NioCorp Developments Ltd. Common Stock Investor update

Good day, and welcome to today's webcast with NioCorp Developments. This is Barrett Boone with Red Chip Companies. Today's webcast will cover NioCorp's recently published 2026 technical report for its Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in Nebraska. All participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the webcast to your questions. You may submit a question at any time by clicking the Q&A button on the bottom of your Zoom window and typing it in. I will now hand the webcast over to Jim Sims, NioCorp's Chief Communications Officer.

Jim, please go ahead. Thank you, Barrett, and thanks to everyone for joining us today.

It is a big day for the company. The team today, we are going to walk through a supplemental presentation during today's webcast to accompany our overall discussion in the Q&A session. NioCorp's news releases, presentations, SEC filings, including the technical report supporting the updated feasibility study, are all available now on our website at niocorp.com and on SEDAR. On the webcast today, we have Mark Smith, Executive Chairman, President, and CEO of NioCorp, and Scott Honan, Chief Operating Officer of NioCorp and President of Elk Creek Resources Company. Before we begin today, please note that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements, including those regarding NioCorp's future financial and operating results, expectations, plans, and prospects. Any statement that is not a historical fact should be considered a forward-looking statement.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed. For a description of these risks, please refer to the cautionary notes in today's presentation and to the risk factors in NioCorp's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and on SEDAR+. Today's discussion may also reference market and industry data drawn from third-party sources, which the company has not independently verified and which are subject to uncertainty. Lastly, all dollar figures today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated. Following today's prepared remarks, we will open the webcast to your questions. Let me now turn the webcast over to Mark Smith.

Mark, please go ahead. Thank you, Jim, and much like Jim just alluded to, this is a very important time in the company's history.

This is quite the effort that the company has undertaken here. Along those lines, I would like to start out by thanking Scott Honan, our COO, the entire NioCorp team, including our board of directors, who have all been just phenomenally supportive in this effort. I want to thank the literally hundreds of consultants that we have used to put this entire independent study together, and in particular, the 15 qualified professionals who have signed their name and certified the technical competency and accuracy of this report. Very important and it is just a huge responsibility that those QPs undertake when they do that. Then certainly last but not least, I want to thank our shareholders for their patience as we worked our way through this process.

As Jim noted, we did file this report on SEDAR yesterday. If the report is not on our website yet, it will be up there today. I encourage you to take a look at that 500-plus page document. One of the things that is very important to me personally in every one of these efforts I have ever undertaken is that, my entire NioCorp team can attest to the fact that I am always pushing to get things done. Let us get things done. But when it comes to a feasibility study, a technical report like this, quality needs to be paramount. We will always choose quality over speed when it comes to doing a feasibility study. So again, thank you all for your patience while we undertook this effort. It did take a little more time than what any of us had anticipated.

But I know after all of the years I have been working in project financing and fundraising that that short amount of extra time, in this case, is going to pay very good dividends for us as we move into the full project financing, including EXIM and additional equity fundraising. So thank you for that. I think it will pay dividends now with this high-quality study. We basically undertook the feasibility study update for two reasons to start with, and that was to do some additional drilling out on site. We wanted to have tighter hole spacing so that we had better definition of what the ore body contained in between all the other drill hole samples that we had. We undertook that effort. The results were outstanding.

Once again, every time we put a drill bit in the ground, we find out something even better about this ore body, and that just continues to be the case. This is an outstanding ore body. Second, we had a new process flow diagram for our metallurgy. We needed to have the process flow diagram converted into an actual feasibility study level engineering design. So after 12 years now of working on this metallurgy and really optimizing it, I think to almost the highest extent possible, where we are getting high 80s, low 90% recoveries of all of the elements that we are going to be pulling out of this ore body and selling. We are now in good shape because not only do we have a demonstrated metallurgical process, we now have the engineering design to support that effort as well.

Then just because, again, quality is paramount, we undertook during the feasibility study engineering effort and the drilling effort, we undertook some other additional studies just to make our technical program that much more robust. So we did some extra geotechnical studies, some geohydrologic studies. We did a lot of work on paste tailings and a lot of work on grouting, which will make for a better mine plan, a safer mine for our employees, and a longer-lasting mine over the long run. So again, really a solid effort here. I want to make sure we send out that thank you to everybody. Alex, let us go to slide 4. We will start out with one of the main drivers here in terms of improvements to the feasibility study for 2026 versus 2022.

We will now have eight different products that we will be selling as a result of underground mining and surface processing activities. You can see we will be producing niobium, scandium, and titanium, which of course was in the 2022 feasibility study, but we will also now be producing the neodymium, praseodymium high-purity oxide, dysprosium high-purity oxide, terbium high-purity oxide, and then as a result of how one goes about processing rare earths and what comes out first in solvent extraction, we will also be producing two different concentrate products. One is called an SEG, or samarium europium gadolinium carbonate concentrate, and the other one is all the other heavy rare earth elements in a carbonate form, again, concentrate style. What you can see on the right here is the life of mine gross revenue.

The circle on the left shows the 2022 feasibility study, where we had niobium, scandium, and titanium as part of the overall revenue. Just a little under $22 billion for that life of mine gross revenue. The figure to the right, which by the way is to scale so that you can actually visually see what the additional revenue means in terms of a to scale picture here. We will have life of mine gross revenue as a result of the 2026 feasibility study of a little over $37 billion with multiple products here, niobium, scandium, the rare earths, and the titanium. That $37.4 billion is about 1.7 times greater than the $21.9 billion. So a huge impact on the revenue side of the equation, given the additional products that we will be able to produce from this ore body. Next slide, Alex. If we start heading into the overall economic highlights and some of the numbers associated with our economic model, I will start out over on the left here, and this is a life of mine margin of $560 per ton.

That is one of the highest that I have certainly seen in my career in the mining industry. We get that by simply taking the $815 gross revenue per ton figure and subtracting the $255 OPEX per ton. Keep in mind that that $560 per ton margin is 41% greater than the margin we showed in the 2022 feasibility study. So again, really getting those extra products in, getting the extra revenue in really bolsters the economics here quite significantly. Then we can focus on some of the numbers to the right. I know I like to focus on the $4.1 billion pre-tax NPV utilizing it at 8% discount rate.

We have $519 million per year average annual cash flow over the life of the mine. If we head over to the right, you can see the $608 million EBITDA annually over the life of the mine. We have a 40-year mine life, and we have a total upfront CapEx estimated at $1.85 billion. Clearly the CapEx number has gone up, as has the NPV, as has the margin, as has the revenue, as has the EBITDA, as has the cash flow. But that CapEx number, I think we were all concerned about what inflation would do, and this is largely driven by inflation more than anything else. But we do need to remember that we have added some additional processing to what we had before as well. We have the solvent extraction for the rare earths. We have the chlorination for the niobium and the titanium.