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: Today, we will discuss our recent results and our outlook for 2021.
Joining in for the Q&A session are Brad Griffith, our Chief Commercial Officer, as well as George Schuller, our Chief Operations Officer.
Before getting started, I would remind everyone that the remarks we make today represent our view of our financial and operational outlook as of today's date, February 17, 2021.
These expectations involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially.
A discussion of these risks can be found in our SEC filings located online at investors.compassminerals.com.
Our remarks today also include certain non-GAAP financial measures.
I'll start today by giving a top-line overview of our financial and operating results for 2020 before providing some thoughts on the impacts of our enterprisewide optimization efforts, as well as our path forward.
As we look back on the year from a broader perspective, 2020 introduced personal and professional challenges to each and every one of us.
I'm incredibly grateful to the men and women of our company for staying laser-focused on operating safely and responsibly, continuing to bring forward new ideas for improvement and remaining committed to delivering for our customers, communities and our shareholders during this extremely difficult time.
We'll provide more color on those shortly.
We're taking steps internally to further girth our preparedness for such events.
That said, I continue to believe strongly that our team's prudent management and unwavering commitment to our enterprisewide optimization efforts underpinned longer term transformational benefits that we started to see throughout our operations, and fully expect to positively impact our financial results in the future.
One key factor we simply cannot control, but rather we must manage through, is the weather.
We estimate the weak winter weather season in both the first quarter and fourth quarter of last year negatively impacted our full-year 2020 operating income by approximately $40 million to $45 million.
Other external factors adversely affecting our business during the calendar year included the wildfires in California and drought conditions in South America, both of which impacted demand timing from our Plant Nutrition customers and multiple hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, which required multiple brief but unplanned shutdowns at our Cote Blanche mines.
In addition, our South American Plant Nutrition business experienced stronger year-over-year agriculture sales volumes and, in local currency, achieved a 16% increase in fourth quarter operating earnings versus 2019.
However, the Brazilian currency weakened by approximately 33% during the year compared to the U.S. dollar, which ultimately hurt our bottom-line in terms of U.S. results.
As we look at full year 2020 on a consolidated basis, net income for the year decreased by approximately 5% and adjusted EBITDA decreased by approximately 8% when compared to 2019 results.
On the positive side, we continue to generate strong positive cash flow from operations totaling over $175 million for the full year.
We also took an aggressive approach to managing our capital plan and I'm pleased we were able to come in 13% below the midpoint of our original guidance for a total spend of roughly $85 million for the year.
Our free cash flow for the full year was just over $90 million and we returned at $99 million to shareholders through our dividend program, which reflects our confidence in the company's ability to deliver cash flow through varying economic and weather-related cycles.
As a result, we formally relaunched what is designed to be a targeted and expedient process for the sale of both of our Chemical and Plant Nutrition businesses in South America.
We intend to use the proceeds from these transactions to continue reducing our debt, further enhance our liquidity and continue our focus on meeting our customer demand for our essential products.
Given the sensitive nature of these matters, we will not be fielding any questions on this topic, but we'll provide more information as it becomes appropriate to do so.
With our multi-year runway of ample liquidity, no material debt maturities due for over three years, capital plan flexibility and improving execution capabilities, our near-term priority is to deploy any incremental free cash flow after dividends, whether from organic generation or strategic transactions, toward continuing our deleveraging process and paying down our debt to further enhance our equity valuation.
Now moving to our Salt segment.
Full-year adjusted EBITDA margins increased approximately 3 percentage points to 29% despite our adjusted EBITDA being lower by 2%.
We also saw continued improved production performance at our flagship Goderich mine.
On a full year basis, production tons out of Goderich have increased 17% from 2019 results and production costs are down 16%.
In addition, during the fourth quarter of 2020, the team was able to achieve its highest production month since its conversion to continuous mining and haulage.
These steadily improving production metrics highlight a sentiment you've heard me communicate before that we've not yet reached our full long-term potential at this operating assets.
