Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. In just a moment, we will take you through the performance of Rain Industries Limited during the fourth quarter of 2021. Today's presenters are Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy Nellore, Vice Chairman of Rain Industries Limited, Mr. Gerard Sweeney, President of Rain Carbon Inc, and Mr. T. Srinivasa Rao, Chief Financial Officer of Rain Industries Limited. Before we begin, management would like to mention that some of the statements made in today's discussion may be forward-looking in nature, and they could be affected by certain risks and uncertainties. The company's actual results could differ materially from such forward-looking statements. Now, if you could turn to slide three, Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy Nellore will provide an update on key developments within the Rain group. Thank you, and over to you, Jagan.
Thank you, Alan. Good evening, everyone. I'm pleased to announce the completion of our third consecutive year with a total recordable injury rate below 0.2. In this COVID environment, where many of our production facilities have been operating with a depleted workforce and the added stress that comes with it, their ability to remain focused and relatively injury-free last year was quite an accomplishment. From an earnings perspective, we finished the fourth quarter with EBITDA of INR 5.41 billion, compared with INR 6.54 billion during the previous quarter. As indicated in our last call, when we explained that Q2 and Q3 are typically our strongest quarters, the sequential decrease was not a surprise, given the seasonality of some of our products sold in Europe and North America that are not in high demand in cold weather.
We also lost volumes during the quarter due to several planned maintenance outages in our Advanced Materials segment and encountered unprecedented energy price increases in Europe. Despite these factors, this was the sixth consecutive quarter that we have seen an increase in revenues. We are pleased with the overall performance in 2021 and look forward to a better 2022. We anticipate robust demand for our Carbon and Advanced Materials products to continue as the global economy rebounds from the challenges caused by COVID. With regard to the Cement business, the volumes improved in the current quarter compared to the previous quarter. In fiscal year 2022, the Cement production in India is expected to achieve higher growth, driven by the continued government's strong focus on infrastructure development.
As part of our continued sustainability initiative, we are expanding the solar power capacity at our two cement plants by 14 MW at an estimated cost of $9 million. We would like to caution that there could be disruption in our performance if there is any regional event that could have widespread repercussions in the markets we serve. Perhaps the feared conflict between Russia and Ukraine or a continued manufacturing downturn in China. With that cautionary note, we remain optimistic that our 2022 performance will again be within our historically normal range. On Slide four, as we mentioned during our last call, high energy costs continue to constrain aluminum smelter production in Europe. However, with the LME prices hovering in the low 3,000s, there is plenty of motivation for smelters in other regions to boost production, restart idle production, and bring new capacity online.
As such, we have not seen and do not expect a material impact from this energy cost on our demand. In China, a slowing economy and power rationing continue to limit aluminum production. As we informed you during our last call, China's aluminum output in 2021 was expected to be higher than in the previous year, despite its economic and energy woes. In 2022, we expect China will continue to dominate as the largest producer of aluminum, albeit at levels that might be lower than its total 2021 production numbers. Despite the situation in Europe and China, we believe that aluminum production will remain robust in this high demand environment supported by strong LME prices. With this business update, I will now turn over the presentation to Gerry to take you through the industry and other businesses update, updates on slide five. Gerry?
Thank you, Jagan. Good evening, everyone. It's a pleasure to discuss our performance and the fourth quarter industry's trends with you today. Let's turn to slide 5. Typically, we begin our segment discussion with the Carbon business, our largest. However, as you undoubtedly noticed in our press release and presentation, we had a substantial EBITDA drop in our Advanced Materials segment on a sequential basis. It is best to begin with that. As Jagan mentioned a few moments ago, some of this drop was expected due to product seasonality and planned maintenance outages in our maleic anhydride and BTX units. These factors resulted in reduced sales volumes, which accounted for approximately half of the $22.2 million quarter-over-quarter EBITDA reduction.
The situation was also exacerbated by historically high energy prices in Europe, which resulted in approximately $15 million of additional unforeseen costs and prompted us to curtail production of some products as costs simply became too high within the quarter. We have taken several steps to mitigate these costs. We have changed fuels for our internal energy production, hedged a portion of our natural gas contracts, and implemented select energy surcharges to our sales prices. In a few of our Advanced Materials product lines, we have even taken aggressive actions to reduce energy consumption in order to restore margins. Lastly, as we work to master the sophisticated design and technology of our hydrogenated hydrocarbon resins plant in Germany, we found an opportunity to upgrade the productivity and reliability of the plant.
