, especially in regions like ours, which are semi-arid, where water is at a premium, we don't wanna be seen by the community as going after their water. So we use sewage-grade water from the Jequitinhonha. We stay open pit, and that's what we believe in, and that's what we do.

Actually, it was, I mean, when there's fresh water in the middle of our pits, like in phase one, we actually preserve it. So we forsake ore on behalf of fresh water. Answer live. So let me see. Is consolidation with other projects in the region something Sigma would consider? No, absolutely not. Why not? Because we believe in developing the downstream in Brazil, and we are not going to be a monopoly. So we believe in projects that are serious, projects who don't do environmental damage. It's important that all of you folks ask about the environmental aspects. Where are the areas? Is this an environmental area? Is this allowed? Are these people drilling in allowed areas? We believe that more Sigmas have to exist. The world needs, someone told me the other day, 54 Sigmas.

We're hoping, hoping there will be many Sigmas here. Three, four, I mean, there are folks here doing work. You know, but to be Sigma, it's not just to drill, drill, drill, do a lot of damage, faze topics at the expense of the environment. That's not who we are. Our success is because we adhere to our ethos, adhere to our purpose. We stay true to what we believe in. I think that's key here. I mean, to be Sigma is more than just being our neighbor. We wanna make it very clear because, you know, there are some neighbors here making a real environmental mess, and blaming, and we end up getting the blame, and we've been taking the blame quietly, steadfastedly, inside the colossus, as we say in Brazil.

But, you know, I think you folks should do due diligence. But we want more Sigmas here. Why? Downstream. Downstream is coming to Brazil, fast and furious. The midstream of the supply chain can be built and will be built here sustainably. Zero, again, zero tailings, zero carbon. The same thing, we're building a house by the foundation. When others were talking about downstream, back when it was downcycled, just for the sake of it, we didn't say anything because we're building our house foundation by foundation to scale. We're gonna be at a scale of probably, expectedly, 1 million tons, if we end up with four lines. And at that point, we can carve out a bit for our downstream business and do just the basic chemistry.

We're not gonna have the audacity of doing something China does better than anyone, or the United States does better than anyone, with Albemarle, Livent, Ganfeng, Tianqi, all the leaders of the industry, or Yahua. We don't have that audacity. These guys do best. We are gonna supply basic chemicals to them, right? We're gonna supply triple zero technical-grade carbonate or lithium sulfate, so that we enable potentially zero carbon chemicals at the end. So we are humble. We are intellectually honest about what we can do best, and we can be best in the world, and what we don't have the specialty to do. It's a different industry. Specialty chemistry is a different industry. So where do we start? In basic chemistry: calcination, lithiumization, that's about it, right? So where are we going with this?

So I think we're good, guys. So, essentially, we answered quite a number of questions. We're running out of time. I have a very special guest this year on site that I'm also hosting. You can always be in touch with our IR. We can give you, you know, all the details. We're quite open. I really, really wanna thank you for your time, for listening to us, and for your trust, for your trust. I mean, the trust that we would get to this moment, right? Where we're just accelerating the plans, delivering the material, and really changing, an entire sector around us and, globally as well, which fills us with humility and pride, and with a huge sense of responsibility. I mean, we're gonna keep on doing it, keep on doing it the best that we can.

We all work relentlessly. As I said, I'm on site today. I was in the Amazon on the weekend. We're really working as hard as we can, and we are executing to the T as planned, as promised. So thank you very, very much!