ABAT Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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DATE

Monday, Sept. 14, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer - Ryan Melsert
• Chief Financial Officer - Alex Flores

TAKEAWAYS

• Revenue -- $21.7 million, representing an increase of over 400% driven by increased recycling throughput and byproduct manufacturing.
• Cost of Goods Sold -- Increased 67% year over year, reflecting the realization of economies of scale at the first recycling facility.
• Operating Cash Spend -- Decreased 16% year over year, despite a more than fourfold increase in facility throughput.
• Adjusted Gross Profit -- $1.7 million, compared to a $6.2 million loss in fiscal year 2025, due to higher capacity factors and operational efficiencies.
• Cash Balance -- $49.5 million as of June 30, 2026, supported by financing activities and interest income.
• Total Asset Base -- $133 million, representing a substantial increase from the previous fiscal year.
• Long-Term Debt -- Zero outstanding, as the company extinguished all long-term obligations during the year.
• Recycling Facility Capacity -- 20,000 tons per year for the first commercial facility, which is currently scaling operations.
• Planned Recycling Expansion -- 100,000 tons per year for a second facility in the Southeast U.S., supported by a $150 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
• Next-Generation Recycling Grant -- $10 million from the Department of Energy to commercialize three laboratory-proven technologies at commercial scale.
• Tonopah Lithium Resource -- 21.3 million tons of lithium hydroxide identified at the Nevada property.
• Proven and Probable Reserves -- 2.7 million tons of lithium hydroxide classified within the Tonopah resource.
• Tonopah Refinery Target -- 30,000 tons per year, with the facility designed to process lithium-bearing claystone.
• Permitting Status -- Certified by the Bureau of Land Management for the Tonopah plan of operations, concluding the pre-NEPA phase.
• Reinstated DOE Grant -- Funding and milestones for the claystone processing project were fully restored following a successful appeal by the company.
• FAST-41 Designation -- Selected for streamlined federal permitting as a priority project by the National Energy Dominance Council and the FAST-41 Permitting Council.
• Recycling Feedstock -- Sourced from grid-scale storage, electric vehicles, battery cell manufacturing, and consumer electronics.
• Gross Margin -- Achieved first-ever positive result, reflecting improved pricing and facility-level manufacturing efficiencies.
• Demonstration Facility -- Actively producing large-scale batches of battery-grade lithium hydroxide for customer evaluation and qualification.

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RISKS

• Melsert stated, "the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a directive that effectively bans the export of black mass unless there is an exception or adjustment obtained from U.S. Department of Commerce," noting that the company is currently storing this material pending a regulatory response.

SUMMARY

American Battery Technology Company (NASDAQ:ABAT) reported a transition to adjusted gross profitability for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2026. Management reported that the company's first battery recycling facility achieved a positive gross margin for the first time, supported by a 400% increase in top-line revenue and significantly improved throughput. The company stated it has extinguished all long-term debt while increasing its cash position to $49.5 million. Furthermore, the company advanced its Tonopah Flats lithium project by receiving federal certification for its plan of operations and securing a priority permitting status to accelerate domestic critical mineral production.

• Melsert noted that the recycling plant's feed is increasingly sourced from grid-scale battery energy storage systems used to support domestic data centers and artificial intelligence training models.
• The company formed a strategic partnership with The Battery Network to collect consumer batteries across the country for domestic recycling.
• Management reported that the Tonopah project has moved into the full NEPA process, the final federal regulatory step required to obtain permits for site work and construction.
• Melsert indicated that the company is working closely with the U.S. Department of Commerce on an exception request regarding the export of black mass byproducts.
• The company is utilizing a $10 million grant to integrate automated next-generation recycling technologies into its commercial operations to improve recovery rates.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• Black Mass: A concentrated mixture of metals including lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese obtained from shredded and processed lithium-ion batteries.
• NEPA: The National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of proposed major federal actions.
• FAST-41: A federal program designed to improve the transparency, predictability, and timeliness of the federal environmental review and authorization process for high-priority infrastructure projects.
• Claystone: A fine-grained sedimentary rock from which the company extracts lithium using proprietary processing technologies.
• Lithium Hydroxide: A chemical compound used primarily in the production of cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Tiffiany Moehring: American Battery Technology Company. I would like to welcome everyone to our fiscal full year 2026 earnings call. On behalf of the entire team at American Battery Technology Company, I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to join the call today. Following this presentation, a recording of this call, along with our press release, will be available on our website. This presentation includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor's provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ from those anticipated.

