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 have slides for our conference call.
You can find them in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.
A great deal has changed over the past year with the COVID-19 pandemic.
For us, our top priority is and has been to protect the health and safety of our employees and our customers while ensuring our business continuity to meet our customers' requirements.
All of our plants around the world are operating, and we are continuing to meet our customer needs despite the increasingly challenging conditions caused by COVID as well as the current year global supply chain pressures that have impacted raw material availability.
I'm very proud of what the Quaker Houghton team has done to continue to service our customers as well as continue with our integration.
We are very pleased with our strong first quarter results.
Overall, our sales were sequentially up 11% compared to the fourth quarter, with all regions and segments showing revenue growth.
This was primarily driven by higher volumes as our business continues to come back from the negative impact that COVID-19 had on our end markets.
The sequential increase was broad-based, with all segments and regions growing between 9% and 12%.
I also think it is interesting to look at our revenue changes from the first quarter of 2020 which is just when COVID-19 was starting to impact us.
A year ago, we primarily saw the COVID impact in China, and you can see this impact in our current quarter, Asia Pacific sales growth of 31%.
EMEA and our global specialty businesses also showed strong growth and were up 14% and 12%, respectively, from a year ago.
The Americas were relatively flat in sales from a year ago if you exclude the two recent small acquisitions that we made.
Overall, we anticipate a sequential sales growth to play out in the first quarter.
But we were surprised by how strong our sales volumes ended up being as we simply just did not expect to see this level of growth so soon in 2021.
Some of this growth may be due to our customers replenishing their products in the supply chain and some pre-buying of our products, but it is really difficult to precisely say this was a major impact.
I also want to point out that our ability to gain new piece of business and take market share also contributed to our performance as our analysis shows that we had total organic sales growth due to net share gains of approximately 3% in the first quarter of this year versus the first quarter of '20.
So we continue to feel good about our ability to deliver on our historical performance of consistently growing 2% to 4% above the market due to share gains.
And looking forward, we continue to feel good about these levels and share gains, given the opportunities we have recently won or are actively working on.
While higher-than-expected sales were a positive for us in the quarter, a clear negative was the continued increase in our raw material costs.
While we knew raw materials were increasing the last time we talked, the increases have continued longer and at a higher level than we expected.
Overall, our cost of raw materials have increased over 20% since the end of last year.
There is tremendous stress on the supply chain of our raw materials and logistics.
Further, the availability of raw materials has impacted us at times.
But I'm proud to say that we've navigated through this so far and have ensured that all our customer businesses continued to operate.
The increase in raw material costs did put downward pressure on our gross margins in the first quarter, and this downward pressure will continue into the second quarter, just given the sheer magnitude and duration of additional increases and the lag effect we experienced between the time the raw material cost increase and the time we have to fully implement price increases to offset that.
So overall, we are pleased with the quarter, given the environment we're operating in and saw a strong sequential improvement in our sales and adjusted EBITDA from the fourth quarter.
Synergy achievement also was a factor in our results as we achieved $18 million in the current quarter compared to $10 million last year.
Relative to liquidity, we did increase our net debt in the quarter due to the small acquisition in the steel market and an increase in our working capital due to the strong sales growth.
However, our leverage ratio of net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA continued to improve from 3.2 times at the end of the year to 3.1 times to the end of the first quarter.
And we currently expect to be below three times at the end of the second quarter.
As we look forward to the second quarter, we expect short-term headwinds from higher raw material costs and some lower volume impacts due to some of the factors I mentioned earlier as well as the automotive market continuing to have semiconductor shortages.
I do see the second quarter as our lowest quarter of the year, both in terms of gross margin and profitability.
However, we do expect our margins to sequentially improve in the third and fourth quarters and return to where we expected them to be by the end of the year.
As I think about our full year, we are continuing with our previous guidance, which is really a floor or the low end of our expected EBITDA.
However, I am more optimistic on our year than I was a few months ago.
While we may end up the year in the same place, we're slightly better based on our strong first quarter, the shape of our year's expected profitability trends has changed.
Essentially, we're seeing higher demand for the year but greater margin pressures in the near term, which is expected to be largely offset by this higher demand.
However, the margin pressures are expected to be short term in nature, once our price increases are fully implemented.
So we currently expect to exit the year at better-than-expected demand for our products and our margins largely returning to our expected levels.
So even though we expect to largely end up in a similar or slightly better place as our previous expectations, I feel better about this scenario than the already positive one I had envisioned a few months ago.
We will have a step change in our profitability, essentially complete our integration, cost synergies, continue to grow above the market by taking share and reach our targeted net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA leverage of 2.5.
I am so proud of how our team has performed in servicing our customers, meeting their needs and successfully continuing with our integration execution, which is both critical and difficult for us given the current conditions we are facing this year.
