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: We're only at March 4th and this year is already looking like a completely different story, compared to 2020.
Late in the fourth quarter, we started to see demands trend in a positive direction, and that's really evidenced in our Q4 results that exceeded expectations.
And 2021 has really kept on roll and as we've seen, the U.S. farmers' sentiment and farmers' capital investment index levels spiked to all time highs already.
The $25 billion of government payments late in 2020 certainly helped move these indexes in a favorable manner combined with of course strong commodity prices with corn hovering around $550 and soybeans up above $14.
Another significant positive indicator for 2021 is the low levels of inventory that exists in most channels, especially in the dealer networks.
Therefore our market uptick at the retail level should get that additional boost from inventory replenishment.
It's definitely great to see ag moving in a positive direction in 2021 and it seems that the market upturn shared [Phonetic] some pretty good legs on it as well.
Looking back a year ago, I don't think there is many people who thought that coronavirus would turn into a global pandemic that impacted really every country, in every facet of society.
I do want to take a second and reiterate our Titan team did an excellent job working hard to continually safely operating our businesses during the pandemic and our 2020 performance positively reflects those efforts of our team around the world.
It also demonstrates the strength and resiliency of our people and our products.
During times like that, those items really show, and again, it's our people and our products that make Titan unique in our industries.
However, I think it's important to go a step further with those comments to give credit for how well Titan remained focused on our imperative that we really had at the beginning of the year to improve our financial position.
It was clear, we didn't enter the pandemic in a position that allowed us much room for error.
Our 2020 results clearly illustrate that Titan has strengthened our financial position and we were able to make those improvements while dealing with the onslaught of the challenges from the pandemic.
I think the success of that is seen in our 2023 bonds, which have been trading around par at recent months.
It also gives us an opportunity to explore the potential of a refinancing.
Now let's take a step back and look at the fourth quarter.
We finished the year with a significant turnaround, especially in ag as demand for many of our customers continued to strengthen as the quarter progressed.
During the quarter, our adjusted gross margin of 11.8% was the strongest margin achieved over the previous ten quarters.
Also, our adjusted EBITDA over $17 million was our highest since the first quarter of 2019.
A lot of these gains and financial performance, our continuing efforts and focus to improve our financial position, resulted in a strengthening cash position along with net debt.
We delivered our sixth consecutive quarter with positive operating and free cash flow and reached levels of cash and net debt that haven't been achieved since the end of 2017.
Now as we look deeper into the business going forward, the positive trends in ag that we saw in late 2020 especially in North and South America have only increased during the first couple of months of 2021.
In North America, the growth in small ag, in our small ag customer base continues at a rapid pace as we've seen our customers increase orders to address the need to restock inventory on top of their already expected growth this year.
Large ag is historically a strength of Titans, as our plants and tooling are well equipped to handle the volume and complexity of SKUs related to that business.
The size are forming [Phonetic] that suggest large ag is beginning to move in a favorable direction as well.
The challenge for us, which is similar to many manufacturers these days is that coming off the lower production levels of the pandemic, the surge in demand has created a high degree of volatility for our customer base and for Titan as well.
We are dealing with the constraints in labor as we are hiring rapidly, we're dealing with raw material issues pretty much all over the map, and we're dealing with logistical challenges that pertain to shipping containers and trucking that have sprung up as of late.
Titan has, and I will make this clear, Titan has a long history of being flexible to adjust to market volatility.
And we have the robust production capabilities, that can meet the needs of our customers.
In order to do that, we are hiring aggressively at all of our ag and wheel and tire plants in the U.S., along with South America, and we will continue to do that throughout this year.
However, there is a training curve to onboarding people into our operations.
Therefore, we need to hire systematically during the ramp-up process to mitigate our training liability as our positions do require a vigorous training program.
The flexibility and scalability in Titan's production base is a core strength, and we do expect to earn a good return on providing this to our customers during the times that we are in and currently entering deeper into.
Anyone who has seen our plants, especially our real -- our tooling for our real business would understand what I'm saying.
We are currently in discussions with major OEMs on long-term supply agreements that would be a win-win for both sides in today's changing world.
So now turning over to South America, we've seen the market really jump to life in Q4 and then really proceed to keep on running into 2021.
Since we acquired Titan Brazil in 2010, we've consistently invested in large radio ag and OTR capacity that at the time of the acquisition was really only a small part of the portfolio.
We see the rewards from those investments through the years as we've significantly grown our output in both those areas along with expanding our market share.