I am confident our progress will continue as we build out our new mine plan, helping to ultimately secure Goderich's position as the leading salt mine in North America from both a cost and volume perspective.
When coupled with enhancements that are designed to provide long-term flexibility and optionality to our logistics and procurement teams, we set a course to capture significant value during stronger seasonal demand by meeting the needs of current and new customers alike.
Our Cote Blanche mine also demonstrated strong year-over-year operating performance, while managing through four significant hurricane events in 2020.
These storms resulted in approximately 11 lost production days during the year.
The preparations made by our team to protect the site and ensure the safety of our people allowed us to resume production efficiently and effectively after each event.
This culture of resilience that permeated throughout the organization in 2020 is perhaps best reflected in the operational agility of our Cote Blanche team who were still able to achieve their full year-end production targets, despite having navigated a record hurricane year in the Gulf.
In addition, given the recent announcement of a nearby competitor closing its facility, we are carefully analyzing opportunities to capture value for our portfolio by enhancing relationships with our existing customers, while also potentially putting us in a position to cultivate some new relationships.
I'd also like to give a particular call out to our logistics team, which has worked diligently on reshaping our network of partners to maximize efficiencies across our operations, while maintaining strong service levels for our customers.
As I mentioned previously, our Plant Nutrition business, particularly in North America, faced some unforeseen circumstances of its own this past year, including extreme wildfires and drought.
The resulting conditions from those events delayed the harvest of key crops, particularly tree nuts along with the fall fertilizer application season.
Our team worked to ensure we were well-positioned to capture those sales volumes in the fourth quarter, ultimately, delivering strong year-over-year revenue growth of 16%.
Given this strength, we were able to partially offset some of the unexpected higher costs that we experienced during the year.
Our Potassium+ product continues to be the SOP market share leader in North America and recent pricing dynamics have reinforced our confidence that near term underlying demand remains robust.
We anticipate upcoming harvest in certain key markets to be very strong, which further translates into nutrient deficiencies for the soil and the need for our products.
When coupled with much more positive global backdrop for all fertilizers and the recent surge in pricing, we anticipate steady demand from our North American customers in 2021.
I would also like to point out that our micronutrients products line was able to achieve a full-year gross sales record in 2020 since their acquisition.
Our South American Plant Nutrition business continued to achieve measured growth in local currency, with sales revenue up 18% for the full year 2020.
Our customers on the agricultural side have experienced very attractive fundamentals and we anticipate these sales trends to continue in 2021.
But as has been a recurring theme, the weaker currency has hurt our results in U.S. dollar terms.
Against the backdrop of the challenges we've all faced in 2020, I'm even more impressed with the efforts of our employees to engage and execute on our enterprisewide optimization effort.
As a reminder, this effort is focused on five broad value streams, namely; operations, commercial, logistics, procurement and working capital.
I referenced previously, in my comments, some of the early benefits coming through our Salt segment results from certain of these value streams.
In prior quarters, we highlighted our harvest haul project at our Ogden facility in Utah, the salt mines compaction project at Goderich and the progress we're making with employee engagement through our organizational health focus.
I would now like to highlight some optimization benefits we're experiencing in procurement.
In 2020, we completely transformed that department, moving from a decentralized and transactional function to a centralized high-standard team focused on operations excellence through global strategic sourcing mindset and a performance-driven culture.
We implemented a category management function, a team concept built to bring together procurement with all relevant areas within that segment.
Each team in a category is a cross-functional and cross-regional aligned to business needs and extensive engagement with stakeholders.
During its initial year in this new structure, the department executed over 65 initiatives, driving as much as 10% annualized savings in a number of specific procurement categories such as contractor services, packaging raw materials and equipment spare parts.
In addition to cost savings, this new procurement strategy is expected to reduce the risk of supply chain disruption and provide a market advantage when our customers require a more sustainable and responsible supply chain.
