Thank you for joining Noble Capital Markets' Emerging Growth Virtual Equity Conference. I'm Mark Reichman, one of Noble's senior research analysts. Today, we are joined by Mr. John Passalacqua, Chief Executive Officer and Director of First Phosphate. The company's flagship Bégin-Lamarche project in Quebec, hosts a large high purity igneous phosphate resource that the company is advancing toward feasibility, alongside planned downstream production of purified phosphoric acid and LFP related battery materials. First Phosphate's American Depositary Receipts are listed in the United States on the Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol PHOS, while its shares trade on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol PHOS. John, the floor is yours. Yeah. Thank you for having me, Mark. Good for everyone to be here. So for anybody who doesn't know First Phosphate already, we are igneous phosphate for the lithium iron phosphate battery industry. So phosphate for battery, unlike most applications out there, which are very low grade sedimentary phosphate for fertilizer and agriculture. So think of high purity igneous phosphate just for the lithium iron phosphate battery. Okay, getting right into it, the LFP battery is the leading battery of choice. It's now almost 70%-80% of all batteries that are produced on planet Earth. It's on a very strong growth trajectory that is going to continue well into the future. The reason for this is that LFP is a versatile technology, and it's a technology of mass adoption. When we look here on the left on the pie chart of all the sectors of LFP, if you look at this one, electric vehicles, it's only about 13% of the entire category of LFP. LFP is just so many more things like large scale energy storage, AI data centers, robotics, factory automation, marine and agricultural, and defense applications as well, small mobility like skateboards, bicycles, scooters, electric vehicles, consumer products, EV charging stations, and telecom. The reason for this is really that the battery has demonstrated itself to have very superior fire safety, well-defined performance, lowest cost battery on the market, and longer life. So, when we look at the LFP battery, and we look at how we are going to onshore the LFP battery here in the West. If you look at the cathode of the LFP battery, we could start with that and say, "Well, what is the cathode of the LFP battery made of?" Look at this. Surprise, surprise, only 4% lithium, 35% iron, but 61% phosphate. This is remarkable, right? More than half of the battery is high purity phosphate in an LFP battery, and these batteries are now 80% of all the batteries produced in the world. What are we doing to solve this issue? Well, lithium, no problem, right? There's over 150 public companies worldwide that are involved in some form of extraction or purification of lithium. That covers that 4%. If we're interested in iron, there's over 100 public companies worldwide that produce iron. Iron is scarce and is high purity powder format, but you can find it. What happens when we come to phosphate, the full 61% of the cathode? If you look at the phosphate market, there's only a handful of public companies that are out there in the phosphate world, but all of them are involved in agriculture and fertilizer. As far as we know, First Phosphate is the only company that's 100% fully dedicated to high purity phosphate for the lithium iron phosphate battery industry and not for fertilizer. Why? Because we saw this opportunity here. Phosphate could be one of the very serious linchpins in the domestication or onshoring of the LFP battery. We're going after what is really the highest priority here, phosphate, and not focused on the lithium or the iron. Let's talk a little bit about phosphate. Phosphate is the second most important element in electrification after copper. The only issue is that phosphate, even though we have purified phosphoric acid, that's the highest purity form of phosphate, which is required for batteries. We have a lot of it in the West, but you see the supply curve here, this really light blue line, is inelastic. We can't grow it more than what it is right now. Why? Because we're making this high purity phosphate off of the back of fertilizer. Only the purest form of the fertilizer stream, 10%, 20%, 30% maximum, can go into making purified phosphoric acid, and the rest has to stay back in a fertilizer stream. We've already maxed that out. Why? Because the fertilizer market is in equilibrium, and we can't make any more on the basis of that type of sedimentary rock. Look at this. These are already the traditional uses for phosphoric acid, purified phosphoric acid, that is. They are going to outstrip the supply already by the mid 2030s. We have all of this space here, which is LFP battery, which we need to grow into for the onshoring of the LFP battery. This is a very conservative estimate. If we listen to Benchmark Mineral, it's probably like 8 to 10 times the factor that we need. How do we do this? How can we create more purified phosphoric acid without having recourse to the fertilizer world? Is there a magical way to do it? The answer actually is yes, and that's igneous phosphate rock. That's the phosphate that First Phosphate has in its Bégin-Lamarche property in Quebec. It's a very high purity form of phosphate that has been sort of trapped in lava rock in the magma. When the Earth was cooling, this phosphate just fell to its specific density and kind of just stayed there, and it's sort of trapped in there with iron and with titanium. What we can do is we can easily pull out the magnetite and the ilmenite being the titanium, and we're left with a very, very pure phosphate that once we convert it, we convert it almost 100% into purified phosphoric acid to make the high purity phosphate PPA for the production of LFP batteries. With minimal