You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: With that, I'll now turn things over to Mike.
The dedication of our team is clearly visible through our excellent safety performance, where we achieved zero recordable injuries during the first quarter, a record for our company.
In the -- from the coronavirus front, we continue to take all necessary measures to ensure the health and safety of our workforce and have implemented policies and procedures that follow the guidelines established by the CDC, OSHA and local health and governmental authorities to protect our workforce and contractors.
Turning to our results.
In the quarter, we were extremely pleased with the operational performance that our team delivered across both our Coke and Logistics segments.
Our coke making operations returned to running at full capacity and our logistics operations saw a significant uptick in volume.
We achieved record-setting first quarter results with adjusted EBITDA of $70.6 million, a 14% improvement over Q1 2020.
We are also pleased with our initial performance in the foundry and export coke markets.
Our products are well received and we are excited about the possibilities in these markets in the future.
We will continue to work on optimizing our production and growing our market participation for these products.
A very encouraging development for our Logistics segment this quarter was the signing of a new take or pay agreement to handle iron ore pellets at CMT. As we discussed in our last call, we successfully tested this product during the fourth quarter of last year, which has resulted in a take or pay agreement and a new product for our logistics business.
Looking at our capital structure and deployment of cash in the first quarter, we reduced debt by $33 million during the quarter and continued to execute on our deleveraging initiative, while also maintaining our $0.06 per share quarterly dividend.
We are well on our way to achieving our long-term gross leverage target of 3 times or lower by the end of this year.
Overall, very strong operational and financial performance in the first quarter provides a solid foundation to build on for the rest of the year.
We now expect results at the top end of our 2021 guidance of $215 million to $230 million.
Turning to Slide 4.
Our first quarter net income attributable to SXC was $0.20 per share, up $0.14 versus the prior-year period, mainly driven by our Logistics segment performance.
Adjusted EBITDA came in at $70.6 million in the first quarter of 2021, up $8.5 million versus the first quarter of 2020.
The increase was primarily due to approximately 1.1 million tons of higher throughput volumes at our Logistics segment.
Turning to the detailed adjusted EBITDA bridge on Slide 5.
First quarter 2021 adjusted EBITDA was higher by $8.5 million or 14% over the prior year period.
Our coke operations performed well this quarter and results were reasonably consistent with the first quarter of 2020.
The majority of the period over period increase in adjusted EBITDA was driven by our Logistics segment and CMT saw a significant increase in coal export volumes driven by strong global demand and supported API2 pricing.
When adding in slightly favorable results in corporate and other, we ended first quarter at $70.6 million of adjusted EBITDA.
Turning to Slide 6 to discuss our Domestic Coke business performance in detail.
First quarter adjusted EBITDA per ton was $61 on 1,038,000 sales ton.
Our Domestic Coke fleet ramps back up to full capacity utilization during the first quarter of 2021 after the volume turned down in the second half of 2020.
Foundry and export sales complemented our long-term take-or-pay contracted sales and are expected to continue to do so for the rest of 2021.
As a reminder, foundry tons do not replace blast furnace tons on a ton per ton basis.
For example, due to differences in the production process, a single ton of foundry coke replaces approximately 2 tons of blast furnace coke leading to lower coke production in sales in the current quarter as compared to the first quarter of 2020.
Our coke plants continued their strong operational performance and disciplined cost management during the quarter, while producing and selling new products.
On the back of strong first quarter '21 -- 2021 performance, we are on track to achieve our full year Domestic Coke adjusted EBITDA per ton and production guidance.
Moving to Slide 7 to discuss our Logistics business.
The Logistics business generated $10.9 million of adjusted EBITDA during the first quarter of 2021 as compared to $3.3 million in the prior year period.
The increase in adjusted EBITDA is primarily due to higher throughput volumes at CMT. Our Logistics business handled 5.3 million tons of throughput volumes during the quarter as compared to 4.2 million tons during the prior-year period.
CMT handled 1.6 million more tons versus the prior-year period, mainly driven by higher coal exports and iron ore.
Increased global demand, strong API2 index pricing and increasing natural gas prices have resulted in higher thermal coal exports from the US.
We expect export volumes to remain strong in the second quarter.
Although our domestic terminals volumes were lower compared to the first quarter of 2020, it was more than offset by lower operating costs resulting from the cost savings initiatives implemented last year.
Given our very strong first quarter 2021 results and looking at the API2 forward curve, we now expect to deliver at the higher end or possibly even exceed our Logistics adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $20 million to $25 million.
We expect to handle approximately 5 million tons of coal at CMT as compared to our original guidance of 4 million to 5 million tons, along with 2.5 million to 3 million tons of other products for which the guidance remains unchanged.
The volume guidance for our domestic coal terminals also remains unchanged at approximately 10.5 million ton.
Turning to Slide 8 and our liquidity position for Q1.
As you can see from the chart, we ended the first quarter with a cash balance of approximately $54 million.
Cash flow from operating activities, generated close to $65 million due to strong operating performance and the timing of cash payments.
We spent $20.1 million on capex during the quarter, which included some carryover payments from last year.
We lowered our debt by $33 million during the quarter, with the majority of the reduction coming in the form of pay downs on our revolving credit facility.
We expect additional deleveraging to continue over the balance of the year as we continue to make good progress managing our balance sheet.
We also paid dividends worth $5.1 million at the rate of $0.06 per share during the quarter.
In total, we ended the quarter with a strong liquidity position of approximately $386 million.
Wrapping up on Slide 9.
As always, safety and operational performance is top of mind for our organization.
We want to continue our exceptional safety performance demonstrated in the first quarter, while focusing on successfully executing against our operating and capital plan in 2021.
As I mentioned earlier, we are pleased with the progress we have made during the first quarter on our foundry and export coke growth initiatives.
These additional sales, enable our coke fleet to run optimally at full capacity and we will continue to focus on further developing our customer base and participation in these markets.
From our Logistics business perspective, the new iron ore take-or-pay agreement is another step in the direction of revitalizing CMT as we continue our efforts to bring new products and customers.
The uptick in coal exports underpinned by the revised take-or-pay contract provides a strong foundation to further build upon at CMT. We again made good progress on our well established and well balanced capital allocation goals, continuing to bring down our debt balance is critical to stabilizing and strengthening our capital structure.
We will continue to evaluate capital needs of the business, our capital structure and the need to reward shareholders on a continuous basis and we'll make capital allocation decisions accordingly.
Finally, as I stated earlier, continued strength in steel and coal export markets combined with our excellent first quarter results leads us to comfortably project full-year results at the high end of our adjusted EBITDA guidance.
We will provide further updates to the guidance as we have more clarity about the second half of the year in our next earnings call.
With that, let's go ahead and open up the call for Q&A.

user
q1 earnings per share $0.20.
well positioned to achieve top end of full year 2021 adjusted ebitda guidance range of $215m to $230m.

assistant