Additional information regarding the factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in our annual filings. On today's call, our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Ryan Melsert, joined by Alex Flores, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide remarks regarding our two lines of business, which include our lithium-ion battery recycling business and our primary claystone to lithium hydroxide business. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Ryan.

Ryan Melsert: Great. Thank you, Tiffiany, and thank you everybody for joining. We here at the American Battery Technology Company are working to introduce the closed loop supply chain seen on the right here. Many of the other sectors already exist and are mature. However, within the U.S., we have very little production of the critical minerals that are needed to support this domestic closed loop. In order to do that, we have implemented three different technology sets. We have developed and are deploying our technology for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries to help to close this loop. In addition to closing the loop, we also need to fill this loop the first time.

So we also have our own mineral resource development with our lithium mine, and we've developed our own internal technologies for the processing of this lithium-bearing claystone into a battery-grade lithium hydroxide product. Through these three units, we are working to enable this closed loop infrastructure within the United States. Over the past year, we have significantly ramped our operations at our first battery recycling facility, and we're proud to state that we have substantially increased revenue compared to the past year. An over 400% increase, up to $21.7 million over the past year. While revenue increased substantially, we had only a moderate increase in our cost of goods sold, increase in about 67% from the previous year.

This really is from achieving economies of scale in our recycling facility and implementing many different operational efficiencies throughout our first plant. On a cash basis, even though we substantially increased throughput, we actually decreased cash spend and operations for this plant by about 16%. Because of these increases in throughput and revenue and implementations of operational efficiencies, we were able to turn an annual profit or adjusted profit for the first time. With the removal of these non-cash expenses, we have an adjusted gross profit of about $1.7 million over this past year, compared to a $6.2 million loss over the previous year.

Again, this really is the manifestation of much higher capacity factor at our first recycling plant and the implementation of operational efficiencies. Because of these improvements, we have been able to increase our cash balance up to about $49.5 million as of the end of June and increase our total asset base up to about $133 million. We are also proud that over the past year, we have had our fiscal discipline and have zero long-term outstanding debt for the company. All these pieces together show that we have the strongest financial results we have had in any year as an operating company and are in a strong position to keep growing as we move forward.

We are excited to work with many partners. One of our closest partners is the U.S. Department of Energy. We were fortunate enough to have a visit and tour by some of the DOE leadership just a few weeks ago. We have multiple projects, both on the battery recycling and on the claystone to lithium refining side, that are supported by the Department of Energy. The leadership was able to come and see our operating battery recycling plant and also see our integrated demonstration facility for how we convert our Nevada-based claystone material into our battery-grade lithium hydroxide.

It was great to be able to show these individuals the progress we have made over the past few years as we have moved from R&D level efforts up to bench scale systems to pilot plants and now operating commercial scale facilities. Within the recycling plant itself, we continue to scale this first facility with a design rate of about 20,000 tons per year. We have moved into having our highest annual revenue, really by that increased throughput, additional manufacturing of byproducts, and improved pricing for the products that we sell. The feed for our recycling plant comes in a wide variety of sources.

Quite a bit of it now comes from grid-scale battery energy storage systems that are used to support domestic data centers and artificial training models, but also a large amount from electric vehicles, from battery cell manufacturing, and from the consumer electronics market. We have achieved our first ever positive gross margin because of this increase in economy of scale and the implementation of operational efficiencies. Again, we were selected over the year for one of the largest lithium-ion battery cleanup projects in the country's history, working to process a lot of these grid scale batteries that have been through incidences and need to be recycled in a responsible manner.

We also work closely with some partners in the collection area. The Battery Network, which was formerly Call2Recycle, is one of the nation's leading consumer battery collection companies. We did form a partnership with them, working to collect batteries throughout the country, recycle them in our facility, and really demonstrate this closed loop supply chain to our partners. We are also continuing to develop our second recycling plant based in the Southeast U.S. that is designed to process about 100,000 tons per year of these batteries, and are continuing to work with the U.S. Department of Energy on the $150 million grant that supports the construction and rollout of this second plant.

