Origin Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:ORGN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 4 of 4

Ashish Gupta: Okay. Thanks. We’ve received several questions about Origin 2, including whether there’s any updates on financing of the plant. Can you help us a little bit more there?

John Bissell: Yes. I think we ended up covering that in a lot of the analyst questions, and so I won’t go for all the details of it. But I’d say there’s one more generic comment to put on top of it. It’s that we still see the same existing sources of financing that we’ve discussed historically. So things like the private activity bonds, et cetera, we still see those as play a really meaningful role. And then additionally, we’re seeing the sort of partners and customers leaning in to participate as well. So I think we’re seeing more options for financing fewer, and we really haven’t taken anything off the table yet that was already there.

Ashish Gupta: Appreciate it, John. Wrapping up here on caps and closures. Can you just give us a better sense of the opportunity? Any color you can provide would be great.

John Bissell : Yes, sure. So we’re really excited about this application. We really see it as an application that comes out of the materials and application development that we do for our new materials. So part of developing new materials is you’ve got to go have the expertise to work with customers downstream to help them understand the way that your materials could improve what they’re doing. And so we have a technical staff that’s really quite excellent in order to interface with those customers on those different applications. And one of the things that emerged from that that is this caps business. So we’re really excited about it. Some of the key points to that caps business are caps, while just one application in this area or actually, it’s a huge market.

It’s a $60-plus billion market. So it’s by no means trivial. And really, the key driver here is that PET caps seem like, frankly, kind of obvious. Why wouldn’t you make the cap on a bottle out of the same material we can make the bottle out of, especially since the bottle material is so ubiquitously recycled, whereas the cap material dose theoretically recyclable is really much less frequently actually recycled. And so this sort of mono material package seems like it’s so obvious, but actually there are some really key technical insights that were required to make that work, and that’s why people haven’t done it in the past. It’s been something of a holy grail that people have talked about for a long time, but nobody has done it successfully.

So we’re really excited about that. As I said, it’s — it enables really a single material of mono material for the whole beverage package and that’s a big deal, really improves the recyclability of the package overall. You actually get some benefits over using PET as a cap beyond recyclability as well. It’s got better barrier than the polyethylene, polyolefin caps do. So we’re really excited about it. We see customers really excited about it. And so it’s very much an adjacent sort of innovation to our core business and our core technology — but it’s one that has a tremendous amount of customer pull and demand, and we’re excited about it also because it’s something that moves in quicker capital cycles than you see chemical plants moving — and so we think that lines up really nicely with the way we’re thinking about the world right now.

Ashish Gupta: Very exciting. Really appreciate all the extra color and I want to thank the investors for those thoughtful questions. That’s going to conclude the Q&A portion of the call. I’ll now turn it back to Rich for closing remarks.

Rich Riley: Thanks, Ashish, and thank you to everyone who joined today. We’re looking ahead with confidence energized by the team’s recent achievements and the incredible opportunities in front of us. Our success with Origin 1 was a historic milestone that fundamentally improved our technology scalability. And we’re more excited than ever to deploy our platform and begin to serve our over $1 trillion addressable market, while helping to solve some of the biggest environmental and performance challenges of our times. We’re very focused on managing our cash, including near-term revenue and we look forward to our next update with you in February. Thanks, again.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for attending.

Follow Origen Financial Inc (OTCMKTS:ORGN)

Page 4 of 4