Sigma Lithium Corporation (NASDAQ:SGML) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Sigma Lithium Corporation (NASDAQ:SGML) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript March 30, 2026

Sigma Lithium Corporation misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.22 EPS, expectations were $-0.01442.

Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Sigma Lithium’s 2025 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. We would like to inform you that this event is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] There will be a replay for this call on the company’s website. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Anna Hartley, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Anna Hartley: I’d like to welcome you to our 2025 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today is Ana Cabral, Co-Chair and CEO of Sigma Lithium. Our earnings press release, presentation and corresponding documents are available on our website. I’d like to remind you that some of the statements made during this call, including any production guidance, expected company performance, update on mining operations, the timing of our projects and market conditions may be considered forward-looking statements. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements in our presentation, MD&A and press release. Before turning the call to Ana Cabral, we will be showing you a short corporate video as we think the pictures will paint a thousand words about what’s happening at Sigma. [Presentation]

Ana Cabral Gardner: Hi, everyone. Well, thank you, Anna, for showing us this video of our operations. As you can all tell, we’re very, very proud of what we built here in Vale do Jequitinhonha. So without further ado, I’ll go straight into the fourth quarter 2025 earnings release presentation, which covers the entire full year 2025 annual financial results. We’re going to make quite a lot of forward-looking statements, and we would like to encourage you to read the disclaimer of this presentation that’s going to be posted on our video. Sigma is the largest industrial mineral producer in the Americas. We’ve delivered operational excellence. We are a low-cost operation, and we are executing a high-growth strategy for 2026, 2027 and 2028.

This is because we are a management operator company where our interests are fully aligned with the interest of our shareholders, which are to build long-term value. Our main competitive advantage is our resilience, which comes from operational efficiency. Our efficiency is, again, driven by the fact that the management is owner of the company. More importantly, we are located in a country in Brazil, which is a politically stable traditional mining jurisdiction, where we have a very low-cost operating environment. On sustainability, we are 100% sustainable. We have the Quintuple Zero lithium, which starts with 5 points. We do not have tailing dams, so 0. We do not use drinking water, 100% of the water is reused and recycled from sewage, 0. We use 0 hazardous chemicals in our operation.

DMS is basically a physics-based process, so third zero. We use 100% clean energy, so 0 dirty energy. And we have had 0 accidents with lost time for almost 3 years. Again, a picture is a thousand words. Here’s a picture of our waste tailings before and after the artificial germination program. It’s blended into the landscape. It’s basically stacked up rock, fully geotechnically stable. And we went through the sustainability initiative of actually planting the rock into a green mountain. So what you see now is essentially the picture below. We are 100% sustainable. We produce the Quintuple Zero lithium. We have zero tailing dams. We have 0 drinking water. We have zero hazardous chemicals. We have 0 dirty power. 100% of our power comes from clean electricity.

We have had 0 accidents for 2 years and 7 months, 5 zeros. At the bottom, a picture is a thousand words. You see the before and after of our waste tailing piles, which are basically the rocks removed from the pits. Rocks, very stable, geotechnically stable. But more so, we have planted the face of those rocks with artificial germination. We basically did what we call proactive regeneration and the picture shows how it looks like now just a year after those piles were created. So geotechnically safe, sustainable, blended into the landscape, which further enhance the environment. We have built the fifth largest industrial mineral lithium producing complex in the world. So in the picture, you can see that we have a state-of-the-art industrial plant, integrated into a mine.

But the plant is not just an industrial plant, is a state-of-the-art clean technology lithium processing facility where we achieved 70% recovery of the lithium, which is amongst the highest in the sector, and it compares with processing methods, which are a lot less sustainable. Sigma is the economic engine for developing the valley of Jequitinhonha. We lifted the valley towards prosperity. That is a key region of Minas Gerais, which is the second richest state in the Republic. We created 1,000 jobs, 11,000 indirect jobs and 21,000 beneficiaries from our social programs of microcredit and small-scale agriculture. We also have granted drinking water access to 18,000 people. 85% of our workforce is regional. 50% of the economically active population has benefited from our social programs.

We have renovated, created and built schools that put over 500 children in after-schools or school programs. We have been instrumental in delivering 6.8% of GDP growth for the whole state of Minas Gerais. And still, every year, we serve 3 million meals so that the new waves of people keep coming to help build this lithium valley. So we have a built to last company. It’s a resilient business that’s been thriving throughout lithium cycles. That’s what we have achieved in 2025, and that’s what we will continue to deliver in 2026, large scale, low production costs and traceability. We have had 0 accidents for 2.7 years. We uphold the highest health and safety standards in the world, top ranking amongst all companies in metals and mining. But more importantly, we have demonstrated speed of execution, low CapEx to build and to restructure operations, such as what we’ve done with mining.

And we are in a low-cost operating country, which supports us to achieve all of that. So now I’m going to go through the operational and financial highlights of 2025, and I’m going to give you a preview of the first quarter 2026 estimated. We have had unparalleled resilience throughout the last year to date. We have generated cash flows across 2025 lithium volatility. Our business was built to last and to endure the cycles. Four key examples, we signed $146 million in offtake agreements with very robust intrinsic values. Intrinsic value is the advancement we receive from clients for the right to have deliveries of tonnage throughout periods. First offtake agreement was basically to fund working capital. It was signed in ’25 for deliveries throughout 2026.

