Q1. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of your professional background, particularly focusing on your expertise in the industry?

Senior operations and strategy executive with 25+ years of leadership across four highly engineered industries—Electric Vehicles, Grid-Scale Energy & Battery Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Consumer Electronics, Power Tools. Trusted repeatedly to build, scale, and stabilize complex manufacturing and supply-chain platforms where technology risk, capital intensity, regulatory scrutiny, and execution discipline converge. 
Career defined by turning advanced engineering into bankable, investable operations—from pilot lines to giga-scale manufacturing—while delivering sustained improvements in cost, yield, OEE, quality, and reliability. Operated at the intersection of engineering depth, capital allocation, and governance, with a track record of aligning boards, investors, EPCs, regulators, and operating teams behind large, irreversible decisions.

Q2. What structural shift is fundamentally changing how capital is deployed in battery and EV manufacturing today, and why is it decisive now rather than two years ago?

A shift from the era of capacity to a cost-based strategy has emerged. Today, things are different because all subsidies are conditional on localization, the capital market punishes FCF, overcapacity in China exposes weak business models, and OEMs are not willing to prepay for battery equipment supply.

Q3. Where does digitization or AI materially move yield, OEE, or failure-rate outcomes, and where does it become an expensive dashboard?

At electrode coating (cathode specifically) with upto 28% scrap reduction and 3% yield improvement, and during formation and aging with a dynamic formation profile - formation aging cost runs 20-23% of production cost, MES overlays are no-no and do not yield any benefits. 

Q4. Where do compliance and traceability requirements materially reshape sourcing strategies, particularly when shifting supplier bases across regions?

Recycling content, moving to synthetic graphite to evade the China effect, and with the IRA and EU, critical mineral origin verification.

Q5. Which geography appears attractive based on incentives for battery manufacturing but becomes operationally hardest to stabilize at scale?

North America, because of the $35/kWh credit.

Q6. Where in the lithium-ion value chain is fragility most visible today, and how does that vulnerability manifest operationally before it becomes commercial disruption?

PCAM is most geographically concentrated, with a high defect rate, along with Lithium Refining, as it takes a long time to refine.

Q7. If you were an investor looking at companies within the space, what critical question would you pose to their senior management?

Break-even point at 85% yield, 90% OEE without incentives, and a reduction in lithium price.