ALTM - Arcadium Lithium plc (ALTM) 3rd Annual Evercore ISI Global Clean Energy & Transitions Summit Conference (Transcript)

2024-06-12 16:15:03 ET

Arcadium Lithium plc (ALTM)

3rd Annual Evercore ISI Global Clean Energy & Transitions Summit Conference

June 12, 2024 01:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Paul Graves - President & Chief Executive Officer

Presentation

Unidentified Analyst

Thanks for joining us. It's the deadly post lunch slot, Paul. So here we are. Get you caffeine and everybody's hyped up after the Power and AI keynote, I bet, at lunchtime. So anyway, we are pleased to welcome Paul Graves to join us as the CEO of Arcadium Lithium. Arcadium is the result of a merger that closed earlier this year, late last year, between Livent and Allkem. Itself was the merger and the result of a number of previous legacy lithium producers notably in Argentina and Australia, so Paul you know -- I consider Paul one of the straight shooters in the lithium market, or at least somebody that it doesn't shy away from questions and provides opinion. And so we always appreciate that. So always found those discussions insightful. So welcome, Paul. Thanks for joining us today.

Paul Graves

Thank you.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Unidentified Analyst

So let's step back and maybe talk about the drivers of the merger. Let's start on the company instead of talking about the industry a little bit. But maybe you could talk about some of the drivers that merger and some of like your underlying thesis. And clearly, the transaction provided a lot of scale and diversification. But maybe just give us some perspectives on that as a starting point.

Paul Graves

Sure, I think where it really starts with is this idea in the lithium business that given the growth of demand and therefore ultimately of supply that we need, you can't be a small single asset company. And so you have to start thinking about how do you -- and the reason for that is you're just not big enough to be relevant with your customers. You end up being just tiny. I mean, you just don't have any relevance. And if we are producing 40,000 tons a year of lithium and one customer needs that much, then you're just going to struggle to really have relevance in this industry.

So we definitely believed that it was important to get bigger and It's pretty difficult to ramp up a single resource, even the big Argentinian brine resources, which are just massive, but the ability to actually bring more production on a rate that's in-line with the growth in demand is just not there for a whole bunch of reasons. So we decided and we realized that we wanted diversification of resources to give us more optionality and expansion. We needed more molecules to be more relevant with the customers. And then we looked around and we said, look, we in Livent, I was running Livent before, we have a lot of expertise and DLE and brine-based extraction and lithium hydroxide, but we may be less experienced in hard-rock mining and we need to be in that space as well....

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