The reality is that this rapid increase in orders coming off the back of the pandemic means that we do have to allocate our production across our customer base.
We will continue to invest in capacity and we are investing in capacity, I should say in 2021, and we'll do that through both hiring, but as capital investments as well as we do believe the favorable volume trends that we are seeing will continue.
Now looking over at earthmoving and construction.
The full year 2020 results show a drop in sales, driven by the pandemic, but I do want to state that we finished the year with fourth quarter sales really moving in a positive direction, and we continue to see those trends in the first quarter as sales in our undercarriage business have exceeded budget by over double-digits.
This is really good to see early in 2021 as our thoughts were more for growth that come later in the second half of the year when the pandemic effects on this sector start to fade away and you start to see infrastructure and development spending kick into gear.
So these early gains in construction, mining for undercarriage really only point to an even stronger year as it progresses.
Now coming back to Ag, over the past five to six years, we've been in a softer Ag market that has put pressure on our pricing and margins.
Now, when I say pricing, I'm looking at it from three angles.
First, recovering your raw material cost; second, recovering other production related costs; and then third, pricing leverage.
We do have some raw material agreements with key OEMs that automatically modify pricing based upon raw materials.
However, I don't think I have found anyone that can recall a time when we've see steel go from $445 a ton to $1,200 in such a short duration and then also be in short supply as well.
So the challenge for us is that our raw material agreements don't always protect us in these rapidly changing moments, and we will work to ensure we get raw material cost recovery throughout 2021.
Our agreements in North and South America -- excuse me, in North America and Europe typically only pertain to raw material fluctuations.
So the next piece of our pricing strategy focuses on the recovery of other production costs related to over time shipping energy, etc.
Again, we believe this market provides us an opportunity to tack [Phonetic] pricing beyond just raw materials to address areas of production that are also facing cost increases.
The third piece of pricing that we look at is related to leverage as demand improves.
We certainly feel that Titan produces valuable products and with strong production capabilities that are quite unique in our space, and we believe as the market continues to progressively improve, we should see an opportunity to approach pricing with more leverage than we've seen in recent years.
Now looking at the market again, the market is really moving in a positive direction.
There is no doubt about that, but it has shifted quickly in such a short time period that it is difficult to provide a reasonable full year 2021 forecast for sales and EBITDA like we've done in prior years.
Based on our strong finish in the fourth quarter and what we're seeing already in 2021, we are targeting good growth in sales, EBITDA, along with margin expansion.
We intend, and we will remain diligently focused on protecting our balance sheet and realize that cash is going to be needed to fund inventory.
As noted in the pricing discussion that I referenced, the market landscape gives us opportunity to do things differently than we have in prior years, and we intend to set production schedules using payment terms as a criteria, therefore we'll be looking for customers to adjust their payment terms.
And most importantly, support our customers throughout the pandemic and now beyond.
These efforts have enabled Titan to be in a really good position for 2021 as the markets are moving in a very positive direction.
I appreciate all of those who are participating in the call and those that are following Titan's progress.
Well, my whole plans are changing in flash.
While we're still very much in an uncertain times and while the pandemic and other global volatility and economic uncertainty continues, Titan's world is changing rapidly.
Our response to the crisis last year was critical as we now head into the recovery of that [Indecipherable].
I'll focus most of my discussion today on the fourth quarter performance, but what is important and what we accomplished in the quarter and for the year, puts us in a stronger position as we manage 2021 and beyond.
First, our cash position was [Phonetic] $117 million for the year, up $51 million from last year-end and we accomplished this through strong operating cash flow in Q4 and for the full year, along with our efforts to secure liquidity through non-core asset sales and related transaction.
Operating cash flow for the fourth quarter was $10 million, which pushed full-year operating cash flow to $57 million.
As anticipated, we completed further transactions in non-core -- of non-core assets of $16 million in Q4 and for the full year, it's up $53 million.
Second, related to the cash improvement, our net debt position at the end of the year was $347 million, down from $366 million at the end of last quarter and $433 million at the end of last year.
As we stated in the release, we haven't seen this level since 2017.
Third, we took another important step forward last week with the extension of our domestic ABL facility.
This facility now has [Indecipherable] for two more years and are now closer to maturity on our overall debt structure.
So there are several other takeaways from our P&L performance for the fourth quarter that I want to pay attention to.
And normally our fourth quarter is traditionally or seasonally a low quarter, but this year was not normal.
We had quarter-over-quarter and sequential sales growth in both Ag and EMC.
Second, we also continued our strong adjusted gross margin trend with 11.8% for the quarter, best margin performance, we've seen in ten quarters.