The total is $96 million for 70,000 tonnes of deliveries. The second was a $50 million typical offtake prepayment that was signed for 40,000 tons of annual deliveries throughout the next 3 years commencing in 2026. Second, we have been the demonstrators that a commercial strategy well executed can actually yield actual results even in this market, even throughout volatility. We have been tracking seasonality, and we have achieved $67 million in net sales in the fourth quarter of ’25 and the first quarter of ’26, solely a result as this sound commercial policy. First, we monetized lithium seasonality to by basically receiving price adjustments in the fourth quarter, working with our clients to time the deliveries and the final sales, resales of their products throughout the contract season of 2025.

That has resulted in the revenues for the fourth quarter. More importantly, we have generated cash flow from a whole new line of business, which is selling the lithium fines, high-purity lithium oxide fines that we have reprocessed through our industrial plant out of our dry stack tailings. That happened initiated in 2025 and then throughout 2026. We’ve deleveraged our balance sheet and we repaid debt. That was our third highlight. 60% of our short-term debt has been repaid. 35% of our total debt has been repaid in the years such as 2025. On top of that, number four, we have upgraded and restructured our mining operations completely for safety, for efficiency, for low cost, for cadence and for better delivery. We transitioned from an outside contractor to full operational control, and we are poised to demonstrate those efficiency gains and cost optimizations throughout the next quarters.

Here are pictures that, again, a thousand words. It just shows the lithium fines piles being moved across to the shipping halls already at the port. The result of those sales have actually monetized what we used to call green premium, which doesn’t really exist. But the fact that we actually created this new line of product out of the dry stack tailings definitely delivered to our investors what we call a sustainability premium, meaning actual financial results from the investment we made on a dry stack unit for the Greentech Plant. This is a page with our offtake agreements. The offtake agreements single-handedly enabled our mining upgrade, our long debt repayment and the capacity expansions. We have an announcement. We signed a 40,000 tonne a year typical offtake agreement that is going to net us $50 million in a true prepayment to be closed within the next 3 months.

That amount is equivalent to 120,000 tonnes to be delivered over the next 3 years. The use of proceeds will be for our growth strategy. We also announced and signed the 70,500 tonne 1-year offtake agreement for a total of $96 million. That offtake agreement is for deliveries throughout 2026 and the purpose of it is for working capital. That’s the working capital that enabled the mining upgrade and some of the debt repayments. Now in 2026, we have two more offtakes to conclude. First, we’re going to amend our contract for the equipment leases of the mining upgrade large-scale machines that have been backed by an offtake for 3 years. Initially, it was for 11,000 tonnes. The number probably will increase depending on the scale of machinery that we are able to secure in the second quarter.

So again, the continuity of the mining upgrade to better, more efficient, more cost-efficient and safer operation. The second offtake that we’re about to close is the 80,000 tonne a year for 3 years that is going to net us $100 million in a typical prepayment. That conventional offtake will have used proceeds to pay down the long-term debt that currently is sitting in our balance sheet as short-term debt because it matures in December of 2026. That was a 4-year shareholder that has been gracefully given us by our shareholders in late 2022 to enable us to have working capital to commission our plant. So that debt will be replaced by an offtake, which is a very sound and very logic operational move for Sigma. On this page, we again demonstrate how the competitive advantage of low costs create resilience from the price pressures that lithium has undergone this year, especially coming from new regions, sometimes not necessarily compliant or traceable product, but more importantly, from the constant refining innovation that the main markets have demonstrated by bringing the ceiling of this industry constantly lower.

The ceiling for, for instance, lepidolite that once was $20,000 to $25,000 per tonne is now around $17,000 to $18,000 per ton, but going lower to a target of probably $15,000 per ton. It doesn’t matter. Irrespectively, we are actually working below the floor of the industry, which is product coming from the African new supply regions. So long as we are sitting exactly where we are in the cost curve, we have the resilience of operations that allow us to, for instance, sign offtakes without floors and continue to deliver excess returns every time prices are in the current levels. On the left, we demonstrate the resilience with our total cash cost, which are all-in sustaining costs plus interest. On the left in green, we show the full year achieved all-in sustaining costs plus interest and the guidance.

So we’re pretty much in the same ballpark. And as a result, we felt comfortable to put in the guidance of $532 for all-in sustaining costs plus $60 for interest for 2026. In the next slide, we show the numbers of how we are able to bring our people safe to their families every single day, day after day. And this is what we work for. We have never had a fatality in 13 years of operations. We have been producing for almost 3 years. We have never had a fatality. But more importantly, we’re getting to almost 2.7 years with 0 accidents with lost time. So our people go home every day and come back to work the following day. That is the highest operational global safety standard in the entire battery materials industry, but more so, we sit at the top of the ranking across all metals and mining companies.

We have had 1,600 employees here. We now have 1,000 employees. It’s a large operation, and we still achieved that, 966 days consecutively without accidents. We’re very, very proud of it. So here is to the numeric operational excellence. A number is a thousand words. The unique resilience and robust cash flows can be demonstrated by each and every one of the main items of our 2025 and first quarter ’26 estimated operational performance. First, offtakes. We had signed a $96 million offtake prepayment in ’25 that enable us to receive working capital by having our production paid in advance. Then we just signed a $50 million traditional offtake for 3 years of 40,000 tonne deliveries totaling 120,000 tonnes to be delivered over the next 3 years.

