CEO comments on the first quarter of 2021

We are now well into 2021 and progressing with our battery minerals projects in Finland, Spain and Sweden. At the same time, we are constantly evaluating new opportunities to achieve our business goal of providing sustainable battery minerals and metals for the electric revolution.

During the first few months of this year, I have maintained a strong focus on increasing our footprints in the automotive industry and building a solid foundation for the company’s long-term financing.

At the beginning of Q1, we made the strategic move of entering the German market via a parallel listing at the Börse Stuttgart in Germany. I cannot underestimate the importance of the company having a presence in the biggest market in the automotive industry in Europe and globally. Following the entry, I have been working hard on educating the industry about building future electric vehicles from sustainably produced raw materials from Europe, rather than depending on ‘dirty’ minerals from outside our region.

The entry into the German market is also significant from another perspective. We are now present in the biggest financial market in the EU post Brexit. The parallel listing gives easy access to Eurobattery Minerals for potential shareholders from Europe who are interested in investing. And we have seen substantial interest right from the start from both private investors as well as major German institutions. Combined with our current significant investors and our considerable number of shareholders in Sweden and elsewhere, the move to Germany will further strengthen our financial position and increase our already robust owner structure.

Q1 also gave us the final results from last summer’s drilling campaign at our Hautalampi project in eastern Finland. And we are thrilled to have confirmation that there is a significant resource expansion in this nickel, copper and cobalt project. The next step – and a significant prerequisite in developing a battery mineral mine – is to conduct a resource estimate, and work is underway with results due after the summer.

We have also received some interesting initial findings from our research collaboration with AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow that could make an important contribution to the future of more sustainable mining. In this project, we are looking at ways to develop an optimal technology for extracting vanadium and rare earth elements (REE) from minerals in black shales, such as in our project in Fetsjön in Sweden. Initial results suggest that the vanadium can be obtained more sustainably and cost-effectively than what was previously believed, and the researchers are now conducting further tests.

We are committed to being the sustainable foundation of the battery value chain, and taking part in research collaborations is one crucial way of achieving this goal. After all, the one thing we know for certain is that the number of electric vehicles on our roads will increase substantially, which means there is a constant and growing need for battery minerals. If you would like to know the exact figures, please refer to the report we commissioned from research company Aperio during Q1. It will give you a good overview of supply and demand and provide details about market potential in the regions in which Eurobattery Minerals operates.