Westwater Resources, Inc (NASDAQ:WWR) Q2 2019 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Westwater Resources Inc. Second Quarter 2019 Results and Business Update Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.

[Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Christopher Jones, President and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Ariel, and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us today and welcome to the Westwater Resource's Second Quarter 2019 Results and Energy Minerals Business Update Conference Call. With me on our call is Jeff Vigil, our CFO and Vice President of Finance; and Dain McCoig, our Vice President of Operations. I'd like to remind our listeners to read our cautionary statements on the following pages, as we will be discussing some forward-looking statements and information.

On to slide four, which covers our highlights for the second quarter of 2019, a busy quarter for us, with lots of moving parts both inside and outside the company. So we're going to try to shed some light and a bit more context around a number of those for you this morning before we take your questions. We announced today that our ULTRA Purified Micronized Graphite under testing with a major battery manufacturer has requested a bulk sample, one metric ton in size of our battery grade graphite for further testing. This is a major milestone for Westwater.

At the same time, we also have laboratory testing ongoing with additional potential customers. We are also among the first in the graphite development space to release long-term cycling performance results of our spheronized graphite materials from our Coosa graphite project. We're not aware of anyone to date to report long-term cycling data for U.S. sourced natural flake graphite materials. We announced the sale of four royalties owned by Westwater on future uranium production for mineral properties on South Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico, as well as a mortgage we hold in the amount of $2 million on the Church Rock property in New Mexico owned by Laramide Resources for a collective total consideration of $2.75 million, including $500,000 paid at signing.

We recently agreed to extend the date for closing to August 30th, 2019, and we received an additional $1 million as a non-refundable deposit. We entered into an equity purchase agreement with Lincoln Park Capital Fund, our current investor in Westwater for up to $10 million under very favorable terms to Westwater and its shareholders. We're proud to say that our shareholders approved this agreement on August 6th.

We also announced a new drilling and sampling exploration plan to explore four and define vanadium resources on five target areas at our Coosa project in Alabama. We've achieved reclamation milestones that are Vasquez property. We also announced the granting of mineral, I'm sorry -- water rights at our Sal Rica property and had our request for arbitration accepted at the International Court for Settlement