This high degree of focus from our team is expected to produce long lasting benefits and help expand our margins.
As we worked to both navigate external challenges and drive internal improvements over the course of 2020, there was no area of focus given more attention than our responsibility to keep our employees safe and healthy.
As many of you have heard me communicate before, our number one priority as a management team is ensuring our employees go home at the end of their shift as healthy as they arrived.
Our focus on this Zero Harm culture has been critical in our ability to navigate the current pandemic.
For the year, we achieved another step change decline in our Total Case Incident Rate or TCIR.
In addition to achieving a multi-year low for our 12 months rolling TCIR average in 2020, we ended the year with an average of 1.53 and I'm happy to share that our TCIR in December was among the lowest of any month in the history of the company, coming in at 1.23.
As a leading indicator for operational success, this continuous improvement in our primary safety metric highlights our commitment to conducting business in a responsible manner that protects the health, safety and security of all of our employees, contractors and the communities in which we operate.
The COVID-19 pandemic remains an ongoing challenge and we continue to take actions to mitigate its impacts.
In addition, we faced another slow start to the winter season in our served markets.
Yet our talented workforce, advantaged assets and efficient procurement and logistics operations continue to perform with excellence through this adversity, supporting our global customers with essential products proving our resilience as an organization.
While our overall financial performance in 2020 was below our expectations, we were aggressive in our efforts to mitigate the various external headwinds we faced.
We now estimate a combined negative impact to our original operating earnings forecast of roughly $67 million due specifically to weak winter weather in both the first and fourth quarters, a Brazilian currency that progressively weakened throughout the year and COVID-19 impacts, including both cost preventative measures at our sites and reduced demand within certain higher-margin end markets.
While these factors were out of our control, be assured, we are acutely focused on identifying steps we can take to help insulate our businesses from the severity of similar impacts in the future.
Again, what has allowed us to effectively navigate through the past year is the underlying resilience of the markets in which we serve with our essential products, the strength of our advantaged assets and the dedication of our employees to drive improvements through the optimization effort.
We've also maintained close contact with our customers and remained on course with our previously communicated strategic priorities.
I continue to be excited about the future prospects of our company and confident of long-term value our team, at Compass Minerals, can deliver.
First, a quick review of our consolidated results.
Our fourth quarter 2020 consolidated sales revenue and operating income, both declined year-over-year as late winter weather coupled with lower highway deicing average gross sales price pressured Salt results.
Lower year-over-year SOP pricing, along with elevated SOP production costs more than offset Plant Nutrition North America sales volumes improvements.
For the full year, sales revenue and operating income were also lower as we dealt with over $100 million in sales revenue impact and more than $40 million of operating earnings and tax due to weak winter weather.
We also had elevated SOP costs and lower SOP pricing, which were partially offset by stronger year-over-year SOP sales volumes.
Looking now at our Salt segment results.
Total sales in the quarter were $228.5 million, down from $310.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, largely due to lower weather-driven demand for deicing products and the effects of customer carryover inventories.
Although the snow event activity was similar to last year's December quarter, this year's winter had been slow to develop with most of the fourth quarter snow events occurring at the tail end of December.
This winter weather impact, combined with high customer inventory levels, resulted in lower deicing salt sales to highway, commercial and big-box retailers.
Total Salt segment sales volumes dropped to 23% compared to fourth quarter of 2019.
Within our Salt segment, highway deicing experienced a 25% sales volume decline and consumer and industrial sales volumes dropped 16% year-over-year.
Looking at our sales by end-use, rather than by business unit, most of the volume weakness was attributable to lower deicing demand.
In other words, combined sales of most of our non-deicing products, such as water conditioning, chemical processing and food and agriculture were not impacted by the weather and were generally flat with the prior year fourth quarter, even after taking into account some lingering slack in demand due primarily to COVID-19 challenges.
Highway deicing prices were down 11% versus the prior year quarter at $59.20 per ton.