Before I head into this normal review of sales, gross profit and SG&A, I want to get into some of the non-operating items that occurred in the fourth quarter.
During Q4, we recorded impairments related to two sets [Phonetic] of long-term asset categories for a portion of our smaller operations.
First, we broke down certain equipment to fair value related to our entire recycling operations in Canada and this resulted in a charge of $11.2 million.
Secondly, we wrote off intangible assets related to our customer relationships from our acquisition of the Australian operation many years ago and it resulted in a charge of $6 million.
Both of these resulted from recent trends and market conditions, triggering a review of our fair value of our long-term assets, specifically into these businesses.
In October, we sold our facility in Brownsville, Texas garnering net proceeds of approximately $11 million and a gain on sale of $4.9 million.
And finally, in November we received further recovery related to an insurance claim from the fire in our Canadian Tire recycling operation from 2017 of $3.6 million.
From here forward, I will review the results of the fourth quarter and for the full year excluding these items, and the other unusual and non-operational transaction that occurred during the year.
Net sales for the fourth quarter were up over 8% from Q4 2019 representing a nice turnaround in a year where we saw an overall decrease in sales of 13%.
As the fourth quarter progressed, the stronger operations became -- particularly as our OE customers began increasing production and demand for our product.
What is even more impressive is on a constant currency basis, total sales was up nearly 15% from Q4 last year or $45 million.
The negative currency impact was approximately $19 million or 6% with most of the impact coming in Latin America and Russia, as we saw throughout 2020.
Our overall sales volume on a consolidated basis was up over 20% from last year and price and mix in the fourth quarter was down about 6%, mostly reflecting lower raw material costs and related material pricing mechanisms with our OE customers.
Consolidated net sales in the agriculture segment improved by 15% in the fourth quarter, with growth coming from all parts of the world.
On a constant currency basis, agricultural sales were -- would have been up 25% in Q4, led by North America, Latin America and Europe.
For the full year, the agricultural segment experienced growth on a constant currency basis of 4% on the healthy turnaround in the second half of the year.
These trends are accelerating as we progress into 2021.
The EMC segment saw a nice turnaround in the quarter, in what was a soft year for the market.
During Q4, the EMC segment showed growth of 4.5% on a reported basis and on a constant currency basis, it grew by over 6%.
The largest driver of the rebound came from ITM, our undercarriage business as construction markets in Asia and parts of Europe began to wake up from the effects of the pandemic.
To say that we're seeing a recovery in the global construction markets may be premature, but our order decks for the businesses are stronger than they were three, six and even nine months ago across the global business.
Our overall North American sales were up over 6% relative to last year, all of this growth coming from agriculture, while the EMC segment was down slightly reflecting a slower recovery.
Our aftermarket tire sales in North America in Q4 were up relative to the prior year and for the full year was slightly better than full year 2019 levels.
Our Latin America operations have seen a sharp turn upward in the market in recent months.
Our aftermarket business was resilient throughout the pandemic but our [Indecipherable] sales rebounded sharply in Q4.
Reported sales for Latin America in Q4 were up almost 16% while on a constant currency basis, sales would have increased by over 41%.
Our gross margin performance in the segment continue to be important driver overall, I should say for our financial improvement and our stability in 2020.
Adjusted gross profit for the fourth quarter was $38 million versus $18 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, representing a 110% improvement.
Our adjusted gross profit margin in the fourth quarter was 11.8% versus only 6% last year.
And this performance was the best of any quarters since Q2 2018.
We continue to manage our factory overhead costs aggressively during the fourth quarter as sales have trended more strongly, we have necessarily calibrated our labor force to meet rising demand.
While it has been more challenging given certain marketplace constraints and the surge of demand that we've seen in recent months.
We have plans in place to grow our production levels up to meet with what we see from our customer forecast and our current order deck.
It is important to note that in recent months, raw materials have risen sharply across all market sectors from the more favorable cost that we saw in 2020, and as Paul indicated earlier, we're putting through corresponding price increases to customers to reflect these increases along with other rising costs including labor and shipping costs.
We are responding to the significant forces in the market that are moving very rapidly and we're working carefully to calibrate all our actions.
Now, let's go through segment performance.
Our agricultural segment net sales were up $21.5 million or 15.3% from Q4 2019.
Currency translation was significant in the fourth quarter and affected sales by 9.4%, particularly in Latin America and to a lesser extent the Russia.
Volume in this segment was up 32% while we had a decline in pricing of 7.6%, relating primarily to lower raw material costs.