People are everything in our business, by far, our most valuable asset, and ensuring their safety and well-being is and will continue to be a top priority for us.
So I can't help but to reemphasize my pride for our Quaker Houghton team and what we have and will be able to accomplish for our customers and investors, both now and going forward.
I'll now hand it over to Shane so that he can review some of the key financials for you for the quarter.
GAAP measures and non-GAAP measures provided in our call charts on Pages 10 to 21, for reference.
Looking at our strong start to the year.
The quarter really rounded out, as Mike previously summarized.
Our performance was driven by record quarterly net sales, partially offset by lower-than-expected gross margin due to higher raw material costs on significant supply chain pressures.
As I begin to discuss our quarterly performance, I'll point you to Slides six and seven in our call charts, which provide a further look into our financials.
Our record net sales of $429.8 million increased 14% from the prior year, which was primarily driven by higher volumes, including 3% from acquisitions and increases due to foreign exchange of approximately 3%.
This top line performance is truly a global effort, with each segment contributing nice growth year-over-year.
APAC's net sales increase of 31% was the largest increase than the prior year, but this was mainly due to the initial impacts of COVID hitting China in the first quarter of last year versus the rest of the segments being impacted in the second quarter of last year.
EMEA also showed strong net sales growth of 14% due to a solid bounce back from COVID-19.
Americas and GSB had net sales growth of 4% and 12%, largely due to higher volumes, including the Coral acquisition made in December of last year, which helped offset some of the market pressures we are facing, such as the semiconductor shortage.
Net sales were a positive story to the quarter.
But similar to all of our peers and most other manufacturing companies in the world right now, we are facing significant challenges with rising input costs due to the global supply chain disruption.
Gross margins were 36.3% for the quarter compared to 35.4% in the prior year.
But excluding onetime COGS increases related to acquisitions, these would have been 36.6% and 35.5%.
Notably, this 1% improvement year-over-year is really the benefit of strong execution of integration synergies, offsetting higher raw material costs that we incurred in the quarter.
SG&A was up $5.6 million compared to the prior year quarter, as we had additional costs associated with our recent acquisition of Coral and higher SG&A due to the impact of foreign exchange.
These were partially offset by additional savings from integration cost synergies as well as travel and other savings due to the COVID-19 situation.
So the net performance resulted in strong adjusted EBITDA growth in the first quarter.
As you can see in chart eight, our quarterly adjusted EBITDA of $77.1 million grew 28% from the prior year, which drove an 8% increase in our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA to $239 million.
These results were really driven by higher operating earnings in each of the company's segments year-over-year as the continued recovery of the company's global end markets, the benefit of recent acquisitions and higher integration cost synergies contributed to a record adjusted EBITDA performance.
From a tax perspective, we had an effective tax rate of 24.2% in the quarter compared to a benefit of 31.1% in the prior year.
Excluding various onetime items in each period, our tax rate would have been reasonably consistent at 25% for the current quarter compared to 22% last year.
To note, we do expect both our second quarter and full year ETRs will be in the range of 24.5% to 26.5%.
So net -- our net GAAP earnings per share of $2.11 grew 53% compared to the prior year as our strong operating earnings and adjusted EBITDA, coupled with $3 million of lower interest expense due to lower borrowing rates were partially offset by a slightly higher tax expense.
As we look to the company's liquidity, summarized on Chart nine, our net debt of $749.6 million increased $32 million in the quarter, which was primarily driven by a $25 million acquisition of a tin-plating business for the steel end market, $7.1 million of dividends paid and $12.6 million of operating cash outflow.
Related to the quarter's outflow of operating cash, the company's major cash requirement is working capital.
In periods such as this where our sales and volumes increase dramatically, there is an outflow of cash needed to sustain our day-to-day operating requirements, which will come back to us as our demand trends normalize.
Despite this increase in net debt, the company was able to improve its reported leverage ratio to 3.1 times as of the first quarter compared to 3.2 at the end of last year.
Overall, I want to emphasize we are committed to prudent allocation of our capital.
This includes prioritizing debt reduction while continuing to pay dividends and invest in acquisitions that provide growth opportunities, which make strategic sense, all while remaining committed to reducing our leverage below our targeted 2.5 times level by the end of this year.
So to summarize, Quaker Houghton had a strong quarter that was above our expectations due to continued end market recovery, a pickup in demand and good market share gains.
As we look to the second quarter and the remainder of the year, we expect our strong Q1 performance and improved volume demand will be a bit offset as raw material cost increases take full effect and we see more volume impacts from market variability, including the semiconductor shortage.
Though, as Mike mentioned, we still maintain our previous floor guidance that we will see a greater than 20% increase in adjusted EBITDA in 2021 as compared to the $222 million we achieved in the prior year.
That concludes my remarks.

user
q1 sales rose 14 percent to $429.8 million.

assistant