residual, the gypsum that comes out of it is very clean and is able to be recycled into agriculture or into building products. Whereas when we look at the sedimentary phosphate here, the issue is that the sedimentary phosphate contains a lot of cadmium, uranium, and thorium. This is phosphate that sort of accumulated at the bottom of old streams, lakes, sea beds, swamps, places like that, and it accumulated with a lot of the nasty heavy metals like cadmium, uranium, thorium, mercury, arsenic, and the rest of it, and lots of radiation. When we process the sedimentary phosphate rock, the gypsum slag piles are radioactive. They cannot be recycled. They sit there in the environment, big problems in the Carolinas and in Florida over these slag piles. We get a lot of phosphoric acid, low grade for fertilizer, but we don't get much for LFP batteries, okay? The secret again here is igneous phosphate rock, which converts very clean, almost 100% into purified phosphoric acid for the LFP battery, and that's where we're focused. That's where we're focused at First Phosphate because like I said before, our objective is phosphate for the LFP battery industry, not for agriculture. Now, if we said that First Phosphate's igneous rock is very important and that igneous rock is a solution to making a lot of purified phosphoric acid, well, then let's go out there and get a lot of igneous rock. What is the problem? Igneous rock is rare. Rare. The word rare, right? That's a big one. If we look at the world's phosphate reserves, the red dots that you see here, kind of in the equatorial area of the world, those are all basically sedimentary phosphate deposits. That's about 95% of the world's phosphate. The other 5% of the world's phosphate is igneous, and it's found in four zones, primarily here in Quebec, down here in Brazil, southern Africa, the blue dots again, and then up here in northern Russia. The igneous deposits, they divide themselves up into two categories, igneous anorthosite, which is here, in Quebec, and then the other ones are igneous carbonatites. Let's talk a little bit about the igneous carbonatites. The igneous carbonatites, they are very pure. The only problem is that sometimes the veins can change, the mineralogy in the veins can change. Sometimes they can have thorium in them. Sometimes it can have a lot of rare earths. They can become very unpredictable and also very difficult to separate. For instance, the igneous deposits in Brazil, because Brazil is a big food basket. Basically, they all go into agriculture. In southern Africa, they're a little bit hard to get to, so they still have not really been that well exploited. But in Russia, the igneous carbonatite, they are able to separate it, but the issue now is that they stand behind, obviously, the sanctions. Now let's talk about the igneous anorthosite in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec. This is some of the world's purest phosphate concentrate. We're able to purify it over to over a 40% pure P2O5 rating. That's pretty much the highest that's ever been attained in the world. Again, the reason for that, like I said, it's very predictable. The mineralogy is very consistent, and we're able to pull out the magnetite and the ilmenite, and left with silicates and phosphate. We float the phosphate, we dry it, and we get the purest quantity in the world. Now, the purest quality in the world is very important now that we come into the battery, because with the battery metals, everything has to be of ultimate purity. This is a very easy way to make a lot of purified phosphoric acid for batteries without having recourse to the agricultural sector. I repeat that because it is very important. Okay, let us move on here a little bit to the deposit. The deposit is here. It is an open pit deposit. It is very close to infrastructure. It is 2 km from a major highway. It is 2 km from a major electricity post. It has also got two smaller towns at about 5 km on either side for workforce. The deposit itself is 2.7 km long. It is about 300 m- 500 m wide. It goes down to about 400 m, but it is fully open at depth, and it is somewhat open here on the sides as well. In the recent drilling campaign, believe it or not, we drilled another 50,000 m, and we were able to increase the amount of indicated resource by 378%. That is a whopping number of increase. Also we were able to determine great continuity and, most importantly, great homogeneity, within the resource. The mineralogy is very homogeneous, which gives us great confidence to move into our next step, which is our feasibility study. We have already begun the feasibility study, and the feasibility study is to be rendered by the end of 2026, latest Q1 of 2027. We are probably predicting January, February of 2027 at this point. Let us talk a little bit about the deposit. Before we did the last set of drilling, what does it mean? How much phosphate is there here? Well, there is enough phosphate for 350 GWh of LFP batteries. Okay, now what does that mean? Well, 350 GWh of LFP batteries would be enough to electrify half of the fleet of new vehicles produced in North America for the next 23 years. That is, there are 12 million vehicles produced between U.S.A., Mexico, and Canada per annum. We would be able to basically electrify 50% of those, or 6 million cars, right? That is quite a bit of electrification. It is a very big deposit, and even though it is big and we make a splash in the market, we still would not cover the whole market, which is good, right? Means that there is plenty of demand left. Let us look at the economics. It is an NPV of CAD 2.1 billion. There is an IRR of 37%. There is a 2.9-year payback, and like I said before, a 23-year mine life. The deposit is fully royalty-free, and we have got a great strip ratio of 1.5: 1. Okay. Also it is very important, these critical minerals, it is very important on logistics, right? Logistics is key. If you look at where we are based here, we are based in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, which is this area here. Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec is just about two and a half hours south of Quebec City. Quebec City, two and a half hours by car, you get to Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean. What is really precious about the area is that it is the fifth most largest population basin of Quebec. The reason for that is that there has been heavy industry in this area for the past 100 years. This is where the aluminum industry is located under Rio Tinto, previously Alcan, and it is also where the forestry industry is located. Because of that, there is a great industrial workforce in the area, great industrial equipment suppliers, and we benefit from all of that. We are located right here at the end of the valley of Saguenay, about 770 km driving distance to the Port of Saguenay. At the Port of Saguenay, we benefit from massive federal industrial lands and the deep sea port to be able to get our materials off to our definitive off-takers right here through the Saint Lawrence and over into the Atlantic. We also have rail transportation all the way to the heart of North America. So really important, just the strong logistics of the project. Also you will note that the population basin here is kind of right in this area, so it is perfect. People can live in the cities and come about an hour, an hour and a half to the work site and go and return every day. That is perfect. There is no need for a camp. There is no need to leave families. So the mine can live in a very sort of a complementary way with the society that is already there. I will also note that there already is a mine, the only niobium mine here in North America, Niobec, very close to where we are. So the communities are used to mining. They are used to heavy industry with Alcan Aluminum and the forestry industry. So we fit in very nicely. We have got great social acceptability in the area. Quite frankly, everyone is looking forward to a new industry, an industry that will contribute towards the decarbonization of the world. We have done something really, really important here in the last few years that we have been working. We have been able to get from the igneous anorthosite in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, all the way to making LFP batteries out of critical minerals from North America. We have been able to do that with some of the world's largest organizations and through fully commercial technology. So we have been able to make these, I do not know if people can see them here on screen. These are the first LFP batteries made of North American critical minerals, made in the last 25 years. Why do I say in the last 25 years? Well, pretty easy. LFP technology was invented in North America in 2001. We made some of these batteries, but by 2003, we had lost the technology. Since then, it has been sitting in China, where it is almost 100% located in China. If you will remember back in October of 2025, this was no more than a year ago when President Xi and President Trump had their first little dispute. There was three things that were put on the table. One was rare earth materials. Number two was semiconductors. But number three was this. It was the LFP battery supply chain. To this date, you cannot export LFP cathode active material or any of the processes used to make LFP cathode active material from China. Pretty ironic, right? When North America actually invented the science over 20 years ago. But anyways, that is the way the geopolitics are going. But let's focus on what First Phosphate has been able to do to break this impasse, at least for North America. We've been able to take the igneous anorthosite, we've been able to turn that into a phosphate concentrate. I'll add, we were able to do that with solventless processes, clean processes for the environment, recyclable gypsum. From there, we were able to make this purified phosphoric acid. This, we made it with Prayon, the world's largest producer of phosphoric acid. Then with GKN Hoeganaes out of Tennessee, the world's largest atomizer of steel powder, we got to iron phosphate precursor. Then with a source of lithium from Century Lithium in Nevada, we were able to get the LFP cathode active material. With the graphite material from Nouveau Monde Graphite in Montreal and the technology of Ultion from Nevada, we were able to get to these, right? North American battery cells made fully of North American critical materials in the anode and the cathode. What's really important as well is we tested these batteries 2,000 x, and they perform just like any other battery in the market. Meaning we charge them and discharge them 2,000 x. They pass commercial testing. That means that all the minerals that went into making these batteries, as well as all these commercial processes, there's no R&D involved, are fully validated to be able to land this supply chain here in North America. So very important, where First Phosphate is going in its mine to market vision of LFP batteries. Of course, we're focused mostly here on the mine and on the phosphoric acid, and then we're looking for partnerships and clients down the value chain. But we have a full vision on the value chain, and that's been really important with the support that we've had from governments for this, which I'll show here in a minute. We've been able to really successfully de-risk the project, and we de-risk the project through key relationships. I've gone over some of them already. We've got a very key relationship with our local indigenous community, full collaboration agreement. We've been very well helped to develop the project through the local group and also through the local chambers of commerce and local suppliers guilds in the area. Quebec