Our aftermarket sales have continued to be strong, while the big driver was the turnaround in OE sales during the Q4, particularly late in the period.
Overall Ag sales in North America were up 16%, our Russia ag sales were up somewhat [Phonetic] from a year ago, and on a constant currency basis.
And our European Ag sales were up almost 30% from Q4 2019.
Reported Ag sales in Latin America were up 22% from last year, and while on a constant currency basis they were up 47%.
Once again, the rate [Indecipherable] distorts the real contribution of our Latin American business, again the Ag markets have shown resilience in throughout 2020 through the challenging times earlier in the year and now we're in totally different volume with solid tailwinds across the markets.
The agricultural segment's adjusted gross profit for the fourth quarter was $21 million, up from $9.2 million years ago -- a year ago, representing a 127% increase.
The gross profit margins in Q4 were 13% for Ag, which was a significant improvement from the margin we saw in Q4 2019 of 6.6%.
This was the strongest margin quarter since Q3 of 2018 for our Ag segment.
We discussed it last quarter as well, but we have seen improvements in plant efficiencies from our strong internal actions along with raw material cost and [Indecipherable] improvement, a key component of this improvement came from our North America wheel operations as we continue to improve performance after significant headwinds that existed in 2019 surrounding raw material and inventory management.
The trends have been increasingly stronger throughout 2020 as the new management team's actions and operational strategy began to take hold.
Similar to Q3 2020 performance, each of our geographic businesses experienced expansion of gross profit and margins in the fourth quarter compared to the prior year.
Our Earthmoving and Construction segment rebounded in the fourth quarter after seeing the most impact earlier in the year from the economic downturns and the construction market volatility.
Overall, the EMC segment experienced an increase in net sales in Q4 of $6 million or 4.5% from last year, and on currency -- constant currency basis, net sales was an increase by 6.3% versus a year ago.
Which meant that currency was only a minor impact of 1.8% for the quarter.
Volume was up in the EMC segment by a 11% while the impact of price and mix was negative at 4.6%.
North America experienced a small decline in Q4, reflecting a slower market recovery than other parts of the world.
ITM's undercarriage business saw an increase in EMC sales by almost 12% from the fourth quarter of last year.
Now, on a constant currency basis, the increase was almost 14%.
Again, global construction markets are only beginning to wake up, and while the order backs are steadily improving, we believe that there will be a stronger recovery in the latter part of 2021 and beyond.
Adjusted gross profit within the EMC segment for the fourth quarter was $14 million representing an improvement of $6.9 million or 109% from Q4 2019.
The entirety of the TTRC impairment of $11.2 million was recorded in this segment in the fourth quarter.
The adjusted gross profit margin in the EMC segment was 10.4% versus 5.2% of last year.
And this was the best quarterly performance in over a year.
Again, the largest driver of the increased profitability came on the increase in sales in the ITM undercarriage business, while there were also increases seen in Australia and Latin America.
Consumer segments, Q4 sales were down 7.7% from last year.
The negative impact from currency translation was 13%.
So volume increased by 8% and price and mix was down by almost 3%.
The rebound in the business in the fourth quarter, primarily related to the Latin America utility truck segment as the markets began to fall out after the pandemic effects.
This recent rebound is expected to continue in 2021.
The segments gross profit for the fourth quarter was $3.2 million, a healthy improvement from Q4 2019 and gross margins were 11.5%, which was an improvement from 7.6% in the fourth quarter of last year, reflecting improved production efficiencies from the increased volume.
Selling, General and Administrative and R&D expenses for the fourth quarter were $39.3 million, but this includes $6 million in impairment charges related to the Australian customer relationships I described earlier.
Excluding this, we spent about $33 million in the quarter, which was a bit higher than our Q3 level.
Costs related to investments improving our supply chain and logistics processes totaled approximately $1.3 million in the quarter.
We will have approximately the same amount of investment in Q1 '21 and we anticipate that this will drive savings in future quarters on a sustainable basis, well in excess of these investments.
For the full year, excluding the unusual charges in 2020 of $11 million, our SG&A and R&D costs were $129 million coming in below the low end of our range of expectation about $130 million to $135 million.
Foreign currency revaluation was less of a factor on the results in Q4 and a $1.3 million loss in fourth -- but for the full year, the total negative impact from foreign exchange revaluation totaled $11 million compared to a gain of $4 million in 2019.
We recorded tax expenses in the quarter of $4.6 million on a pre-tax loss of $14.9 million during the fourth quarter.
