Earnings call transcript: ABTC’s Q4 2025 results show revenue surge, EPS miss

American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) reported its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings, revealing a substantial revenue increase but a significant miss on earnings per share (EPS) forecasts. The company posted an EPS of -$0.11, against an expected $0.08, resulting in a -237.5% surprise. Despite this, the stock saw a 35.8% increase during regular trading hours, closing at $3.3, although it later dipped 6.07% in aftermarket trading. According to InvestingPro data, ABTC’s stock has delivered an impressive 220% return over the past six months, though technical indicators suggest the stock is currently in overbought territory.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue surged to $4.3 million from $300,000 year-over-year.
• EPS missed forecasts significantly, with a -237.5% surprise.
• Stock price increased 35.8% post-earnings, followed by a 6.07% drop in aftermarket trading.
• Inclusion in Russell 2000 and 3000 indices and strategic partnerships bolster market position.
• Guidance projects mixed future performance with negative EPS forecast for FY 2027.

Company Performance

ABTC demonstrated strong revenue growth, with a year-over-year increase from $300,000 to $4.3 million, representing an exceptional growth rate of 1,149% according to InvestingPro data. The company nearly tripled its quarterly revenue compared to the previous quarter, reflecting a robust demand for its innovative battery recycling and production technologies. This performance aligns with the rapidly expanding battery industry, where ABTC is making significant strides in both recycling and new mineral extraction. While the company’s market capitalization stands at $389.55 million, InvestingPro analysis indicates the stock is trading near its Fair Value, with 12+ additional ProTips available for subscribers.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $4.3 million, a substantial increase from $300,000 year-over-year.
• Earnings per share: -$0.11, compared to a forecast of $0.08.
• Cash balance increased to over $25 million as of September 15.

Earnings vs. Forecast

ABTC’s EPS of -$0.11 fell short of the $0.08 forecast, marking a significant miss with a -237.5% surprise. This deviation from expectations suggests potential operational challenges or unforeseen costs that impacted profitability.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, ABTC’s stock surged 35.8% to $3.3, though it later fell 6.07% in aftermarket trading. This volatility indicates mixed investor sentiment, likely driven by the contrast between strong revenue growth and the EPS miss. The stock’s movement is significant, given its 52-week range of $0.73 to $4.11.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, ABTC plans to construct a second battery recycling plant with a $144 million DOE grant and advance a 30,000-ton lithium hydroxide facility. Despite positive operational updates, the guidance includes a negative EPS forecast for FY 2027, suggesting potential challenges in achieving profitability. InvestingPro analysis reveals the company maintains a healthy current ratio of 2.16 and operates with moderate debt levels, providing financial flexibility for its expansion plans. For detailed insights into ABTC’s growth potential and comprehensive analysis, investors can access the full Pro Research Report, available exclusively to InvestingPro subscribers.

Executive Commentary

CEO Ryan Meltzer emphasized the importance of recycling in the battery industry, stating, "If the total amount of batteries in the field was stable in a mature industry, recycling could provide the vast majority of minerals needed." He also highlighted the company’s efforts in creating a closed-loop supply chain within North America.

Risks and Challenges

• Continued profitability challenges, as evidenced by the EPS miss.
• Potential supply chain disruptions impacting production.
• The need to balance rapid expansion with financial sustainability.
• Market saturation risks in the battery industry.

Q&A

The earnings call did not include a Q&A session, leaving some analyst questions about future profitability and strategic initiatives unanswered.

Full transcript - American Battery Metals Corp USD (ABAT) Q4 2025:

Tiffany Mooring, Director of Communications and Marketing, American Battery Technology Company: Good afternoon. I’m Tiffany Mooring, and I’m the Director of Communications and Marketing at the American Battery Technology Company. I would like to welcome everyone to our fiscal fourth year quarter and full year twenty twenty five earnings call. On behalf of the entire team at American Battery Technology Company, I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to join our call today. Following this presentation, a recording of this call, along with our press release and our quarterly SEC filing, will be available on our website at investors.americanbatterytechnology.com.

This presentation includes forward looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of The U. S. Private Securities Litigation Act 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding the factors that may cause actual results to differ can be found in our annual filings.

On today’s call, our CEO and CTO, Ryan Meltzer, will provide remarks regarding our two lines of business, which include our lithium ion battery recycling business and our primary claystone to lithium hydroxide business. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Ryan.

Ryan Meltzer, CEO and CTO, American Battery Technology Company: Great. Thank you, Tessame. As many of you know, we work in the critical mineral manufacturing business area. We are working to try to make the closed loop for the battery metal supply chain within North America. Right now, this is much more of a linear economy.

