welcome to CEO insights I'm Marilyn the Guzman with investing news thatw work my guest this episode is Alex Holmes Chief Operating Officer fernandoo Wan materials and we are talking about the company's new collaboration agreement with Japanese firm Sumitomo metal mining welcome Alex thank you Maran yes so let's get on to it so your company just announced an agreement with Japanese company Sumit tomu and it includes a $16.9 million Strategic investment and a collaborative agreement let's pars it down and talk about the


financial deal first tell us about what that is and what it means for your company's strategic goals yes thank you this is a very exciting news for us today um we're very proud of our team and and helping us get to this point uh this has been in the works for several months uh with sumol metal Mining and um as far as a company goes um they're one of the most highly integrated miners refiners to cathod AC materials produced from the world um so this is a this is a significant step forward for nano1 U the investment


itself represents about a 5% Equity stake in nano1 was done at at about a 10% premium to the 5day vwap um really what it is it's a it's effectively an endorsement or it's a it's a valid marker of what we are doing at Nan one and what we're looking to continue to do as we execute our business plan right and then there's also that collaboration agreement uh uh is it technical like what that can you talk a bit more about that as well yes it covers the collaboration EUR covers a


number of areas um so as I mentioned we spent the last several months um working with Sim Tomo but the areas that we're going to be focusing on working with them are ultimately for you know looking to lead to licensing and joy Venture of our technology for lfp cathod AC materials and nmc cathod materials uh they're an existing producer today of cathod act materials they're highly integrated into the Japanese ecosystem um they actually have a very similar plant to the one that we acquired last


year in Quebec and and there's in Vietnam uh and through uh you know the last number of months our teams really were able to sit down uh share knowledge and and the expertise that each other had in particular in lfp um and map out uh you know what is we see as a big opportunity particularly in the lfp market but the Japanese Market is going to grow in time as well both for automotive but also for energy grid Storage Solutions so I I I think I guess a big portion of this uh agreement comes from


your proprietary uh one pot process right so for I guess investors uh that are uh watching us today that's not familiar with that process could you just give an overview of that uh process and why that matters to the electric vehicle market and the battery Market yes certainly uh so the onep technology is a technology that we've organically developed ourselves inhouse um built up over the last 12 years or so uh really to a place where now we have 32 patents uh issued globally uh 50 plus


pending and this is about the manufacturing process and how cathod active materials are made the process in which they're made today is the same way it was made in 1990s um but the system and the process was not designed in the 90s to get to the scales that we're reaching today so we start to think about Net Zero 2050 we start to think about electric vehicles on the road energy grid storage we're talking about hundreds of terawatts of installed capacity of batteries and that means tens of millions of tons of cathod


active material that goes into those batteries and the current system today uh is fairly wasteful it's not very energy efficient uh it consumes a lot of water and also has a CO2 footprint as well which you'd expect um what our technology enables is a much simpler process uh to produce caod active materials call it a one pot technology it's flexible with different feat stock materials we have no waste streams we significantly reduce the amount of water use um we're much more energy efficient


and uh and also it's a much lower environmental footprint from a ghg perspective and you know you don't always get that as well as capital and operating cost benefits and savings as well so we've been working up and down the supply chain um with miners at the far with riotinto who also owns about 5% of us all the way through to the cathod active materials producers like BASF and Yore big European companies now Simon will we add into the mix as a as a strategic collaborator uh down to the


cell level with our next energy where we're working with them uh to uh ultimately get to offtake for our lfp material that we will produce at a new commercial plant next door to our Cur on in Quebec uh and then the automotives right down at the end of the supply chain and the driving force between all of this is localized Supply reducing Environmental footprint improving the cost and the performance materials So speaking of um that supply chain for you know battery um Canada and Japan have uh also


announced recently enhanced cooperation agreement for a battery supply chain they haven't really disclosed any details of what those uh you know would entail but what impact do you see that having on your business operations well I think the Canadian government and the Japanese government has spent the last um considerable amount of time at efforts there's been a number of um missions to Japan uh and earlier this year we had the um battery Association for supply chain which represents the entire battery supply


