Good day and welcome to the Compass Minerals' fourth quarter earnings conference. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Theresa Womble, Manager of Investor Relations for Compass Minerals. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Camille. Thank you all for joining our call this morning. I am joined today by, Fran Malecha, our CEO; and Rod Underdown, our CFO. Before I turn the call over to them, let me remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on Compass Minerals' expectations as of today's date, February 11, 2014, and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially. These differences could be caused by a number of factors, including those identified in Compass Minerals' most recent Forms 10-K and 10-Q. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made today to reflect future events or developments. You can find reconciliations of any non-GAAP financial information that we discuss today in our earnings release, which is available in the Investor Relations section of our website at compassminerals.com. Now, I'll turn the call over to Fran.

Thank you, Theresa. And thank you all for joining us today to discuss Compass Minerals' fourth quarter performance and outlook for 2014. Today, we're reporting both topline and bottomline improvements in the quarter and for the year versus 2012 results. Our sales increased 45% to $387.4 million for the quarter and 20% to $1.1 billion for the full year. Our adjusted EBITDA increased 68% for the quarter and 31% for the year. Excluding special items, net income for the quarter and the year improve 62% and we generated $239.3 million in cash flow from operations, which was 58% more than the $151.7 million we generated in 2012. Now, there were a number of puts and takes in the quarter and Rod will walk through those later. I'll focus my comments on areas where we're making progress and building momentum as well as the areas where improvements need to be made. As I look back, it's amazing, what a difference a year can make. When we hosted our earnings call last February, many wondered if we would ever have a normal winter again. At that time, we were on the hills of a third consecutive quarter, a significantly milder than average winter weather, and dealing with all the headwinds created in the market and for our operations. But last winter ended with a flurry of snow activity that helped alleviate some of those pressures. We still had deicing salt inventory issues at the customer level, which prevented 2013, 2014 highway deicing bid volumes from fully rebounding to typical levels. Another effect was lower average selling prices for highway deicing salt on those awarded bids, which is impacting the current winter season. Winter weather in the fourth quarter of 2013 was substantially above average. The total number of snow events in our…

Thank you, Fran. And I'll start today with a review of our Salt segment. Fourth quarter salt sales increased 56% from last year's fourth quarter, again as a result of the increase in sales volumes this year. The increase in snow events in our core North American markets compared to the prior year, pushed total salt sales volumes to 4.7 million tons compared to the very mild 2012 fourth quarter, when we sold only 2.8 million tons. Consumers and industrial volumes in the quarter were up 26% from the prior year and most of that increase was related to packaged deicing demand, although non-deicing product sales volumes also grew respectively in the quarter and for the full year. This was the first meaningful year-over-year increase in consumer and industrial sales volumes in a number of quarters, as our retail customers' deicing inventories became depleted by the widespread winter weather, and therefore sales were brisk in December. Our average selling price for consumer and industrial salt was 1% higher year-over-year, is the benefit of stronger sales of consumer deicing products, was muted by a larger percentage of those sales coming from lower-value packaged rock salt deicing blends. Average selling prices for highway deicing products were essentially flat with the prior year result, as the ratio of higher-value highway deicing salt to lower-value rock salt for chemical customers was more favorable this year. This offset the impact of lower highway contract prices from last summer's bid season. Average selling prices for all salt products, which again, combined highway deicing and consumer and industrial products together, declined about 7% as a result of the stronger highway deicing sales this quarter, when compared to last year, when the sales mix was more influence by the higher value consumer and industrial sales. This product mix…

(Operator Instructions) And we'll take our first question from Mark Gulley with BGC Financials.

Congratulations on being able to maintain stable SOP prices. That certainly has not been the case for other crop nutrients. If I refer to Page 7 where you go through some of the agronomic selling points, can you maybe dig a little bit deeper on how you're doing there or maybe express it in terms of the volume growth you might be able to achieve by selling more of your product in North America to the markets that you identify there?

I think the success we've had so far has really have been moving volumes from lower netback regions further away from the plant into the higher regions closer to the plant, which really puts us more into California and the PNW. As a result, if you look at, especially the crops that we have on the page that you've identified, some of those crops are a little more sensitive to MOP than others, but generally we see more opportunity in crops that just can't handle that chloride issue. And I think that's in both of those regions that I talked about. So it's a constant process for us. We continue to increase our customers in those areas, increase penetration, and with people that we have on the ground expect that that will continue to build over time. And I think it bodes well, for as we look at increasing production, whether we're doing that through using KCl or through more pond base, which is our desire, as we go down the road, it will match that demand build overtime and not kind of destroy the pricing structure in the market.

Secondly, do you view even more MOP addition as a substitute for a plant expansion for maybe the foreseeable future?

