Good afternoon everyone. Betolar published its first nine months business review this morning, and we have the CEO of the company, Vibeke Krohn, in our interview here. Nice to see you, Vibeke, again.

Thank you, good to be here.

Absolutely. So it was approximately three months ago that we discussed last time. It was, if you remember correctly, your day five at the job. Now you have been three months in the CEO role of Betolar, so kicking off with a question of what have you learned during the first three months and kind of what are the key changes you are trying to achieve in the organization going forward.

Thank you, and thank you for having me here. It is really good to have the opportunity. I think that the biggest learning, I guess, in coming in three months ago, is I viewed the challenges and opportunities not to be smaller, but rather larger. I think it is especially on the critical infrastructure protection side. I see a lot of demand across the board on land and also subsea. We have spoken to quite a few customers.

We also sold a couple of projects, and I'll talk to that more, but when I speak to data center owners and operators, and I speak to substation and power grid companies and operators, they are gravely concerned with the current situation in geopolitics. They are concerned with drone threats, they are concerned with sabotage and incidents, and some are intended and some are not. We speak to quite a few subsea operators, so owners of cables or pipelines across Europe, also gravely concerned with incidents that could be a trawling anchor coming close to pipelines or cables. We have seen quite a few in Scandinavia, in Finland, in the Gulf of Finland, and in Europe in general, and I think there is grave concern, with reason. Obviously that provides an opportunity. We provide solutions both for subsea protection, so pipeline and cable protection, told almost like an IaaS platform. We provide solutions on land, which is a combination of hardened precast concrete and multilayer nettings. It could be for critical parts of a data center, it could be for a transformer, and it could be for a port or another installation that needs to be protected against mainly drone threats.

So I think, to your question, what I learned is that the need is there, and the fact that we have solutions makes me very proud. So that is pretty key. We have also our business relating to circular materials, which I think is a key part actually of Betolar and not at all to be forgotten. That's also where we get recurring revenue. We have operations both here in Finland and in India, really interesting growth in the India operation. We see increased growth for the year-to-date, with flat-ish order intake so far to date. But we see a real uptick towards the end there, hopefully.

On the Finnish side, construction in general, not only in Finland but also in the Baltics and Europe, has been a little bit on the lower side obviously. Then concrete demand and Betolar's movement in both the concrete consumption for infrastructure, large infrastructure projects in Finland, and also Finland is truly booming with the data center industry moving in, and obviously that drives also activity in construction. With that, we also see increased demand for not only concrete but also concrete alternatives that are looking a little bit more to lower carbon emissions, still a little bit of a way ahead. If I look back to this first six months, I see that. But going into the future, in the conversations we are in now, I see concrete players really actually being quite interested in the lower carbon opportunities and the concrete mixes that we are offering in the market, so expecting to see considerable growth in that space.

So putting it together, you see the growth potential as higher than you did three months ago.

Yes, for sure, but I think that is also what you do in a company. It also normally takes a little longer than you think, right. It takes more than three months. I think we have managed to put the foundation in place. We are moving away from just talking about technology potential, but really start hammering out what commercial execution looks like. Clock speed is up for sure, but we are turning technology into customer solutions and really creating value. So what I am hoping to see is that we can turn all of these opportunities we talked about into real customer products and revenue going forward. So it's a little bit of a stepping stone in this quarter. If you ask me personally, do I feel that the revenues are a little bit soft? Yes, I do. We want to fix that. They are.

You addressed two of your three business units. You have circular materials where you do this replacement. The polluting traditional cement in concrete, which you addressed, and also the critical infrastructure protection. So there is also a lot of learning curve in the metal extraction, which is far from a simple technology or business, so maybe a couple of words of key learning from there.