government, which is our local provincial government, kind of like a state government, has fast-tracked the project. We are one of three projects that are fast-tracked under the Filon legislation in Quebec, and that's been going really quick and really advancing the project. Government of Canada has given us CAD 21.5 million now of non-refundable, non-dilutive contributions to get through the feasibility study. Also what's really impressive, the government of Switzerland and the government of Denmark have come to the table and offered each about $200 million of CapEx support when we come down to our final investment decision. That's enough to cover almost 85% of the CapEx of the mine when we get there. We have three entities of the Italian government as well as MAIRE Group, one of the largest engineering firms in Europe, that has come to the table to support the development of the phosphoric acid plant. I'll just get into a little bit, this one here, which was the funding from the Government of Canada. We needed to have a global partner at the table. We had the ambassador of Belgium at the table. We had the EU critical minerals envoy at the table, and this allowed us to procure these almost CAD 21 million from the Natural Resources Canada Minister Hodgson and myself signing hands here at PDAC this year. Because of this, what was really great was that the G7 Leaders Summit in Évian, France in June of this year, we were really taken aback. We were basically listed as two of 13 new partnerships that the G7 would like to have to be able to onshore critical mineral supply chains in the West. Basically, the G7 picked out a bunch of supply chains where they said, "Look, wow, these are almost 80%, 90%, almost 100% in the hands of China, and we want to do something to re-onshore those supply chains. How can we do this?" They looked for companies that could help. First Phosphate was the only company that was endorsed, as regards to the LFP battery supply chain by the G7 as a strategic project under the G7. We were given a letter of intent by the Danish government, as I mentioned already, for about CAD 275 million towards the CapEx of the mine. We signed definitive offtake agreements for phosphate concentrate and for phosphoric acid, and we also got the support of the Italian government for the phosphoric acid plant. All of that under the G7. Very important, that mandate that the G7 wants. None of these supply chains that they've identified to be more than 60% in the hands of any one country or region of the world by 2030. We're dealing with the LFP battery supply chain, which is 99% in the hands of China at the moment. Okay. Management milestones. We've meet and beat milestones. Right now, we're fully funded to get through feasibility study, permitting, and right to our final investment decision. Feasibility study is targeted for Q1 2027. Permitting for Q2, Q3 2027. Final investment decision would be towards the end of 2027, early 2028. Like I said, we've got about CAD 25 million in the coffers. The company does itself, but another CAD 21 million from the federal government of Canada. So that's over CAD 46 million that we have to get the right to final investment decision. Then there we got the governments of Denmark and Switzerland ready to supply almost 85% of the CapEx. So what does that mean? We've got over a two-and-a-half year runway here that we do not need cash. At the end of that runway, we've got the governments that are willing to come in and to support with CapEx. We are a very de-risked project. We are debt-free. We still have very high insider ownership, 20% is management and board. We have CAD 80 million, sorry, that's been invested to date. We've raised that all on our own without any underwriters. Management and board have put in CAD 4 million of their own capital. Management and board take a big portion of their salaries in RSUs. That's in stock. As CEO, I get paid fully in stock. All of the board gets paid fully in stock. We do that so that the funds can stay internalized for the development of the business, because we're on a very fast development timeline. We believe here that the quicker that these projects can get into fruition, can get into production, the more valuable that they'll be worth. We are kind of like on a sprint here, to get into production. Also, we want to be able to maintain the largest percentage of this company that we can as board and management. The reason for that is we want to be aligned with our shareholders. We are looking for capital appreciation. We are not here to look for salaries. Know that as shareholders, if you are or if you become shareholders, our intentions are fully aligned, and that is to really to grow the market cap of the company through solid execution. Last thing I will just say, board and management, we are very strong in business, very strong in capital markets, extremely strong in mining, lots of good mining experience on the team. That is what we need right now. Then we have also got a great technology background, right? Because we view the mine not as an end in and of itself, but really as the starting point that gets us to the battery, right? To the mine to market LFP battery strategy for North America. That is who we are. Mark, thank you for giving me the time. Thank you everybody for listening. I hope everyone is still awake. We have got about six minutes left, so I will pass it back on to you, Mark, for any questions. Thank you, John. We do have a few questions. The first is, you already addressed some of it where you said the final investment decision is expected by the end of 2027, early 2028. The question is: When do you expect the mine to go into production? Yeah, we are looking for production by end of 2029, latest 2030. The next question is: How should investors think about the eventual mix of export credit financing, government support, strategic