That's something that we certainly are putting into our equation. The risk in that is that the prices of both of these go up and down and it's hard to predict those prices well into the future. We do know that if we can increase the pond-based production at returns that meet our requirement that's a more stable opportunity for us to meet that market demand and in the future. So we're kind of weigh both of those things, and I think we're at a spot right now where we'll try to continue to produce as much as we can, probably using a little bit more MOP than we'd like. But we're going to do that because we can, and we're going to make good margins and build that market successfully.

We'll take our next question from David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.

Fran, looking at prior year's periods where you've had very strong and depleting winter seasons. How would those next year price negotiations progress?

And as I think, if you look at the history of pricing over the last 10 or 15 years actually, we do post that information to the market over time. We've averaged about 3% to 4% price increase on average, but we've had few years including the last two, where we've had price reductions. The last two years have been 2% and 3%. And we've had years as high as 8% to 10% in terms of price increases, and most of that was driven by certainly weather and strong winters. So we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves here. We do have a couple of months to finish up on our core shipments for the winter. But certainly, as you look back in history, it should bode well for the upcoming bid season.

And, Fran, just on shipping and handling cost in Q1, are you incurring any additional costs due to the severe winter weather, either rivers freezing, et cetera?

If you look at this winter, I mean it's been so strong everywhere. And especially, if you go back to that kind of late December weather was extremely cold, that created freezing in the river system in places that we haven't seen freezing happen, and that's caused some problems getting barges to market at times, and certainly the same way with vessels through the lakes. In fact, now we aren't shipping any vessels now, as we've shut that program down for the balance of the winter, which is normal. But the last bit of that season was certainly more challenging, just because of the cold weather. So I think when you look at the cold temperatures, plus just the fact that winter has been heavy everywhere, we really have had the opportunity to take advantage of moving salt from one spot to the other, and they'll pickup some additional margin. We've just been really concentrating on getting everything to meet our current sales. And we really haven't had a lot of time in between these storms to replenish ahead of the next storm coming, like it would be probably a more traditional pattern, if it was average. So it's a good news story for us. And I expect that we'll have some additional cost, as we ship out the balance of the season.

And we'll take our next question from Ivan Marcuse with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

This is Andrew Dunn on for Ivan. So just to kind of confirm what you're saying on the salt side. Since you've had trouble moving some of those inventories around, do you anticipate that you might have to purchase from third-parties going into the first quarter? Have you had to do a little bit of that already? And also just to make sure what you're saying, as you're not really going to have any opportunity for any spot purchasing in the quarter as well?

I think we are saying that the spot opportunities just aren't going to be there and what we just described kind of the reasons for that. In terms of meeting our customers' needs, we're doing that. I would say that nothing out of the ordinary this year in terms of making that happen. There is always some buying and selling that goes on I think to kind of match things off, but we expect to be able to meet our requirements.

Then on the SOP side. Do you think you can maybe breakdown for us, right now, kind of the benefit you're seeing from this drought situation in California versus the increased demand that's coming from your own kind of increased marketing and sales efforts?

I don't think we can accurately predict that. We aren't hearing a lot about the drought from our customers in terms of the decision they are making here in the short-term. I think we'll be cautious if the drought continues and that will have an impact, could potentially have an impact on the longer-term. But it's difficult right now to really get down to that level. I think, personally I believe that the bulk of what we're seeing is from our efforts that we're making on the marketing side. But it's just difficult to get data to say, let's hear it there. Certainly, it's a challenging time in California for growers and we think we have a product that does add some value, as they go through these kind of conditions. We hope that it's short-lived and we'll continue to kind of manage our way through that along with our customers.

And we'll take our next question from Joel Jackson with BMO Capital Markets.

Just a first question back on SOP. What are the opportunity here, if you look at your Ogden plant and trying to increase the conversion rate? And other opportunities here to actually throw more energy cost at it, and maybe run the feedstock through more cycles of evaporator crystallizer as opposed to have to spend more on the CapEx side to maybe to improve the rates?

I think the changes that we've talked about are more in the process. And without getting into too much detail, I think there will be incremental capital fixes just to continue to debottleneck in order to improve our conversion. I wouldn't think there'll be significant CapEx, but it's probably two or three projects that we either have on the go or would be initiating shortly, and that should give us benefit down the road.

And if you are sort of deferring committing through expanding Ogden, so you can sort of figure out some investments to how to improve. Where do you see sort of the growth in earnings for the company? If your salt's earnings are somewhat range-bound by the year-to-year fluctuations in weather, you've got a bit of growth related in new roads and things like that. But if the SOP business is not going to be expanded, where do you see the opportunities for growth coming or when do you make a decision to maybe repurchase more shares, repurchase shares or up the dividend significantly?