As such, we took the HHCR unit offline for several weeks during Q4 to begin the process of sequentially replacing the reactors. The initial design of the reactors was creating unnecessary production bottlenecks for us. The new reactors are based on a much simpler design and are already providing the desired results, and greatly increasing the time between maintenance outages. While the reactor upgrade and outage resulted in lower EBITDA and HHCR volumes during the fourth quarter, the improved reliability and optimization of the plant will quickly offset the fourth quarter impact. Looking forward, at the Advanced Materials segment, the poor fourth quarter performance is behind us and we continue to enjoy robust demand across the entire product portfolio. Demand for our CARBORES engineered product, which is used in refractory and graphite products, as well as our PETRORES specialty coating for lithium-ion batteries, continues to outstrip product availability.
In the coming months, we are looking forward to an incremental production increase of both products, thanks to the fourth quarter completion of a strategic project to convert one of our units in Europe to produce PETRORES as well. This provides us with an option to increase the PETRORES production to meet increasing demand as needed. Looking ahead at this segment, we expect continued strong growth, excuse me, continued strong demand for our Advanced Materials products, and we are ready to meet that demand as a result of these fourth quarter maintenance outages and upgrades to our units that will give us increased operational capacity and reliability. Moreover, with the BTX, HHCR, and PA outages now behind us, we anticipate for volumes of all of these products will return to what we saw in Q3. Additionally, we should benefit from the price increases implemented to offset rising energy prices.
Moving on to our Carbon segment, we continue to see benefits from robust demand by the aluminum industry for both calcined petroleum coke and coal tar pitch. Beyond aluminum, demand for CPC by the titanium dioxide industry has also remained strong. In terms of CPC, volumes were sequentially higher by 11% in Q4 as we were able to minimize the impact of Hurricane Ida on our operations, thanks to lessons learned from previous recovery efforts after storms. As a result, our Gulf Coast calciners are now more resilient, and we have learned to avoid situations that result in extended outages, as evidenced by the fact that our Chalmette, Gramercy, and Norco, Louisiana calciners were able to resume operations in just weeks after Hurricane Ida.
At the same time, the availability of high-quality raw materials continues to be a challenge for us globally, especially low sulfur and/or green GPC. If there's any good news here, it is that aluminum smelters understand this situation and accept that it is not likely to improve. They are finding ways to work with us and adapt to higher product specification to the maximum extent possible in order to help the situation. Looking at GPC pricing, China's refinery production has been impacted by the continued slowing of manufacturing in China. This is due to reduced energy availability and stricter pollution control measures in conjunction with the Beijing Winter Olympics. As a result, domestic Chinese GPC production has fallen, prompting China to import more. This has triggered increased competition and higher costs for essential raw materials on the seaborne market.
We continue to watch the Chinese GPC production and energy situation and would not be surprised to see more volatility in coming months. Continuing with the distillation side of our business, excuse me, Carbon segment, demand for our products remains strong. Coal tar pitch volumes continue to be robust, driven by demand from the aluminum and graphite electrode industries. In addition, continued strong sales of CARBORES and PETRORES translates to higher internal consumption of all our pitch products to manufacture these Advanced Materials. In our other carbon products category, sales of crude naphthalene and carbon black oil remained strong in the fourth quarter, despite reduced demand from one major CBO customer. Creosote volumes fell, as expected, due to lower seasonal demand.
Looking ahead, we anticipate global demand for our carbon distillation products will remain strong in the near term. As with calcination, we are dealing with the ongoing challenge of securing adequate raw materials, in this case, coal tar, in a very tight global market and ultimately passing along the resulting cost increases. The good news is that we have been working with our carbon distillation and Advanced Materials customers to implement energy-related price escalators, and we have increased hedging on our energy contracts in Europe, which will help mitigate the impact of higher natural gas prices. Looking at our major projects, we began production at our anhydrous carbon pellets facility in the United States during the quarter. In December, we began to feed carbon fines and our organic binder into the system to produce our first calcinable ACP product.
We are now working to produce a trial blend of calcined ACP and CPC that we plan to ship to a major global aluminum industry customer by the end of the first quarter. We feel strongly that ACP has a promising future, thanks to its energy savings and emissions reduction potential, as well as its ability to improve our GPC utilization. At the same time, we recognize that commercialization of this product will be a process. We are excited, however, about taking these first steps. In the months ahead, in addition to gaining customer feedback from this initial shipment, we will continue to learn and optimize the production process for this new ACP material. With additional operational and testing experience, we will continue to fine-tune the ACP throughput and production costs.