But in advance, up until June this year, we’re going to receive $50 million, traditional typical offtake. Irrespectively, we have managed to repay debt to a magnitude that is significant considering the volatility in low points lithium prices reached in 2025. We paid 60% of our short-term debt and 35% of our total debt. That was basically because of cash flow generation. This company was built for cash flow generation. We are a cash machine. In the fourth quarter of ’25, we generated $31 million of cash from operations. In the third quarter of ’25, the previous quarter, we generated $23 million. So we increased our cash flow generation in 35% from third quarter to fourth quarter of 2025. More importantly, the lithium materials production has had a decrease in volumes because of the full restructure we conducted in mining.

But given that we are an industrial operation, we delivered another source of revenues. In fact, we built another business, which was reprocessing the dry stack tailings into what we call low-grade lithium fines. So ultimately, we had equivalent of 70,000 tonnes of the main high-grade product in revenues sitting as inventory accumulated throughout the last years. And that material became this new line of business of what we call high-purity lithium fines. So for the full year of 2025, we produced 183,000 tonnes of high-grade premium lithium oxide. For the full year of 2024, we produced 240,000 tonnes of high-grade premium lithium oxide. So our annual production decreased in 24%. However, how did we generate so much cash flow? How did we accomplish so much repaying debt?

By basically creating a new line of business, which is what we call the sustainability monetization, the green premium in numbers. We reprocessed the lithium contained in our lithium fines in our dry stack piles, and we created a whole new business, which is selling high-purity lithium fines, which have a lower grade, but in monetary value, it’s equivalent to 70,000 tonnes of the high-grade premium lithium oxide. So all in all, we’re not even solving for volumes. We’re solving for cash flow and cash flows were delivered, and debt was repaid. And here are the numbers, which speak for a thousand words and do not have an opinion, numbers are numbers. What we want to show on this slide is, again, the quantification and a pictorial of how commercial successful strategy actually helped us to deliver revenues in the third quarter of ’25 and in the fourth quarter of ’25.

We have fantastic clients who are commercial partners. So we sell them the material. We do a final sale and they take the risk. That sale takes place using a provisional price. So we take some of the risk, but we also gain some of the upside. In other words, when our clients resell their product, resell to their clients, we have a profit sharing gain or a profit sharing loss. Last year, we had a loss. This year, we had a substantial gain. Again, this was achieved by mapping seasonality and seasonality in this industry is pretty clear. It happens in the restocking period that takes place after September. It’s called contract season. So our commercial partners worked with us to basically execute their final resales mostly after October of 2025, which allowed us to reap the benefits of a much better pricing environment than what was experienced throughout the whole year because of the tariff volatility in the metals market.

So when you look at the greens, you can see the resales by our clients. When you look at the red, you can see the sales from Sigma to the client. And you look at the line, you see the lithium prices and the tremendous volatility that happened throughout the year. In partnership with our clients, we captured not only the first peak of volatility, which happened in August, but also the subsequent curve of price increases that happened throughout contract season beginning in October 2025. That helped us book over $20 million in final price adjustments in the third quarter of 2025, and it helped us book over $14 million in final price adjustments in the fourth quarter of 2025. These are substantial revenues, so that’s a quantification of what a sound commercial strategy is.

On this slide, I’ll go very slowly because we have quite a lot of information to unpack. But again, it’s the financial discipline that generated the high operating cash margins. High operating cash margins are the source of the cash flow we posted. In 2025, if you compare the fourth quarter of ’24 with the fourth quarter of ’25, we have substantially increased our operating cash margin. If you compare the full year 2024 full year and 2025 full year, our gross margins have decreased, yes, because the pricing environment in ’25 was very challenging. But what is interesting is that the cash margins and the cash flow generation came from one thing and one thing only, we were able to reduce our costs faster than the decrease in our revenues. So despite the mining restructuring, despite price volatility, we were focused on what we could control and what we can control and on what we always control, which are our costs.

So if you look at the bottom of the page, you can see that the quarterly comparison between fourth quarter ’24 and fourth quarter ’25 shown a 77% reduction in costs. That’s way more than just variable costs. When you look at the annual cost reduction, you can see that full year ’24 to full year ’25, we’ve had a 21% decrease in costs. So when we talk about these operating costs, we had operating costs, SG&A, ESG plus all others. So it’s truly an achievement of financial discipline. We’re always cutting what we control. We’re always optimizing costs. So with that, we can go back to revenues. In other words, when you look at net sales revenues on a quarterly basis, we’ve had fluctuations, which again just demonstrate how volatile lithium prices were.

More notably, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter, when we restructured mining operations, we had a 41% decrease in net sales revenues. However, when we look at the first quarter 2026 estimate, we more than compensated for that decrease. Why is that? Because we not only opened this new line of lithium fines, which were the low-grade high-purity business that we created out of our dry stack tailings, but also all the work we’ve done in mine restructuring began to show results. So on an annual basis, the revenues decreased 27%. And so when you look at the bigger picture here, what is actually visible that, yes, revenues decreased 27% on an annual basis. Cost decreased 21% on an annual basis. So costs decreased less than revenues on an annual basis, but we were very quick to compensate that and to fix it in the fourth quarter, where we cut costs and we decreased costs in 77%.

