Retail investors interested in buying a piece of St. Louis’s soon-to-be newest public company will be able to do just that on July 7.
On that day, Evolution Metals, a potentially multi-billion-dollar company headquartered in the city’s Hill neighborhood, will go live on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The company’s leadership will be in New York City to ring the opening bell.
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“That will be the first day someone who is sitting in a BarcaLounger on a front porch in Tappahannock, Virginia, watching the river go by, that they can pick up the phone to call their broker and say, ‘You know, this is what I want to buy,’” says Al Watkins, the attorney who quarterbacked the deal by which Evolution Metals will go public. “I am one who is known for abuse of hyperbole, but there’s no exaggeration here. This is a monstrously big deal.”
That deal involved a special purpose acquisition company, Welsbach Technology Metals Acquisition Corp., acquiring Missouri-based Critical Mineral Recovery as well as four South Korean companies. The new entity is going public under the new name Evolution Metals. “We [still] have a lot of work to do,” says Watkins. “That’s just part and parcel with any transactional undertaking involving the acquisition by one company of five different companies at one time.” The plan is to issue 600 million shares of stock, at $10 apiece, valuing the company at $6 billion.
He adds: “There is, you know, a lot of paperwork.”
The company, which Watkins describes as “an above-the-ground mining operation,” will process old lithium-ion batteries into lithium, cobalt, and nickel, which are critical minerals key to electric vehicles. Evolution will trade under the ticker symbol $EMAT.
Yesterday morning, Evolution became Securities and Exchange Commission effective, which is essentially a green light from the regulatory agency and clears the way for the public listing in July.
While special purpose acquisition companies enjoyed a boom during the pandemic, companies that went public via a SPAC process have more recently faced headwinds—with 23andMe, Bird Scooters and WeWork being a few of the higher-profile flops. Inc. reports that 40 former SPACs have filed for bankruptcy since 2022, a recent trend that Evolution is hoping to buck.
Last October, a catastrophic fire broke out at the Critical Mineral Recovery’s lithium-ion battery processing facility in Fredericktown. Watkins says that the search for a site to rebuild is “being actively worked on,” and suggests multiple parcels may need to be purchased for the new facility.
Both in that matter and in Evolution’s plans to go public, Watkins had positive things to say about the assistance the company has received from Governor Mike Kehoe as well as Congressman Jason Smith, whose district includes Fredericktown—though Watkins is eager to point out that no tax incentives are involved in either the Fredericktown plant or the company’s headquarters.
He adds that he and Critical Mineral Recovery CEO Rob Feldman were both intent that Evolution’s corporate headquarters be in the city of St. Louis. “It’s very important to me personally. It’s very important to the CEO of CMR. This is his home, right?” Watkins says. C-suite staff from as far away as South Korea have already relocated here.
However, it did seem to be something of a sore spot with the attorney that no one from city leadership reached out after SLM first reported in February on their plans to headquarter here.
“Not a call, not a wave, not a note, not an email,” he says. “I am not a hard guy to find.“
He adds, “We have a new mayor. You never know.”