capital, and equity needed to build or fund the CapEx related to Bégin-Lamarche? Yeah, I am really glad that that was brought up because I forgot to mention it. With 85% of the capital committed from friendly nation states who want to see the progress. They want their suppliers to be able to sell the equipment to build the mine to us. They want to see us go into production. They want to see people employed. They want to see supply chains onshore here in the West. This is all being done through the G7 Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance. That is friendly capital, right? How many times do we hear of capital that goes into fund mining projects, and they are really hoping that the mine will fail so that they can take it over? That is not the case here. We have got friendly sovereign states on our hands, and we are trying to do as much of this capital as we can, up to 100% if it were possible, by non-dilutive debt financing from nation states. That G7 Critical Minerals Production Alliance like we were talking about, this is critical, right? Having the G7 at the table. Switzerland has come in, Denmark has come in, Italy is at the table. A number of other institutions under the G7 are interested. So we are going to try and do as much of this as we can through friendly sovereign capital. Remember, the sovereign capital is forgiving. Also it comes at the best levels of interest rates because, again, they want you to succeed. They need you to succeed. They are not trying to gain a dollar or trying to take over a project for free. On page eight of your presentation, testing indicates that more than 90% of the Bégin-Lamarche phosphate feedstock can be converted into purified phosphoric acid suitable for LFP batteries. The investor is asking, what gives the igneous anorthosite hosted material that advantage, and how important is that for downstream economics? Yeah, look, that is really important. Great question. It is everything. So the fact that you get to this reading of 40%, 41% P2O5. Apatite, which is basically calcium and phosphate, that is sort of the host mineral. The purest that it can get would be like 41.6% P2O5. That is 100% apatite. That is just calcium and phosphate with no other impurities. As you can see at 40.4%, we get pretty darn close to that. So that means there is very limited impurities in there. Because of that, number one, you use a lot less sulfuric acid to process, or about 33% less sulfuric acid, which is great with the prices of sulfur where they are at. Number two, what ends up happening is the waste streams are so clean that you can basically upgrade over 91% of this directly into purified phosphoric acid, therefore bypassing the fertilizer world. The big decoupling is going to be really in the price of phosphoric acid, purified phosphoric acid, we believe, because we have got to fill in this gap, right? That has nothing to do with fertilizer. It is just above and beyond fertilizer. The igneous rock is extremely key to what we are doing. We do not think that any phosphate project in the West moving forward will be able to get going because of environmental regulations. Those that are there that are operating like in the Carolinas and Florida on sedimentary rock, they will continue. They are grandfathered. You would never be able to get a new permit on that. They are having lots of problems getting these permits in Utah and also in Florida. But with the igneous rock, it is clean. It processes clean. The gypsum is recyclable. It does not have all of the nasty radiation in it. I think igneous is the future of phosphate in the West and certainly the future of LFP battery in the West, the only way to create a lot of purified phosphoric acid in a clean way with good economics and without having to go through the fertilizer world. Next question is the PEA contemplates 900,000 tons per year of phosphate concentrate. It is asking, what level of contracted demand would you ideally want before making a final investment decision? Also keep in mind you have offtake agreements for, what, at least 200,000 tons per year of phosphate concentrate and 60,000 tons per year of phosphoric acid. You can address that question. Yeah. Right now we've taken on 200,000 tons of definitive bankable offtake, and that offtake floats with the market, which is great. There's no floors or ceilings on it. In order to get into production eventually, 500,000 tons of this phosphate concentrate will eventually be digested in our own phosphoric acid plant. Really we're looking at for a short period of time having another 200,000 tons of offtake. We're kind of holding that tight. We don't want to give that away too quickly. But we're quite confident with the economics of the mine, especially once our phosphoric acid plant is running. Well, I think we're nearing the end of our time. I think I'll turn it over to you, John, for closing remarks, and you might just hit on the next two or three milestones that investors should be paying attention to over the next 12- 24 months. Yeah. Thanks, Mark. Like I said before, the feasibility study by Q1 of 2027. Permitting and environmentals by Q2, Q3 2027, and then final investment decision end of 2027, early 2028. As a final remark, when we're looking at the cathode of the LFP battery here as I've got back on screen, look at this. Phosphate is over 60% of the cathode of the LFP battery, and First Phosphate is one of the only companies out there that's focused 100% on the LFP battery, lithium iron phosphate, the phosphate in the LFP battery. And there's 150 lithium companies out there that are doing this for lithium when it's only 4% of the battery, and there's only us out there in terms of 100% dedication to phosphate when it's 60% of the cathode of the battery. So don't forget the P in LFP is what I always say. Thank you very much. Thank you, John, for joining us today.