So this is how financial discipline is demonstrated with numbers. In this slide, we show the quantification of the financial discipline, but now on balance sheet optimization. We have significantly deleveraged despite all the price volatility, despite all that happened with revenues. From fourth quarter ’24 to the fourth quarter ’25, we lowered our short-term debt in 60%. From the fourth quarter ’24 to the estimate of first quarter ’26, which is actually the numbers that we have closing, we lowered it by 68%. So the work continued. We didn’t stop. Then when you look at the third quarter ’25 against current, we lowered the debt in 49%. That’s a complete restructuring in the way we fund ourselves, in the short term, in a way we look at working capital even, meaning clients are now funding our operation because of our successful commercial partnerships with our clients.

We make it win-win so that it cost us less in working capital and we deleverage our balance sheet. This slide, I’ll go very slowly on it because it shows our cash flow generation outlook. It’s quite simple. It’s quite straightforward. And again, it just demonstrates how Sigma is a cash machine. Why? Because we have high margins. We are built for cash flow generation. We have estimated that in the next 12-month period for Phase 1, we’re going to probably have 240,000 tonnes of production. As we’ve shown before, for the year, we’re going to deliver 200,000 tonnes. Now because of our optimum cost efficiencies, we are going to be yielding an all-in sustaining cost, including interest of $592. That’s our estimation for the next 12 months, as we’ve shown you in guidance.

That creates cash flows no matter what. If lithium retrocedes to $1,500 a tonne, we’re going to be generating about $158 million in free cash flow after interest, free cash flow. If lithium stays around where it is now between $1,800 and $2,000 a tonne, we can generate anything between $218 million to $260 6 million of free cash flow just with one phase. As we double capacity, which will be in place by the end of next year, capacity and we prorate production as we commission, you can sharpen your pencils and you can do the math of how much cash flow we’re going to have with two plants. More importantly, as we calculate all-in sustaining costs and all-in cash costs, the only optimization we’ve done were on G&A and ESG. You don’t need 2 of me or 2 of most of our personnel to run these businesses on the administrative side and interest because we’re going to cut interest in half, given that the interest is on the total debt that we are going to contract precisely to build plant 2.

So we have not factored in the actual operational scale gains that come from running 2 plants using infrastructure that is built and utilized now for 1 plant. So the infrastructure sharing of 2 plants are probably going to bring more cost gains, which are not here in these cash flows. But just with this conservative analysis of doubling operations and having some synergies on G&A and interest, we’re bound to generate basically $600 million in free cash flow if prices stay where they are. If prices retroceded to about $1,500, that’s okay, too. We’ll generate $384 million in free cash flow, meaning after interest at those levels. What becomes really interesting is when we build a third line, which could be done concomitant with the second line.

That means that at 770,000 tonnes of production, and again, we’re just calculating efficiencies here on G&A, ESG and interest. And we flattened the interest. We haven’t cut interest further. We just cut G&A further because, again, to be a commercial person or to be an administrative person, you don’t need to triple your numbers when you have triple plants. So interest is flat, but G&A and ESG was the only number that was reduced. What does that mean? Our all-in cash sustaining costs, including interest, goes down to $495 per tonne with 3 lines. So if prices retroceded to $1,500 by the end of ’28, when we plan to have this capacity in place, we could be generating $581 million in free cash flow. If the prices stay where they are, we could be generating $900 million in free cash flow.

That’s a significant amount. And it just shows how building long-term value means building a company that is geared to generate operating efficiency, operational excellence and quite a lot of free cash flow to shareholders. As management operators, our interests are 100% aligned. We’re building a business to last. We’re building a business to create shareholder value for all of us, management and outside shareholders. So this slide shows the cash flow bridge, the cash bridge with its respective explanation. So again, more numeric demonstration that the disciplined execution that we have delivered in ’25 and continue to deliver throughout ’26 has created this operational resilience despite the very volatile market conditions. We have had operating cash generation.

This is why we didn’t raise capital because we were able to generate the amount of cash to deliver and to execute on plan, on target. So let’s start at the end of the third quarter of ’25. We had $6 million in cash. As forecasted and as discussed in those materials, and I encourage you to go back to them, we continued on the trend to deliver cash flow from operations. So on a net basis, we delivered $31 million in cash from operations, mainly final price adjustments from transactions from sales that had taken place on a provisional price basis as we discussed earlier. Then we had our cash operating costs. We have executed CapEx towards the mining upgrade, and we had $26 million of debt repayment and interest repayment as we’ve shown in #1 and #2.

Debt repayment was just debt repayment, amortization of principal. Interest expense was the annual cash expense for the $100 million of long-term debt we’ve had in our balance sheet. So we had a flat cash position between the third quarter ’25 and the fourth quarter of ’25. This is financial discipline. We conserve cash. We burned 0 cash. So with the knowledge that there was a whole new business of lithium fines coming on stream, which, again, we flagged during our third quarter presentation, we had inflows in the first quarter ’26, which were the cash sales of those lithium fines that we affected and closed on the beginning of the year. So we achieved $30 million on the sales of the lithium fines, and we achieved $5 million on the sales of the premium high grade.