However, consumer and industrial average selling prices increased 1% to $169.30 per ton as a broad-based price increases across all non-deicing product groups was mostly offset by lower sales mix of our higher priced deicing products.
Operating earnings for the Salt segment totaled $50.2 million for the fourth quarter versus $80.5 million last year, while EBITDA for the Salt segment totaled $67.6 million compared to $96.5 million in the prior year quarter.
Despite the challenging environment I just described, we are pleased to report minimal EBITDA margin compression in our Salt segment this quarter as our enterprisewide optimization efforts helped lower our unit cash costs and tightened our spending control on SG&A, which helped offset lower average selling prices.
When stepping back and looking at our fourth quarter Salt costs, we ended up at $41 per ton, which is flat with the 2019 fourth quarter.
However, on a mix-adjusted basis, our unit cost is about $1.25 per ton lower than prior year.
So we absorbed a 25% decline in year-over-year fourth quarter Salt sales volume and we were still able to decrease our mix adjusted Salt unit costs versus the prior year.
Improved production and logistics costs in our North American highway business for the full year 2020 helped to offset a 12.4% lower salt revenue and resulted in adjusted operating income declining just 6% and an adjusted EBITDA decrease of only 2% year-over-year.
In addition to improved Goderich mine production, we continued to diligently and aggressively implement initiatives across the organization design to ultimately drive revenue higher and costs lower.
These efforts contributed to the expansion of the Salt segment adjusted operating margin to nearly 21% from about 19% last year and, at the same timem driving adjusted EBITDA margin to 29.3% compared to 26.1% for the full year 2019.
While these initiatives are expected to drive sustainable improvements for all segments over time, we continue to be pleased to see these early benefits in our Salt results.
It's also worth noting that these benefits have been muted a bit, given the difficult weather backdrop and the real value creation potential will be more obvious under better business conditions.
Turning to our Plant Nutrition North America segment.
Fourth quarter total sales revenue increased 15.9% from the prior year to $88.7 million.
We achieved this by delivering a 23% increase in sales volumes, partially offset by a 6% lower average selling prices.
As we have discussed in recent quarters, the extreme wildfire conditions in the Western U.S. delayed the start of the fall application season and, as we expected, shifted the timing of SOP sales volumes for the 2020 fourth quarter.
While we always price to drive the appropriate value proposition for our customers, we continue to maintain our market share for our premium Potassium+ SOP product.
Plant Nutrition North America operating earnings and EBITDA for the fourth quarter were pressured by short-term cost increases associated with feedstock inconsistency, unplanned downtime and related maintenance costs at our SOP facility in Utah, which weighed significantly on the quarterly and full-year results.
In turn, our Plant Nutrition North America EBITDA margin compressed to about 20% in the quarter compared to nearly 34% in the prior year, with operating margins declining about 10 percentage points quarter-over-quarter.
Strong full year sales volumes, partially offset by lower sales prices, helped us deliver a 16.2% improvement in 2020 full year Plant Nutrition North America revenue versus 2019.
These revenue results, coupled with the short-term fourth quarter cost pressure and the previously disclosed $7.4 million inventory adjustment in the third quarter, resulted in a $10.4 million decline in operating income and a $14.6 million decrease in full-year EBITDA.
Excluding the inventory adjustment, full-year operating margin would have been 8.1% compared to 10.9% in 2019, while full-year EBITDA margin would have been 25% versus 32.5% last year.
Because the inventory adjustment is non-recurring and our SOP cost pressure is short term in nature, we expect a sharp rebound in the Plant Nutrition North America EBITDA and operating margin percentages in 2021.
Our Plant Nutrition South America segment delivered a 24% year-over-year increase in fourth quarter 2020 revenue and an 18% increase for the full year, both in local currency.
This was driven by increases in average selling prices for both agriculture and chemical solutions products, along with stronger year-over-year agro sales volume.