And as we work through this system, we’re working with many of the partners in the other areas of the closed loop infrastructure. In order to fully implement this closed loop system, we found that multiple different aspects were needed to be added. The first is the implementation and commercialization of a lithium ion battery recycling system. In the system, we take back waste material from other stages of the industry as well as end of life material, recycle those materials through a multiphase process, and then make battery grade materials that are sold right back into that closed loop. If the total amount of batteries in the field was stable in a mature industry, recycling could provide the vast majority of minerals needed.

But with how quickly the battery industry is growing, in addition to closing the loop, we also need to be filling that loop the first time. So in addition to our battery recycling business unit, we have also acquired large amounts of mineral resources in The US and developed our own first of kind technologies of how to extract those individual battery elements, how to purify and upgrade them and how to also make battery grade products from our primary battery metals manufacturing business in addition to our battery recycling business. As for our quarterly earnings that we are reviewing today, we’re proud to show that compared to the previous quarter, we had a very large increase in revenue for the company. This is largely due to increased operations at our first battery recycling plant just outside of Reno. So we nearly tripled revenue this quarter compared to the quarter ending March.

And at the same time, we had a much smaller relative increase in our cash cost of goods sold, really showing that as we have economies of scale and larger operation, the first recycling plants, our revenues are growing at a much faster pace than our costs. So we look forward to continuing to ramp this plant and continuing to improve that gross margin. Separate from our quarterly financials, we also did just finish our fiscal year. And when you tie those past four quarters together, we also see a very substantial increase in revenue of about $4,300,000 for this past year compared to about $300,000 the year beforehand. And similarly, it’s a much larger relative increase in revenue than the increase in the cash cost of goods sold, allowing for an increase in margin as we continue to scale that plant and improve operations.

Beyond just the recycling plant, total operational costs for the business actually decreased this past year over the year beforehand, As we again experienced economies of scale and had cost control measures to improve operations. We were excited to have been selected to be listed on the Russell two thousand and three thousand indices back in June. This is really a sign that we have a different scale of investor as we move forward. And because of that operations, we have seen a very substantial increase in trading volume since being added to that index and a significant increase in percentage ownership from institutional investors. With that market activity, we’ve increased our cash balance to just over $25,000,000 as of September 15 this year.

As mentioned, our battery recycling operations, the main metric over the past year is that we have increased the throughput of our plant about 70% in a single quarter for the quarter ending June versus ending March. This really has been about a large amount of incremental improvements as we continue to add headcount, add shift count, have increased amounts of material and improve our operations there. We’ve been working with several different projects at this recycling facility for the past few years. One of them is a grant contract we won from the U. S.

Advanced Battery Consortium from a project that actually started back in the 2021. We worked on that project for many years and we formally closed out that project a few months ago, really able to show that we had achieved each of the requirements of that grant contracts as we worked with the partners there with the U. S. Department of Energy, General Motors, Ford and Celantis to really demonstrate that this recycling plant could take in full scale batteries, recover those materials, purify the battery metals up to battery grade, work with our partner, BASF to actually take those recycled metals, manufacture large amounts of high energy density active cathode material specifically from those recycled metals and make large amounts over 100 full scale automotive battery cells from our recycled metals and actually test those cells at both our partner and Department of Energy facilities against control group cells. And really being able to show that there was very little difference about the performance of the battery cells when using our recycled metals versus using metals from the market.

This is a very important step for going through large scale qualifications of many different customers. We were excited to receive financial support from the USABC and to now have this project closed out as we move forward with these different opportunities. Because of our increased operations and successes working with our partners on these early scale projects, last September, we were notified that we had been selected for a competitive grant from the U. S. Department of Energy for $144,000,000 to now construct a second battery recycling plant.

We were selected back in September 2024 and through an accelerated process, we were contracted in December 2024 and actually started this project back on 01/01/2025. So we’re excited to be taking all the lessons learned in our first recycling plant, working through our next generation designs and moving forward with a second battery recycling facility. While we work with a lot of automotive companies, the past half year, we’ve really started to work even more with stationary grid battery systems. So these large battery energy storage systems usually work to support grid operations. They tend to be extremely large in the gigawatt hour scale and have a different type of low profile than we see within automotive batteries.

But because we make battery grade minerals, they work equally well, whether they’re sold to companies to make batteries for vehicles or batteries for stationary storage. And similarly, we receive both types of material into our recycling facility near Reno. A few months ago, were fortunate enough to have been invited to the groundbreaking ceremony of one of the fastest supercomputers in the world at Argonne National Lab near Chicago. And the supercomputer is backed up by large amounts of grid scale batteries. So it was great being able to join the ceremony.