That was the beginning of sales resulting from our mining restructuring. Then we had a $24 million CapEx bill for the mining upgrade, mining restructuring and all that we had to do. But as we conserve cash and as we generate cash from that new line of business, which was reprocessing dry stack tailings, we were able to not only pay our CapEx for mining restructuring and upgrade, but also to continue to do debt principal repayment. So we paid down another $5 million in debt, which means we increased our cash position in the first quarter of 2026 by 100%. So we doubled the cash position. So this is, again, numbers. Numbers don’t have an opinion. And it’s very much in line with the strategy for cash flow discipline that we have laid out in the third quarter ’25.

We’re giving you an advancement here or a preview as we call it. We have another $14 million of cash sales from the — we call lithium fines business, the reprocessed dry stacking tailings. Then we have another $50 million of a true long-term offtake agreement prepayment that is poised to close by the end of the second quarter. And then we have about $32 million of the first installment of the $96 million offtake that we signed just in 2025 for the high-grade premium lithium, which is the 70,000 tonnes that we are planning to deliver in 2026. So again, we closed the first quarter ’26 with $12 million in cash, and we have a significant amount of cash coming our way in the second quarter of ’26, having executed pretty much most of the mining upgrade, as you can see in the CapEx bill for $24 million we paid in the first quarter of ’26 plus the $4 million we initiated in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Now we’re going to do a bit about the operational work we have done to restructure our mining operations. This was done for, again, the construction of long-term value for shareholders. We had to do this. We had to take control of our mine because without that, we would not be ready to deliver the cadence that was necessary to affect the capacity expansions of the second and third industrial plants. Just to recap, we are a fully integrated industrial mining operation. We have this proprietary cleantech technology that produces what we call the clean lithium. That means we have a mine that’s integrated into an industrial facility. And again, stopping the mine doesn’t mean the industry stops. Obviously, what we want is having a mine at full tilt and then the plant receiving fresh rock.

But the plant can do many things given that we have dry stack materials. But once we think about doubling capacity and tripling capacity, we mean that our mines need to operate at full tilt and in perfect cadence so that our plant can deliver on the 70% recovery levels it actually is — it has demonstrated it can achieve in the fourth quarter of 2024. Think of it as a blast furnace. If we turn it on and off, it will not maintain those levels of efficiency. So if the same amount of material is not fed into that dense media separators per hour, it won’t achieve 70% recovery. And for that, we need mine planning, mine execution that delivers piles or delivers fresh rock to the ROM pad on the same quantities regularly, at least on a weekly schedule.

So this is kind of the overall concept of 100% vertically-integrated operation. Here is a picture of a Greentech Plant at night, unquestionably a beautiful, beautiful industrial installation. This is what we’ve done with the Greentech plant that allow us to get to the 70% recovery. We had a 2.0 version of the plant, which was the version we operated from July ’23 until November 2024. That was not recovering 70%. It was recovering anything between 50%, low 60s, almost 60%. The dry stack tailing units was not working as we wanted anyway. We actually invested a significant amount of CapEx to get the plant to what we call the current stage, which is the 3.0 version that we plan to double and triple, meaning we’re building another one of this and then we’re building a second one of this.

But in order for that to happen, as we said earlier, we need mine and plant to work in cadence. How did we get to the 70% recoveries? We automated industrial operations. We have software, we have scatter, we have algorithms. We have detection of anomalies automatically. We have correction recommendations automatically. It’s self-learning metallurgy, self-learning for mineralogy. It’s a bot that basically keeps on getting better and better and better when it’s fed the same mineralogy. This is a picture of our fully automated control room. Then we have the mine. The mine had quite a lot of work to be done. It was using less than efficient small equipment. It was using too many pieces of equipment. At one point, there were 48 small 40-tonne trucks trafficking through the mine.

So a lot had to be done there. First, we had to fix geometry. It had to be widened. And here on the picture, you already see the result of widening the geometry. So we’ve done intermediary strip with the objective of widen geometry and increase the mine life and increase access and open other areas with ore that were closer to surface. So what we’ve done, we basically open additional mine fronts now to accelerate the ramp-up. How did we do this? By using larger equipment, larger fleet to remove strip faster. So larger equipment increases efficiency on the excavators, on trucks across the board. In parallel, while we did that mostly in the fourth quarter, the Greentech Plant continued to operate. So we reprocessed the lithium materials from the dry stack tailings during the fourth quarter ’25 and the first quarter ’26 with superior recovery, not the 70% recovery, but it enriched it enough to create decent cash flow to create a decent sale value, a decent value added so that it could generate the cash flow and the revenues we achieved both in the later fourth quarter, but also throughout the first quarter.

So what we’re hoping to happen, and we’ve seen happening already now in March was that recoveries get closer to 70% as we resume delivering fresh rock to the plant. Now this is how we’re going to bring all that software knowledge to the plant. We started and we continue. So we have fast mining implemented in process for mine planning. We have the same software implemented for fuel control. We have fatigue automatic software detection. We have a cost control app sitting on iPads and iPhones for all the mine operators. So we have loading and blasting simulations for optimal results with minimum loads, minimum vibrations. So we’re bringing the same software technologies, the same intelligence to the mining operation. And that is starting in the control room for mining, which is here, as you can see in the picture.