Fourth quarter agro revenue was up about 29% versus 2019 and up nearly 23% for the full year.
Even more impressive was our fast growing Ag B2C business unit where strong sales volumes and price drove a 37% increase in both our 2020 fourth quarter and full year revenue when compared to prior year, again, all in local currency.
Strong demand began in early 2020 for many of our Specialty Plant Nutrition products due to the very attractive economics for Brazilian farmers and that trend continued as we finished 2020 and moved into the beginning of 2021.
In local currency, our Plant Nutrition South America fourth quarter and full year 2020 operating earnings increased 16% and 35%, respectively, while EBITDA increased in lockstep by 15% and 25%, as well.
While we're obviously disappointed with our fourth quarter and full year 2020 results, it's important to again point out that the combination of weak winter weather, Brazilian currency devaluation and COVID-19 impacts in both mitigation costs and end market deterioration negatively affected our 2020 full-year operating income by nearly $70 million.
Despite this impact, we were able to hold year-over-year adjusted EBITDA margins flat at 21% and generate more than $175 million cash flow from operations and $90 million of free cash flow.
I would now like to shift gears and spend a few minutes on our 2021 outlook.
As a reminder, when we work through our annual planning process, we utilize an underlying assumption of average winter weather and how that would translate through our upcoming bid season.
There are multiple scenarios we run, but at the end of the day, we focus on what we can control and then manage through the consequences of what the weather and other opportunities or challenges bring by adjusting our plan dynamically throughout the year.
We are extremely disciplined in our approach to capital spending and closely monitor the supply and demand dynamics of both the salt market, particularly in North America, and the specialty fertilizer market where our high-value Potassium+ SOP product has a leading market share in North America.
Should those factors dictate a supply response, we feel strongly that we can quickly adjust to make rational economic decisions and still be ready to meet our customers' needs.
We're optimistic about 2021 as we look for normalized sales volumes in our Salt business and the expectation of even better agriculture fundamentals in both North and South America.
The initial benefits of our optimization efforts have started to register throughout our various segments and while we're not providing specific guidance on the expected benefits, we continue to believe that the long-term commercial and operational advantages from these efforts will be meaningful to our bottom-line.
For the full year 2021, we are expecting consolidated adjusted EBITDA of between $330 million and $360 million, which is a year-over-year increase of about 20%.
While the midpoint of our guidance is at the lower end of last year's full-year guidance, it's important to note that weak winter weather impacts, like those in 2020, are never immediately reset as prior bid season pricing almost always has a significant influence on the following years' average selling prices.
Our annual operating plan anticipates approximately $100 million in 2021 capital spending, as well as free cash flow at levels similar to 2020.
We are forecasting a significant increase in Salt volumes as winter weather normalizes in both North America and the U.K., and we're expecting high-single-digit sales volume growth for our Plant Nutrition South America segment.
Within Plant Nutrition North America, we expect to see volumes down slightly compared to 2020 as we continue to monitor the growing season and balance our customer needs, given the recent ramp-up in pricing.
Importantly, we will continue working to offset any 2021 headwinds through a dual focus on value creation and cost containment through our enterprisewide optimization effort.
While our net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio ended 2020 at about 4.3 times, it is expected to end 2021 below 4 times.
We expect to also continue to make progress improving our balance sheet and maintaining a very strong liquidity position with very little in near-term debt maturities.
In summary, while 2020 has been a year marked by challenges, not only for our company, but globally, our business model worked and our people withstood the test.
We exercised flexibility, managed external factors beyond our control, executed our plan and worked on our long-term strategy, while continuing to return cash to shareholders.
As we enter the new year, we remain focused on keeping our people safe, optimizing our operations, containing costs and delivering our essential products to satisfied customers around the world.
With that, I will ask the operator to begin the Q&A session.

user
assuming average winter weather activity, expects modest salt segment revenue growth for h1 2021 versus 2020.

assistant