Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Loop Industries First Quarter 2025 Corporate Update Call. This conference is being recorded today, July 16, 2024, and the press release accompanying this conference call was issued last evening, July 15, 2024. On our call today is Loop Industries Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Solomita; Fady Mansour, Chief Financial Officer; and Kevin O'Dowd, Head of Investor Relations. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kevin to read a disclaimer about forward-looking statements. Kevin, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Before we get started, let me remind you that today's meeting will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the security laws. These forward-looking statements related to among other things, current plans, expectations, events and industry trends that may affect the company's future operating results and financial position. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties and future activities and results may differ materially from these expectations. Additional information concerning these statements and related risks and then uncertainties is contained in the Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statements section of our latest annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC yesterday in yesterday's press release. Copies of these documents are available at sec.gov or from our Investor Relations department. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Daniel Solomita, Chief Executive Officer of Loop Industries. Please go ahead, Daniel.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining our call, quarterly 1 call. It's a short quarter because we had our year-end call about a month ago. So I'll go through the -- go through the most important items, which is our refinancing. At the end of last quarter, we concluded a 2 part agreements with Reed. One is for a joint venture. So we created a joint venture with Reed French private equity firm to be able to work together in developing Loop's technology across Europe. The joint venture is a 50-50 joint venture, whereby in Europe, we see Europe as a higher-cost manufacturing countries. In those type of environments, we prefer to work with a partner to be able to lessen the equity commitment that Loop needs to put into this to build these plants and rely more on licensing fees and royalty fees coming on an annual basis from the facilities. So that's why the partnership with Reed makes so much sense for us, less CapEx, less equity commitment for Loop and relying more on our engineering and yearly royalty fees. So that's a key -- that's a key theme throughout the entire company. So whatever we're doing in higher-cost manufacturing countries, we'll definitely be looking for partners to take on a part of the equity check and rely mostly on the licensing side. We will be deploying our capital in lower-cost manufacturing countries such as India, where much more attractive economics, lower CapEx, and we'll get to that at a second step when I speak about the partnership with Ester. The other part of the partnership with Reed is also providing Loop financing to fund our first commercial facility in India in partnership with Ester. So besides this joint venture, we have the financing package. It's taken…

Thank you very much, Daniel. So the first quarter is always a little quiet from a financial reporting perspective. As Daniel alluded to, we just had our year-end call for the 12 months ended February 28, 2024, like 45 days ago. So I will be brief on this call. Obviously, it's been a quiet quarter from a financial reporting perspective, but there's been no shortage of business developments namely the Ester and Reed announcement that came to finality in the first quarter, which we've already disclosed in prior documents. Just looking at our P&L. Our total expenses for the quarter were $5.2 million, that appears to be higher than what I've guided to in the past, but there were 2 specific items which contributed to the increase versus our run rate. One of them is obviously getting Ester and Reed the documents final required significant legal expenses, where we've obviously hired third-party lawyers to let -- to the tune of about $800,000. And we had some project expenses for $600,000. So those are included in our expenses. And then when you back out noncash expenses, which are depreciation expense and stock-based comp, which is also a noncash expenses, we get to the $3.2 million of total cash expenses, which is in line with the $1 million per month that I've been guiding to. So it just -- some quarters are going to be lumpy. Obviously, we had a lot of positive business development and the price of successes you've got to pay some outside advisers for that. So we're happy to pay those expenses to further our strategic agenda. Going through the details of our P&L. Research and development is down by a whopping 50% over the respective first quarter of 2023. Obviously, we had a $1.2 million purchase of…

[Operator Instructions] We currently have no further questions, so I will hand back to Daniel Solomita to conclude.

Thank you very much, everyone, for attending the call.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.