This is a picture of the first wave of larger equipment. The equipment is going to get bigger and bigger. This is the kind of the small large equipment. So — but more important than that, we own production control. We drive production control. Mine planning is ours, blasting control is ours. We hired a third-party driller for blasting. So we’re managing different contractors with our own in-house mining team. That allow us to gain confidence on deploying larger equipment, on investing in larger equipment and on basically doing the calculated analysis of where should we be blasting for safety, for optimal geometry, but also for efficient ore recovery. Now I’m going to talk about how we’re going to continue to expand. We are resuming the construction of Plant 2 this year.

So we’re going to double industrial capacity for the high-grade premium lithium oxide. And we’re not that far. In other words, once we get to it, we’re going to go from the 240,000 tonnes that we’re guiding to 520,000 tonnes, and that is not that far away. More importantly, there’s the potential that we may build 2 and 3 sequentially. So we are never going to decommission the construction crews, given that the CapEx involved here is actually very little and the CapEx efficiency is very high, meaning it’s going to cost us $80 million to conclude the second plant, and it’s going to cost us $100 million to build a third plant. So with $180 million we are able to take our production from 240,000 tonnes a year to 770,000 tonnes a year. That’s a substantial increase, and that’s one of the most efficient CapEx ratios in the whole industry.

So this demonstrates what can happen when we double and then triple production. We run the fifth largest industrial mineral complex in the world. We are the largest lithium mineral producer in the Americas. But here, we have all of our peers. We have the lithium producers in the Americas that produce from the lakes in Argentina, and that includes the Chilean and the American producers. We also have the producers from Australia, and we have the producers from Africa. So although we are the fifth largest industrial mineral complex in the world, and we’re the largest industrial mineral producer in the Americas, we are the eighth ranked producer in the world as a whole. Now look what happens when we double and we triple. When we double, we go from #8 to #6 or #5.

Then when we triple, we go to # 4. All of these companies have valuations substantially higher than ours. In fact, we’re valued as a nonproducing company. So the effect of doubling production and tripling production is not just numeric, it’s also a clear demonstration that we can be up there in the rankings with a concomitant valuation. And that is what it means for us to build long-term shareholder value. And this is what we’re planning to do. This is a slide that shows how close we are to getting there. We have made a decision in the fourth quarter ’24 and in the first quarter ’25 of accelerating the construction of Plant 2. And unfortunately, because of tariff volatility, lithium prices collapsed in more than 50%. So we deployed CapEx and we deployed our liquidity in the fourth quarter ’24 and in the first quarter ’25 towards the construction.

Well, that is not the so good news. We managed, we delivered throughout ’25 as we’ve shown. We overcame because the business was structured to generate cash flows and live through organic cash flow generation. But here’s the good news. We’re almost there. We’ve almost finished civil foundations. So what is missing really? Ordering equipment and assembling equipment, and that can be done quite rapidly. In the first plant, we were able to order equipment and assemble equipment in much less than 12 months. So this is how finishing building the second plant is actually a very expedited exercise in construction, managing procurement of equipment and managing assembly of equipment. And that’s it. This is a fully licensed construction, fully licensed operation is just within our control to do this.

So Sigma is very well positioned to deliver substantial returns to shareholders in 2026. And here, we’re going to show why. This slide demonstrates how Sigma continued cash flow generation, production cadence in ’26 and growth by building Phase 2 that will yield 520,000 tonnes of lithium will certainly position us for a re-rating of our stock. Why is that? When you look at our peers that produce lithium industrialized oxide from minerals in Australia, they have a larger nameplate production and a significantly larger cash flow. However, as we increase production, that means our cash flow will much more than increase because we have this competitive advantage of high margins, low cost and operational resilience. So our increase in nameplate production will bring a disproportionately larger increase in cash flow generation.

More so, that happens irrespectively of pricing environment because of our low-cost operational resilience. The next slide just shows how we’re going to get there. We’ve demonstrated operational discipline. We delivered on all fronts in ’25. That’s what we’ve seen on the right. We deleverage and repaid debt, we increased operating cash margins. We built a new line of revenues. We’re now selling lithium fines high purity from our dry stack tailings. We increased mineral reserves by 40%, which shows we can operate for 66 years with 1 line for over 25 years with 2 lines and most likely for over 25 years with 3 lines. We strengthened commercial strategy by basically capturing seasonality. We monetized final prices in line with contract seasonality in the fourth quarter.

And we closed 2 significant offtakes, almost $150 million in offtakes, $96 million to fund our working capital throughout 96 (sic) [ ’26 ] to fund our upgrade and restructuring of mining operations and then a $50 million typical offtake that will basically be invested in building Phase 2. So how are we going to continue to deliver in all fronts in 2026? We’re going to resume steady-state production from the mining operations, that integration mine plant cadence that we’ve shown before that will resume the cadence of what we call the premium high-grade lithium. We’re going to close financially on the offtakes transaction signed, and we’re going to close on 2 more offtakes as we disclosed when we discussed offtakes here. We’re going to receive the development bank disbursement for the funding we already spent on Phase 2, and we are in discussions with several other banks for Phase 3.