There were very few private companies actually in attendance. It was mostly different government organizations. And to really highlight how The US manufacturing of critical minerals supports data centers, supports supercomputers and supports different types of artificial intelligence and machine learning operations. We were asked to present at this event actually to several dignitaries including The US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright back in July. So really being able to explain to him directly at the Argonne National Laboratory, why both battery recycling and domestic lithium manufacturing are important to support data center supercomputer and artificial intelligence operations as we move forward.

Because of our large amount of interactions with the DOE, it was great to be able to connect with this new administration and really show them the benefits of the projects we’re working on together. When we look at our primary place on the lithium hydroxide technologies, over the past several years, we have been building out this multi ton per day integrated pilot facility near Reno. While we finished bench scale operations a few years ago, it’s very important to take those bench scale results and actually build demonstration scale integrated systems that operate in real time on a continuous fashion. This is a very big de risking step as we look to be building out our commercial scale lithium hydroxide refinery. Similarly, we were fortunate enough to have the buildup of this demonstration facility supported by a Department of Energy grant.

This project also started in the 2021. And as of a few months ago, we’ve also officially closed out this project and completed all requirements showing how we went through the design, construction, commissioning, and then sustained operations in a multi week run, showing how we feed our specific Tonopah Flats claystone material into this plant, go through each of the operating steps and make a battery grade lithium hydroxide product out the back end. So we’ve made many different scales of samples to be sent out to different strategic customers. And to be able to go through different types of analytical evaluations, tests, manufacturing different types of active cathode material. And again, making full size battery cells with the lithium specifically extracted from our Tonopah Flats project.

Because of the operations at our bench scale and these demonstration scale facility, we have continued to go forward with the design of our commercial scale 30,000 ton lithium hydroxide per year facility, working with our selected EPC firm, Black and Veatch. Continuing to send these materials to customers for definition of different types of long term off take agreements as we progress that project. Building this demonstration facility has been great advancing the technology and de risking the construction, but a parallel effort is advancing our permitting progress for the local, state and federal levels. We were excited a few months ago to have been selected by the White House, the National Energy Dominance Council and the Fast forty one Permitting Council to have our Tonopah Flats Lithium project be selected as a transparency priority project, which is really meant to streamline all federal permitting operations for high priority critical mineral projects within The U. S.

Being selected for this was important to really get alignment amongst many of the different federal agencies. And this transparency priority project was really set up by the executive order that president Trump issued back on March 20. But on top of becoming a transparency priority project, there was actually an escalation and we were approved to become a full covered project just back in August. So now having our Tonopah Flats lithium project be a covered project, we have a project coordinator actually assigned to this effort, holding meetings amongst all different federal agencies and really driving visibility and accountability as we move forward. So just in the past few weeks, we’ve seen very significant acceleration of these permitting efforts as we work to bring these different federal groups together.

And this Fast forty one Committee works amongst all different federal agencies, including we’ve mentioned that back in the spring, we did receive a letter of interest from the US Export Import Bank to provide a $900,000,000 low interest loan to support this Tonopah Flat Lithium project. So as a federal agency, this is also being facilitated through the permitting council and through our selection as a covered project. We mentioned we were added to the Russell Index back at the June. Since being added, we have a different set of investors really owning and trading our stocks. We’ve seen a very significant increase in our trading volume per day since the June being selected, and also a big increase in amount of institutional ownership.

This has really provided many different types of discussions we’ve had with strategic investors since then, and has really facilitated different types of funding opportunities as we move forward. As a summary of our financial results for this fiscal year versus the previous one, as mentioned, very substantial increase in revenue, really by increasing the operations and the ramp rates of our first battery recycling plant. Our cost of goods sold has increased, but at a lower percentage than our revenue was increased. And as we continue to scale that plant, we expect to see continued improvements in our margin. We continue to receive funds from our government grants we have contracted, including ones that have started partway through the fiscal year.

So we do expect to see that increase as we ramp up those newer projects. And throughout the year, we were able to take in substantial funds through our financing activities and increase in funds used for our operating activities as we continue to ramp up our first recycling plant and a substantial decrease in our cash used for investing activities. As mentioned, our cash balance has increased substantially both at the end of the fiscal year and as of mid September, as we continue to receive funds really facilitated by that list and the Russell 2,000 Index and the exercising of several of our outstanding warrants. We still have a large balance on our contracted government grants as these are multi year projects that we continue to receive funds on as we move forward. And we have received some competitive tax credits last spring that will still be monetized as we move forward and continue to build out our first recycling plants near Reno and our second recycling plant in the Southeast U.

S. That’s the summary of our financial results for the past fiscal year. We will be holding our annual shareholder meeting in November, at which time we will go through more details about the operations of our past year and some more of our multi year operations as we look more forward looking. So at this time, I’d like to thank everybody for joining this earnings call as we went through the details of both our fiscal fourth quarter and our full fiscal year. And again, we look forward to seeing everybody in mid November at our full Annual Shareholder

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