For the full year, tax expense was $6.9 million on a pre-tax loss of $58 million.
There were additional tax expenses recorded in Q4 related to the growth in income from our foreign operations during the latter part of the year.
Now let's talk of Q4 and fiscal 2020 cash flow.
I realize that I'm beating the cash flow drum a lot lately but it was one of the most paramount actions to take at Titan during 2020 and we achieved the targets we set out at the beginning and perhaps a bit more.
Again cash improved another $18.5 million in Q4 versus Q3 and for the year it improved by almost $51 million.
This has put us much in a more stabilized position to manage the business, particularly as the markets recover as we've only begun to see in Q4.
Cash levels were the strongest since early 2018 coming from stronger operating cash flow and cash generated from non-core operations and related transaction as I stated earlier.
We generated approximately $57 million in operating cash flow for the full year of 2020, a strong improvement over 2019, and again this came from our focus on working capital management.
Obviously, it was important to manage our inventories in a year of declining sales.
With the Company back to strong operating cash flow and those non-core transactions, we generated $89 million of free cash flow for 2020.
I continue to have confidence in our ability to manage cash levels from focus on working capital in 2021, and that will come from improved, continued improvements in our inventory management across the business.
We have strong focus with our operating teams to manage inventory very closely, and we collectively know that there is a balance between managing lack of long-term visibility of our customer demand -- and our customer demand.
Very healthy increases in sales are expected in 2021, and I do expect inventories to rise, but at a healthy ratio in sales.
We continue to improve our forecasting processes to manage demand within our production systems and expect to get better, even as we progressed through 2021.
Capital expenditures for the fourth quarter were $8.3 million, which was more in line with our quarterly historical levels for capital spending.
As normal, we put through maintenance spending and other investments to foster efficient operations.
For the full year of 2020, we've spent nearly $22 million on capex, again reflecting the needs to control our investments in amid the pandemic.
This compares to $36 million spent in 2019.
We anticipate spending to increase in 2021 to roughly $35 million to $40 million, but we will carefully calibrate these investments to work closely with our cash flow from operations through the year.
I want to stress the fact that while we trimmed our investments, we in no way cut the necessary investments to keep us in front of the innovations to maintain and increase our market leadership.
We are in a strong position with our capital program in -- for 2021 to do this as well.
Our overall debt level at the end of the year was in a stable position relative to the end of the third quarter and while for the year debt declined by $35 million from the end of 2019.
As of the end of the year, there were no borrowings on the domestic ABL credit line because of the continued, because of the strong operating cash flow and results from the non-core asset sales during the first nine months of the year.
Short-term debt at the end of the December was $31 million, which is down over $30 million since last year end.
This decline is primarily due to repayments of our normal maturities of loan arrangements in certain of our foreign operations, primarily Russia and Europe.
A portion of this decline also relates to extending loans on favorable terms in Latin America, in response to liquidity initiatives during the pandemic, earlier in the year.
The vast majority of our current maturities at the end of 2020 relate to foreign credit facilities and term loans, which will likely get rolled over and extended as needed in the coming year.
Just to restate, we took an important step last week to further secure our liquidity in the future with the extension of our domestic ABL facility.
The maturity is now February of 2023.
We have the flexibility to manage our U.S. and our corporate operations after freeing up borrowing capacity of the domestic credit facility and increasing our cash reserves to a certain extent in Q4.
At the end of December, the borrowing capacity, when you take away the letters of credit and adjusting for the borrowing base calculations of AR and inventory was at $51 million on the ABL line.
We also anticipate some letters of credits to expire in the first half of the year which could free up an additional $8 million to $13 million in capacity and we also anticipate additional capacity coming on as our borrowing base grows with the business activity.
2020 was a repositioning year for Titan and it was critical to take the swift and decisive actions in the midst of the pandemic as the world has turned back on our improved and stabilized liquidity position enables us to have the flexibility to manage our business.
We are staying focused on managing our working capital this year as well.
The real job is ahead of us as we managed growth in the business.
We have to keep a relentless focus on what has gotten us here.
Last thing I want to discuss relates to our bonds.
The confidence in our Titan's financial position has improved and our markets have gotten better.
We are now in a stronger position to review our options for refinancing in a more reasonable fashion.
In the days ahead, we'll be actively reviewing the opportunities there in front of us for potential refinancing.
And that concludes my remarks today.

user
in q1 2021, increased prices to offset rising raw material costs.
expect 2021 capital expenditures to be in range from $35 million to $40 million.

assistant