We’re going to repay $100 million of shareholder debt funded by one of the offtakes that are in negotiation, 80,000 tonnes per year for 3 years. And we’re planning to commission the Plant 2, the Greentech 2 by the end of 2026. So with that, I close — very proudly close the full year results of 2025, where we crossed the Rubicon of probably one of the most volatile lithium environments this industry has seen. And we’re entering 2026, awash in significant cash generation coming from numerically delivering operational efficiency. So with that, I close this presentation for the full year of 2025. We’re very, very proud of our team. We’re incredibly proud of how we work, how hard we work to cross the Rubicon of one of the most volatile lithium pricing environments I have ever seen, and I’ve been here for 10 years as a C-level executive.

We’ve done it without raising capital. We’ve done it without a hiccup in our operations. We’re entering 2026 in a much strengthened position. Why? We have the resilience that’s basically quantify. We already earned our revenues by building a completely different product line. We resumed production cadence at the end of the first quarter, and we’re entering ’26 with roughly $48 million of quarterly revenues, which is a significant accomplishment considering we’re just coming out of a volatile 2025. All of that without raising any dollars of new capital, pure organic, disciplined cash generation. And that is the quintessential competitive advantage of this company. This operations efficiency delivered and quantified in the numbers we’ve shown you.

We’re very proud of our team, and I want to thank all of our clients and stakeholders who have been there with us, holding hands and helping us cross ’25 and enter ’26 in this very strengthened position.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Fortune Era. The company has indicated a production target of 520 kt in 2027. Does this imply that Plant 2 is expected to reach full capacity by the end of 2026? More specifically, when do you currently expect Plant 2 to begin commissioning? And how long do you expect the ramp-up to full capacity to take?

Ana Cabral Gardner: We are going to have another presentation on plant construction, but we’ll tell you what we’re planning to do now. As we’ve shown in the slide previously, what there is between us and new production is essentially resuming ordering equipment, assembling equipment and commissioning that plant. That can be done quite rapidly. If we use the timetable from the previous plant, it could be easily done in under a year. We are going to order equipment in the summer after the close of the second quarter. The reason being the offtake we just signed will be the main driver for us to deposit and prepay the equipment that we need to build Plant 2. We believe that it will take us anything between 8 to 12 months to actually build and commission that line.

So Plant 2 will be fully commissioned early 2027. And as a result, the guidance for ’27 is not a guidance for production, it’s a guidance for installed production capacity, and we will be further updating the market as that unfolds. But what we can say is we’re almost there with three-fifths of our timetable accomplished in the construction of Plant 2. And what stands between us and that level of production is purchasing, building and commissioning, which we’ve shown we can do quite rapidly.

Operator: A follow-up question. In the guidance section titled cash flow forecast at various realized lithium prices, could you please clarify whether the price assumptions of $1,500 and $1,700 refer to Sigma’s expected average realized selling price for its concentrate or the benchmark SC6 China FOB price. For Sigma’s concentrate grade of approximately 5.2% to 5.5% lithium oxide, what is the typical realized price as a percentage of the SC6 benchmark price?

Ana Cabral Gardner: So we are using — we’re not using the gross prices. We’re using adjusted prices. So when you think about the nameplate price, we take nameplate price from SMM. And then we typically ship 5.2, 5.3 lithium oxide grade product. So the adjustment is done dividing that level of oxide by SC6 in older contracts. In the newer contracts, we divide by 5.5. The results are kind of the same. So when you look at the prices on that table, they are net prices. As you probably are all aware, gross prices have reached $2,400 just 2 days ago. So $1,800 and $1,500 are far below the current level of nameplate prices at Shanghai Metals Market.

Operator: Our next question comes from Lamartine Gomes. Question for Ana Cabral. Can you give us your directional sense of how much each plus USD 10 per barrel increase in oil prices impacts the demand for lithium?

Ana Cabral Gardner: Unfortunately, I don’t have that number, and I am not really an oil expert. What we can say, though, is 15% to almost 20% of the fossil fuels we use here are just the fuels that power the trucks that run around our operations. In other words, every liter of diesel in Brazil has mandatorily 15% of biodiesel. Now that percentage is slated to increase. So we actually are, let’s put it that way, 20% less impacted by the increase in diesel prices than any other country in the world because we have this fantastic, we call, biofuels program in the country, which was actually created 30 years ago during the last oil crisis for this exact reason for energy security of Brazil. And we are the beneficiary of that when it comes to our emissions. So our trucks generate 20% less emissions because the fuel by law has 15% and we’re putting 20-ish percent biofuels for every liter of diesel.

Operator: Our next question comes from Robert Cook. Please detail the timing of Phase 2 and 3 to completion both 2028. Anything more specific?

Ana Cabral Gardner: Well, I was mentioning what we’re going to do on Phase 2. And again, we’re going to keep giving the market updates pretty regularly on that. Phase 2, by the summer, we’re going to be ordering equipment. So close second quarter order equipment. As we demonstrated, that will be funded by the growth offtake we signed, $50 million or more than enough to prepay or deposit towards the equipment we need. To be specific, now what’s between that order equipment and production is essentially assembly. In the previous plan, we had 1,000 man on site assembling that plant, that line. That was done in 8 months. We use what we call air procurement for some of the parts that were delayed so that we could cut short delivery times.