We also are continuing with a $10 million grant we have from the U.S. Department of Energy. This is really used to commercialize our next generation recycling technologies. There are three of these technologies we have previously proven out at the laboratory and bench scale. Through this support from DOE, we're working to now build commercial scale implementations to integrate into our recycling facility. As we continue to expand our recycling plant, it really does have a lot of synergies with our claystone to lithium hydroxide processing facility to help scale both of these technologies to address our domestic needs. In our claystone lithium business, we've had many achievements over the past year.

The highlights are really working to publish our pre-feasibility study last fall. This really demonstrated the technical and financial performance of this system. We showed we have about 21.3 million tons of lithium hydroxide that could be made just from the resources on this site, and that includes about 2.7 million tons that are further classified as proven or probable reserves. We're continuing to develop and roll out our 30,000 ton per year mine and refinery at our property just west of Tonopah, Nevada. We worked closely with U.S. Department of Energy last fall, along with hundreds of other projects. One of our U.S. Department of Energy grants was canceled.

We did work closely with DOE and appealed that decision, and over several months of work with them, we were able to reverse that termination and have our grant fully reinstated. As of now, we are working under the same project with the same funding and the same milestones to continue to have the DOE support the construction of that first processing train. Our full Tonopah project is on government-managed land through the U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Land Management. Through BLM and through U.S.

Department of Energy as a supporting agency, we are going through the NEPA process, which includes large amounts of baseline studies in additional to having our plan of operations submitted that really show how we plan on developing this property. We were fortunate enough last fall to have completed the baseline studies, and just a few weeks ago, to have received certification from the BLM that they have now accepted our plan of operations. This approaches the end of the pre-NEPA phase of this process and allows us to move into the full NEPA process for the remaining steps to have our permits to begin site work and construction at this property.

We were excited last spring that we were selected by President Trump's National Energy Dominance Council and the FAST-41 Permitting Council to be a priority project within the country. This really was chosen for a handful of projects really looking to scale manufacturing facilities to produce critical minerals within the U.S. It really does result in streamlined federal permitting, really working to combine the efforts of the multiple agencies that are needed as we work through this process. We did build and operate an integrated demonstration facility that shows how this technology works.

We continue to work with that plant to produce large scale batches of this battery-grade lithium hydroxide product that we've been delivering to customers for evaluation as we work through their qualification processes. The Tonopah Flats Lithium Project is one of the largest lithium resources identified in the U.S. and is something we are working to scale to really address our domestic needs. Summarizing our financial results from the past year, again, we had substantial increase in revenue, over a 400% increase compared to fiscal year 2025. While our cost of goods sold only increased by about 67%. Showing substantial impact of economies of scale, plus the impacts of implementing operational efficiencies.

Our cost of goods sold on a cash basis was further improved. While last year we had many review periods working with the federal government, we have even more government contracts in place now and look forward to continuing to work with them as we draw down from those over the next few years. On a cash basis, we continue to invest in our first recycling plant, increasing the amount of equipment that we have as we implement more automated processes. Our operational activities actually used less cash over the past year. Even though we had more than fourfold the throughput, we decreased the cash spend on our operating activities as we again implemented those operational efficiencies.

We were able to bring in large amounts of funds through financing activities, and the result is a substantially increased cash balance of about $49.5 million that has allowed us to collect interest over the past year and be ready to expand our facilities as needed. At the same time, we have extinguished all of our long-term debt that was outstanding as of fiscal 2025, and as of the end of fiscal 2026, we have no outstanding long-term debt. There are several updates that have happened in the industry over the past few months. One of them is the U.S.

Department of Commerce issued a directive that effectively bans the export of black mass unless there is an exception or adjustment obtained from U.S. Department of Commerce. We've been working closely with Commerce over the past few weeks. We have submitted an exception request. They have replied with several follow-up questions and requests for additional information. However, at this time, there's no formal response as to the status of our exception request. As of now, we continue to sell the byproducts out of our recycling facility, and for the short term, are storing our black mass product at our facility until there is a conclusion with this directive. But working with U.S.

Department of Commerce very closely and with support from U.S. Department of Energy and many other federal agencies as this process is being reviewed. With that, we thank everyone for joining this review of our fiscal year 2026 financials, and look forward to having our formal annual shareholder meeting in November to talk through more details of the past year and our steps ahead for the coming year. Thank you everybody for joining today.

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