Yes indeed, and thank you, thank you, really good reminder. In the metal extraction field, we focus on extraction of mainly two metals, so chromium and titanium. On chromium, we are very well placed. Our initial I guess extensive, but still pilot tests indicated very high recovery rate, up to 99 percent for chromium. We have several good conversations with mining companies on that side to see also that turning into actual customer projects and customer value over time. On the much shorter term, as we spoke about last time, and also a very important part of our current business in metal extraction, is the titanium project that we are developing in Otanmäki with our drilling partner Skullwolf. That project is progressing

well. What we have also covered now in the webcast for this is that we have progressed in this quarter with the scoping study conducted by Afry. We have conducted a reserve or a resource assessment. What is really in the tailings? We know the tailings are there. There are 9.4 million tonnes of tailings, but obviously to turn that into economic value, we need to know exactly what is in there, so that's some of the scoping study and the reserve assessment. So that is a really key part, and where that's ready, confirming our belief that this is a great opportunity for us. We will continue, I am pretty we are also definitely planning and targeting signing the definitive agreement with the drilling partner by end of the year, and some of you that follow us closely know that also Skullwolf have come forward in September with additional funding. So one million that went into Betolar level, and then there is more funding to follow in that project.

So we are quite pleased with how we are progressing on the metal side, but I think it is also fair to say that I wish you better or will. We will start with the Otanmäki tailings case, but we will not stop there. We will definitely look at others, and we are looking at other opportunities. There are a couple of opportunities in the US that are looking very promising, and then there are a couple of other opportunities a little bit closer to shore that we're also considering, but again, in short focus is titanium and chromium.

Sure, a follow-up on that, just to clarify this, right, so Otanmäki is an old mine. There is a lot of minerals from the old mine in the ground and you're trying to extract them with your technology and make value out of that, and for that you need some capital and Skullwolf is kind of the main capital provider in the future in this project. So the follow-up would be in that, maybe you addressed this already, but you see kind of all the time lines going as planned in the initial releases and plans.

Yes, yes, we do. There are no changes to our plans, neither on funding nor actual delivery in the project. I think it is also fair to say that why is there a partner? Betolar is a tech scale-up. We know technology, we come from a strong base in material science, we own the technology, but scaling fast, we need additional capabilities, we need scaling capabilities and we need capital, and working with a partner, a financial partner like Skullwolf and others in their broader ecosystem, plus also operational partners, is very important for us. That's how we scale fast as a tech scale-up.

So last time we talked, you laid out this beautiful three-step framework, which has: is a technology already at industrial scale, does it have a commercial proof that it solves a customer problem, and lastly, does it have a delivery model that scales. So if you look at your three business areas or product segments, which would you rank on the top currently?

Cool, and you are asking recurring revenues. This is a part of that conversation. Now definitely for any scale-up, getting to technology readiness is the first, right, but also getting to industrial usage. What I think is really cool now, three months in, is that the technology we have both on the CIPS side but also on the metal extraction, but let me now focus on the CIPS side, is probably much further along than perhaps what I believed, and perhaps what others believed. We're not there yet with full scale of everything, but we're on a path and we know what to do, which I think is also very important for a scale-up in terms of some of the industrial or perhaps commercial prep points and showing that we move from technology potential to proven customer solutions and customer adaptation. I think on the CIPS side we have had in the last almost year, coming up to being completed this quarter, we have the subsea protection project, which has actually consumed a lot of our time on the CIPS side. Our actual solution, the Geoprime-based fan sheet, has been confirmed not only by the customer, but also by renowned engineering partners and offshore partners. So I think that that's the real proof point for us.

On the on-land solution, and this is where I love to talk a little bit about our partnership with Andritz, because Andritz and us now go together and provide solutions for data centers, for substations, great power grid. What is really cool in that partnership is the complementary way we go to market working with someone like Andritz. They are a very large engineering firm, they are reputable, they have a large customer base already. Obviously for a small start-up that's attractive, but where they find us attractive is we do threat analysis, we do the conceptual designs. We are the subject matter expert on the protection solution side, and then they come in from engineering, manufacturing, delivery and maintenance obviously. But what is also really cool, and we've seen that now in the project under closed customer, but also in the project where we're now, which is a life facility that we are protecting here in Finland, is that we work, we do the first part of the value chain, and then they do the later work as we get to an actual installation, but Betolar will also hold let's call it an orchestrator role through the project, which obviously translates into revenue for us. So over time, and as we now start to grow our customer base, especially on the critical infrastructure side, I see that model working quite nicely, so I think we're seeing some proof points. So back to our discussed framework. I think that that's where the fun starts, right. That's also where I, as CEO now going forward, am going to be judged on. Are we good at adopting customers? Are we good at delivery? Because I think we're ready for that kind of judgment now.