We use a lot of what we call acceleration techniques, which in this budget are factored in. If we use the accelerated timetable, it means we’re going to spend another $7 million for extra man, extra shifts and air freight for some of the equipment. What does that mean? It means that we could have a built plant by the first quarter of 2027, assuming we start in the summer. And then there’s commissioning. What is the advantage of doing a plant that is a carbon copy of a plant we’ve been operating by then for almost 4 years. That is the plant we really know. And as a result, we believe we can cut commissioning times significantly. And more importantly, start benefiting from the get-go, begin with the same levels of recoveries instead of going through the curve of going — starting with 50% recoveries up to 70% recoveries we underwent from the 2.0 version of the plant to the 3.0 version of the plant.

So without being more specific, we’re quite confident that we’re going to have Plant 2 by any time in the first half of next year. But that’s the reason why we’re making a clear distinction between installed production capacity and production. Production is dependent on the commissioning, and we’re going to keep the market vastly updated as we go along. Now Plant 3. Plant 3 is what we’re very proud of actually because given our operational success, given our cost resilience and given our strength as a business throughout cycles, what we’ve shown basically in 2025 has not gone unnoticed by the main development banks throughout the world, by the main players throughout the world, by the main financiers throughout the world. So we do have dialogues going on for building Plant 3.

Building Plant 2 and 3 together is not new. In fact, in December ’22, when we filed our DFS for expansion, that was the plan. So much so that we invested in building infrastructure for 3 lines. The goal was to do 1, 2 and 3 sequentially and maximize what we call construction synergies. Unfortunately, lithium took a tumble in ’24, and we quickly aborted that plant, and we stuck to just the first plant. By the end of ’24, we resumed Plant 2, and we went all in, again, with the volatility of tariffs in ’25, we aborted that plant and we stuck to Plant 1. But doing 1, 2, 3 is actually what we have been designing this industrial complex for. Why? We spent the money in the infrastructure, and that was not a small feat, meaning we have the water to feed 3 lines.

We licensed to feed 3 lines. We have the sewage inbound treatment station to feed 3 lines. We have the power substation to build — to feed 3 lines. So from an infrastructure point of view, we are ready for 3 lines. And this is why we’re delighted to actually say that, that has not gone unnoticed. And we have, let’s say, no shortage of choices from where to get funded with the appropriate kind of debt, development financing debt to build these 3 lines.

Operator: Our next question comes from David Feng with CICC. Can we have some color on how Sigma would mitigate any potential fluctuations in fuel costs and power costs? What percentage does diesel costs account for in your cash cost or AISC?

Ana Cabral Gardner: I don’t have the number by heart, but I can talk about power. It will have 0 effect in power. In other words, when you think about power, our power is fixed at $2 per kilo — $0.02 of $1, meaning $0.02, $0.02 of $1 per kilowatt hour. This is fixed. One important point, power is renewable here in Brazil. So it’s coming from a hydroelectricity dam. And we have a 5-year agreement, which is set to expire 2.5 years from now. So we’re going to be good with power. Diesel is the element that is a little bit less straightforward to explain. First, because we got biofuels on the mix, and that is mandatory by law. Secondly, because our oil company is state-owned, and they have what we call a diesel compensation account, which works like a shock absorber during oil crisis.

In other words, the diesel costs don’t go straight to the consumer as they increase globally. Petrobras absorbs some of that shock initially using what we call the oil compensation account and then it releases in the market. And that was created because all transport in the country mostly is done by trucks so that — and trucks are individual entrepreneurs so that they have time to plan to actually send that cost into their customers. So we’re going to revert back to you on the percentage of diesel in our costs with that knowledge.

Operator: This concludes the question-and-answer section. I am returning to our CEO, Ana Cabral, for her final remarks.

Ana Cabral Gardner: Well, I want to thank you all of you. And in fact, everyone watching us for the trust. We have gone through 2025, which was one of the most volatile years in lithium, delivering exactly as we said we were delivering resilience, demonstrating operational excellence and executing to plan. We already started ’26 on a fantastic note because of what we’ve learned in 2025 as far as becoming more and more and more resilient. So that’s the effort, the collective effort of our management team, of our workers, of the team here in Vale do Jequitinhonha, essentially working like what we call racing horses. We lowered the flap, we focus on our lane and we raised our own race without looking to the sides, focusing on the target.

And that’s how we’ve been running this business, and this is why we achieved these results. So once again, I want to thank on behalf of our management-operated shareholders here that work at the company and control the company, we want to thank all of our outside shareholders and reiterate our interest cannot be further aligned. There isn’t another company in the sector that’s management-owned, management-operated, where employees are shareholders. So for all of you watching, we’re in this together. And I want to thank you for staying our shareholders because we crossed 2025, and we are incredibly well positioned to deliver stellar 2026.

Operator: Thank you. Thus, we conclude the fourth quarter of 2025 conference call of Sigma Lithium. For further information and details of the company, please visit the company’s website, www.sigmalithiumresources.com. You can disconnect now.