Well, we did up the dividend consistent with past practice, so that continues to be important to us and then part of the value equation for investors. We look at things like margin expansion from our current operations and making them more efficient, especially on the salt side. We'll continue to look for ways to increase higher-value production at places like our plant in Wynyard, in Canada, on the fertilizer side and we'll continue to look for potential acquisitions that would complement or strengthen the fertilizer business overall. And we haven't rolled out the pond expansion either, so we think that we'll continue through the steps that we're making to improve supply and the production which will increase the topline. And then we think that as that's successful, there will still be that expansion opportunity that we would size consistent with where we think this market will grow and continue to kind of maintain the strong margins that exist today. So I think there is opportunities there. If we don't find those opportunities and are looking for ways to invest that money or a return to shareholders, we would certainly consider financial alternatives to do that.

And we'll take our next question from Robert Koort with Goldman Sachs.

This is Angel Castillo on for Bob. Just a quick question, regarding the breakdown of your SOP sales in exports versus domestic, could you give us a sense for where that's today versus historically? Goldman Sachs: This is Angel Castillo on for Bob. Just a quick question, regarding the breakdown of your SOP sales in exports versus domestic, could you give us a sense for where that's today versus historically?

Historically, we've sold about 20% to 25% of our sales internationally. I think we had a year that was upwards of about a-third. This year in 2013, the total was in the low-teens kind of just south of 15%, so a significant move downward.

And if I may, just a follow-up on that. Given this kind of the shift towards the U.S. market, there has been a lot of news around additional low-cost capacity of SOP coming online in the U.S. as soon as 2017. I was wondering how does this affect your strategy and the potential for your further expansion of the Ogden plant and how you view the outlook for SOP prices thinking of that? Goldman Sachs: And if I may, just a follow-up on that. Given this kind of the shift towards the U.S. market, there has been a lot of news around additional low-cost capacity of SOP coming online in the U.S. as soon as 2017. I was wondering how does this affect your strategy and the potential for your further expansion of the Ogden plant and how you view the outlook for SOP prices thinking of that?

There is I guess a handful of projects that are out there in various stages of trying to get to market. Many of those projects are based on converting polyhalite to SOP. That production process from our perspective just hasn't been proven commercially viable. And I guess we'll just have to see if those tons do come to market. Certainly that would be a number of years down the road, if it actually happened. But we continue to watch those. That would require significant capital investment to bring them to market. And certainly if the tons that I talked about would come to market all at one time, it will significantly impact pricing, which I think would certainly impact somebody's thoughts about making those kinds of investments. So that's why I like our approach where we're taking a measured approach. We're continuing to add to bring more tons to the market. We think we can continue to do that as described earlier on the call and continue build on our customer base in the key markets that are driving that kind of pricing that we're seeing. So that's really our perspective. We'll continue to watch those projects, but they just seem me to be, I would say high price tag and just difficult from a process standpoint to be imminent.

And we'll take a follow-up question from Mark Gulley with BGC Financials.

Can you comment a little bit on snow events quarter to date, given the continued harsh weather conditions, but perhaps you have already signaled what that means in terms of your shipments for this quarter. So if the events look pretty solid, could some of that perhaps spill over into the second quarter?

Yes. Mark, this is Rod. Snow fall in January and here in the first little bit of February has been very robust and active. And that's I am talking about now our North American market. In the U.K., it's been mild and so that's certainly affecting our outlook for Q1. But as we turn back and look at North America, I think our guidance is meant to indicate that much, if not almost, all of our inventory and productive capabilities during the quarter will be sold and consumed by our customers. There might be a little headroom there, but not a lot. As we think about the guidance that we gave for the consumer business, I think it's always a little more tenuous to guide in that business. The retailers don't tend to like to buy late in the season, but they will when weather continues. And so I think as we think about our consumer and industrial business, we might have a bit more of a runway there. But we definitely need winter to continue over the next couple of months in order for that to be substantially higher than we've guided. So we'll monitor it over the next few weeks and provide updates as the opportunities arise.

And finally as another follow-up, if I may, Fran, you did talk about the price impact of harsh winter weather on salt pricing, this subsequent winter. But if you look back at history, the last time we had a very harsh winter, '08, it was followed by several years of well-above the average pricing, in the 7% to 8% area even after that 10% in the following year. I know each winter is different and I know the supply/demand is rebalanced every winter, but could we see a couple years of above-average pricing following this one as we did following '08?

Well, we hope so. A lot's going to depend on obviously the winter following and so on so forth. But if you go back and look at history it's a positive I think signal and our job here is to make sure that we're kind of maximizing our capacity and also maximizing margins, which prices driving that. So we've got a lot of experience here and I think we've got a group that's pretty motivated about the year ahead, because last year-and-a-half or so has been challenging. We've, I think done a good job of managing our ways through that. And the group is pretty motivated about what's happening out there right now looking at the future.

This does conclude the Compass Minerals' earnings call for today. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect.