Joel Jackson: Good afternoon. Okay. A few questions. I'll do one by one. I thought maybe a high level question to start if you don't mind. LFP materials, it feels like when looking at some of the industry data lately that LFP inventories are extremely high in China, certainly more than what electric vehicle demand would suggest is required right now. You're delaying your plant in St. Louis. Would you comment on the LFP kind of dynamic right now and how that affects your business with high purity acid and things you're thinking about bad business to adjust to the tougher dynamic lately?
Raviv Zoller: Sure. So, LFP is increasing in market share in, in China. So while the market is not exactly moving as fast as anybody expected. LFP is gaining market share significantly this year. So it's going up from less than 40% to expected about 70% within the next year, and as a result our sales of raw material for LFP are actually at an all-time high in terms of volume and we expect that, although EVs are moving slowly globally, what is moving very fast both in China and globally is, LFP for storage and since there's very little capacity for LFP in the western world, it's just a matter of time that the demand turns into actual deliveries, but it will take time because the infrastructure for the production does not exist in the western world as of yet. So on the one hand, if we look globally, EVs are moving much slower than expected. Stationary storage is moving faster than expected. LFP is penetrating and increasing its market share much faster than expected.
Joel Jackson: So, Raviv, you're not worried about an oversupply of LFP cathodes right now in China that would require some sort of rationalization over the short term to rise as inventories and maybe require you to sell less in the end terms to the market's more balanced?
Raviv Zoller: We're not worried because, in China, we're not producing LFP cathode. We're producing, raw material for LFP cathode. So we have excess demand for MAP and other fertilizer type products in China. So if we had to sell less cathode for battery raw materials then we would just sell more specialty fertilizers in China. It's not a concern for us in the short term. In the long term, if you look at the western part of the world, it's really not relevant for us for 2024, 2025, or even the first half of 2026. We need to look at what's gonna happen in the market, 2026 and 2027 vis a vis what our customers in North America and hopefully, Europe, because we have other ideas for Europe, what they need and when they need it, because we're not going to put the capital to build capacity for customers that are not gonna be ready to produce their batteries before 2027 or 2028. So what we're doing is, we're building, an innovation qualification center in St. Louis that will be up and running by the end of the year, and we are going to qualify product with multiple customers. By the way, many of them in the stationary in the stationary part of the business, and we expect that we will optimize whatever production capacity that we can create with long-term agreements with these qualified customers, and so most of the news is going to be coming out next year.
https://m.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/earnings-call-icl-reports-growth-and-strategizes-amid-market-shifts-93CH-3572058?ampMode=1
on the lfp here are some interesting comments from icl who are delaying completion of their cathode plant in the us. They are citing that they won’t have western demand until the 2nd half of 26 or early 27. they are confident demand for lfp will be there.
this kinda lines up with starting the bfs later this yr with construction maybe after the yp plant. Also I would expect offtake agreements prior to the bfs to underpin the capital outlay, which icl point to.