Interesting, so it's kind of you seeing most traction in the critical infrastructure protection side.

Well, I think it is a super interesting one, and with the boom in Finland on the data center and then also beyond in Scandinavia, and the reason for that I think we all understand, driven by data and energy pricing and also safe societies. So that is a new age opportunity for us. Obviously we want a foot in that market. Couple of.

Comments on the quarter that ended. So revenue grew to 17 percent. And you noted strong demand in the report, but the order intake was on the level it was a year ago, so how would you wrap up kind of this financially ended quarter?

I think all in all, or on the overall year, we saw growth. Would I want more? Yes. Am I happy with this quarter? No, but perhaps yes in a way that it's a foundation quarter. It is my first quarter coming in, and coming in to CEO, there is also building the foundation. Getting the stones in place, and then you start running. So that's kind of what I hope that we can look into the future and also see much larger revenues and also by after the period. And I think the keen listener and the keen follower to Betolar has seen that we already announced a couple of interesting customer projects both on the CIPS side, but also there is good movement on the metal side as well, and we talked about the Otanmäki case and there are a couple more interesting ones moving, so I am pretty positive going forward. Not to be too forward-looking or giving outlooks, but I think it is a space that I believe. We have a right to win both on the metal extraction side and particularly within protection and critical protection. I think we not only have a right to win, I think we're on the forefront and we have a huge market ahead of us, so it is more how we manage to do that.

I think we covered most of the significant news. You already had that in your report, but maybe one thing to add would be you announced this memorandum of understanding, which means kind of a pre-contract, with the Geological Research Institute of Finland, and the case is about this pilot furnace where you can test your metal extraction technology, so could you speak a little about the significance of this. agreement.

I can absolutely, and perhaps before I do that, talk a little bit about the furnace. So what is a furnace? The furnace actually is a key piece of equipment for us, and it has been an important investment for Betolar as we build on technology, where we should extract critical metals from tailings and slag. This part. This is small-scale equipment, and this really enables, so when we go out and have a conversation with mining here or elsewhere. Their key question is obviously to figure out what is the composition of my tailings, what is the composition? So what is the composition of the tailings, what is the commercial value of that? This is where we now broaden our scope and we can be more specific in terms of how we address those questions. So it is a piece of equipment that is important for our further development of our technologies, but also that would give an opportunity for revenue within customer projects.

And where does GTK come into play? I think GTK is a really interesting institution here in Finland. They are also well renowned, they are really respected for their capabilities, and the GTK in Outokumpu, it is just amazing. So not only for Finnish mining industries and players, but also worldwide, and the fact we now place our furnace next to that and then have entered into this collaboration both on the research side, but also has obvious commercial value for us and them. I really think it is really cool and it's a faster route for us as well, moving from R&D to customer value. So it's a really important investment for us, and I should mention that would not have been possible without the funding from EU Life and the Minerwa project, and that is super important and really gets us to start. So yeah.

To look in the future, you have Capital Markets Day coming quite soon, so maybe reading between the lines, critical infrastructure has strong demand and you're making investments in metal extraction, so at least those will probably be on the agenda. Any other teasers at this point?

You, we can definitely give a teaser. Our Capital Markets Day will happen here in Helsinki on November 26. We will as management obviously give the full-fledged strategic outlook, what we focus on in the next period. We will really be clear also on the economic value of our focuses and really get where do we grow, so no, I am quite excited about the Capital Markets Day, so if we now, you know, this is a quarter. This has been the foundation, but in the capital markets I really hope and believe that we can show some more proof points we have in stock, but get to.

Looking forward to that. Thank you so much, Vibeke, and see you latest in the CMD.

Pleasure. Thank you, thank you again.