MP Materials Corp. Jefferies Global Industrials Conference 2026

Sure, absolutely. Thanks for having us again. Appreciate it. For those of you that are less familiar, MP Materials is the Western world's largest producer of rare earth materials. We're the only scaled producer of NdPr oxide in the Western hemisphere, and are the only scaled business with a fully vertically integrated platform with demonstrated capabilities from mining through to magnet manufacturing. We have been on a journey of building the business in stages. We're at the point where we are nearly complete on the optimization and growth of production of NdPr oxide at our Mountain Pass asset, which is, Mountain Pass is really the cornerstone of the rare earth industry. It's where much of it was born, and it is such a tremendous asset for us to build this platform on top of.

We've taken our successes in the upstream and midstream side of the business and have integrated downstream into rare earth permanent magnets, which if I was at this conference three years ago, I might start explaining to everybody what magnets are. I think today now most people know what they are and know how incredibly important they are, which is a major sea change, I think, for the industry is just the broad recognition of how critical they are. But we've built out a very interesting business in worth permanent magnets, starting with the automotive sector, with our first foundational customer being General Motors. We've expanded that business to incorporate Apple as our next foundational customer, speaking to sort of the vertical integration, not just for magnets at our Independence facility, but as our sort of keystone foundational customer for our scaled recycling business.

I think the thing that is so critical to appreciate about this business is the vertical integration really allows for efficiencies across the value chain. That was a very exciting announcement we had last year. The other very exciting announcement, and really, I think, a sea change for both domestic critical minerals policy and industrial policy as well as a major accelerant for our business, was the announcement of a public-private partnership with the Department of Defense in July of last year. That deal came with a variety of attributes to it, namely, a price floor on our critical NdPr commodity, as well as accelerating our investment into expanding the downstream side of our business, where we've now undertaken what we're calling 10X to build our next magnetics facility. We've broken ground and are making really amazing progress in getting that facility stood up.

We are partners with the Department of Defense in that facility, where they are a 100% offtaker and have a guaranteed minimum earnings level at that facility with the ultimate goal of commercially syndicating that out to commercial customers and defense industrial-based customers. So that on top of a lot of excitement on the materials side of the business, where we've continued to find opportunities for very high return incremental tack-on projects like our Claricali facility, our heavy rare earth separation capacity, and things of that nature have definitely all kept us quite busy at MP.

Sure. I think maybe I'll tackle it both on the material side first and then magnetics. I think from a materials perspective the export restrictions that China has brought to bear, I think, across both segments, both products really, I think, have illustrated the single point of failure that has been evident, that we've been talking about for a very long time, but that I don't think the supply chain managers of every large OEM fully took seriously until they were forced to. We get a lot of questions also about there's the upcoming Trump-Xi summit and what we think may come out of that. But the fascinating thing to think about is from an industrial capacity perspective, so many of the things that ultimately are built in the U.S. ultimately touch other parts of the world, Japan namely.

What we've seen is clearly there is difficult relations between the U.S. and China, even more difficult relations between China and Japan, and that is really starting to impact the industrial supply chain. I think that there was a major panic with magnets at the beginning because no one really knew what the pathway was to be able to get export licenses and things like that. Those have flowed some, but not very much. I think that everyone on the magnetic side that we talk to, I think, we would characterize it as the genie is out of the bottle or Humpty Dumpty's not getting put back together.

Like it kind of doesn't matter what happens in the sense that you can never allow your business to be that reliant on the whim of an export official at the port coming out of China to decide if your automotive plant is going to stay open or not. Across the board for some of the materials that we produce on the refined side as well as in the magnetic segment, the level of engagement is huge. The beauty of the structure that we've put together is independence with General Motors and with Apple, the vast majority of that volume is spoken for. Then with 10X, with the investment and offtake agreement with the Department of Defense, allows us to be very methodical in approaching contracting that facility.

We think about it as every day the strategic value of that asset grows as more businesses really come to understand how difficult this is going to be in the Western world. I think start to fully appreciate the value of our vertically integrated supply chain. We've talked a lot about where we think the bottlenecks are going to be, and we are one of the very few companies that I think can actually address the problem.

When we think about this, it's almost fascinating to think about the fact that November would represent a year of a pause on certain export restrictions, right? From our perspective, what we are seeing from customers is, what pause? It is incredibly difficult. The data's publicly available, the trade data on gadolinium, yttrium, heavy earth-containing magnets like dysprosium and terbium going into Japan. All of those are basically zero. It's pretty darn close to zero coming into the U.S. as well. Again, you think about how our supply chains and the geopolitical rivalry here is developing such that the line between the traditional defense industrial base and the broad economic base is blurring. Is a data center commercial or is it defense? You'd be surprised that the answer is maybe both.

I think fundamentally the way that the supply chain needs to be approached now is one where we just cannot rely on China no matter what happens at this summit. I probably am not the best prognosticator on exactly what our President and what Xi will say, but I think in a lot of ways the script is already written from the perspective of the supply chain.