chain in Japan come to uh Toronto and also to Montreal and what we're seeing is um you know sharing of values uh sharing of um you know there's stability in government um there's natural resource extraction that's done responsibly with critical minerals available in Canada and um a lot of government will to set up a cleaner more efficient supply chain and because of that and you know I think we can't forget that Japan effectively innovated or invented and commercialized the first


liting May battery um as a as an industry um it has it pioneered the battery industry and uh we've seen massive growth in other regions and Japan earlier this year announced an industrial policy to build out hundreds of gigawatts of uh cell manufacturing globally and so we're starting to see the fruits of that all the efforts of the government and the private sector that's been working closely with Japanese parties to uh bring some of these um Partnerships these collaborations to the Forefront and I


think we'll start to see we'll start to see just ones as well so a big I guess a big market for these these batteries uh Next Generation batteries is the electric vehicle market and that's what's driving the demand I want to get your opinion from a market perspective like affordability remains a top issue when it comes to EV adoption right do you view your technology the one process and the whole supply chain around that that's happening as having an impact on that on addressing that


affordability challenge with electric vehicles I think certainly what our technology uh addresses is part of that um you know the cathode active material represents roughly 50% of the cost of a lithium onon cell and what we've innovated is the manufacturing process for that so we're able to use lower cost uh raw materials and we've also been able to drive efficiencies to reduce the processing cost and the capital cost and so taken as a whole there is an impact ultimately to the to the to the end


vehicle um there's been other things that have come into play to help with that scale is one of them so certainly economies of scale help drive down costs um Innovations in the way cells are put together at packs has also helped and then you know another part of it which is not always understood is there's different chemistries in cath of cathod active materials you can have iron rich cathod active materials you can have nickel Rich cathod active materials and you can have manganese rich ones our


technology can make all the major cathod chemistries um and then some sort of uh you know sort of more unique ones and one of the cathod materials that we're specifically focused on now for our commercial plans in kolack is the IR cathet material known as lfp and it has a lot of inherent material benefits it's a lot safer it's a lot more stable uh thermally than high nickel chemistries it's also a lot lower cost and the knock against it a couple of years ago was that it was less energy


dense than high nickel however innovation in what's called cell to pack where they're able to put more cells within a battery pack that ultimately goes into a vehicle that has allowed the energy density to become comparable to high nickel and that's why we're working with a company like our next energy so if you sort of take a systems approach to it scale more efficient processes Innovative Technologies different system designs all of these things help contribute to get to lower cost CVS and


at the end of the day they'll be a different use case for each chemistry they'll have lfp makes a lot of sense for Mass Market lower cost electric vehicles heavy industrial use uh energy grid storage and high nickel makes sense for the super high performance long range electric vehicles and we see a world where you need all of it great can you talk about now your um your path and timeline for to commercial ization like what uh can after this you know following this big announcement what can the expect uh the investor


Community expect from the company now sure so about two weeks ago we put out um an update to our shareholders about our activities at our candiac plant the key takeaway from that are are twofold one is we've now scaled the technology into full commercial scale manufacturing equipment uh from our lab scale in bernabe and we've made repeatable batches that that are as good or better than what we've made in the lab so this to me is uh massively takes a technology scaling risk off the table


the other thing it allows us to do is start to send out samples to a long list of uh potential customers so as we think about a scaling up production within the existing facility that we have but B building a new plant next door on the land that we already own um we will need to validate theol fire materials to get off take different customers so our business development and sales team is now going through a process of prioritizing customers uh based on uh volume needs based on timelines um to be


able to send them samples to start the process to get to full qualification and from there with offtake in hand we'll then have one another piece uh of the equation to be able to start commercial sales but also to build that meat plant next great well exciting times ahead for the company thanks for uh joining me today and sharing your insights Alex thank you Marilyn and thanks everyone for watching join us again next time for another engaging conversation on CEO insets if you like this video subscribe


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