During the fourth quarter, we were able to slowly ramp up CPC production at our new vertical shaft calciner in India due to the limited raw material availability and are preparing to export our first shipment of shaft CPC product during the H1 of 2022. Looking ahead, we continue to work with Indian authorities to secure a GPC import allocation for the vertical shaft calciner. Before I turn the call over to Srinivas, I want to reiterate our optimism for the future of this business, in particular our Advanced Materials segment. The actions taken in Q4 will benefit us going forward, and we fully expect the segment to positively contribute to EBITDA during the first quarter. With that, I'll now turn the presentation to Srinivas, who will take you through the consolidated performance of Rain on slide 6. Srinivas, over to you.
Thank you, Gerry. Good evening, everyone. It is a pleasure to present our financial performance during the December 2021 quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2021, Rain achieved consolidated net revenue of INR 39.66 billion compared to INR 26.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, an increase of INR 13.46 billion. This resulted from an increase in revenue of INR 11.86 billion from our Carbon segment, an increase of INR 1.31 billion from our Advanced Materials segment, and an increase of INR 0.29 billion from our Cement segment. Rain's consolidated adjusted EBITDA increased by INR 604 million compared to the prior year.
This resulted from an increase in the Carbon segment by INR 2,429 billion, offset by a decrease in the Advanced Materials segment by INR 1,726 million, and a decrease in the Cement segment by INR 99 million. Now turning to the next slide on Carbon segment performance. Revenue from our Carbon segment was INR 28.58 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2021, as compared to INR 16.72 billion for the same period last year. During December 2021 quarter, sales volume increased by 1.7%. The average blended realization increased by about 74%, driven by higher demand and market quotations across all regions.
There was a depreciation of euro against Indian rupee by 2.6% and appreciation of U.S. dollar against Indian rupee by 1.6%. Overall, due to the aforesaid reasons, revenue from Carbon segment increased by about 71% during December 2021 quarter as compared to December 2020 quarter. Adjusted EBITDA of the Carbon segment increased by INR 2,429 million compared to Q4 of calendar year 2020 due to improved realizations, offset by depreciation of euro against Indian rupee and increase in energy costs. Turning to next slide on performance on Advanced Materials. Revenue from our Advanced Materials segment was INR 7.88 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2021, as compared to INR 6.57 billion for the same quarter in 2020.
During the quarter, there was a decrease in volume by 14.1%, primarily related to the sale of superplasticizer business in December 2020 and planned maintenance during the current quarter. During Q4 of 2021, the average blended realization increased by about 39.7%, primarily due to change in oil-related prices and change in product mix and customer mix, offset by a depreciation of euro against Indian rupee by 2.6%.
Due to these reasons, revenue from Advanced Materials segment increased by 19.9% during December 2021 quarter as compared to December 2020 quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the Advanced Materials segment decreased by INR 1,726 million due to an increase in energy costs and incremental operating costs in the HHCR plant for replacing certain equipment to make process improvements, coupled with the divestment of superplasticizer business and depreciation of euro against Indian rupee, offset by improved realizations. Moving on to the next slide on our cement business. During the fourth quarter of 2021, cement revenue increased by about 9.8% compared to December 2020 quarter. The increase was primarily driven by an increase in realizations by 6.1% coupled with the increase in volumes by 3.6%.
Cement EBITDA decreased by INR 99 million due to higher operating costs, offset by an increase in volumes and realizations. Moving on the next slide on debt. We ended the quarter with total debt of $1,151 million, including working capital debt of $71 million. Net debt was $914 million and based on LTM EBITDA of $341 million, we ended the quarter with a net debt to EBITDA ratio of 2.7x. We are comfortable at this level as our average borrowing cost stood at around 5%, and we expect it to remain stable since the floating rate portion of our long-term debt is tied to EURIBOR, which is still negative.
With increasing prices for most of our products, there is an increase in the working capital requirement for the business. Even with a higher requirement of funds for working capital, we generated cash of INR 8,336 million, approximately $113 million during the year 2021. Considering the increased requirement of working capital with continued increase in prices in February 2022, we increased our global revolver from $150 million to $200 million and extended the maturity until October 2024. As discussed earlier, our requirement for expansion capital projects should be minimal going forward after completion of the vertical shaft CPC plant and our ACP plant in U.S.A. Accordingly, we would be focusing on debt reduction once the expansion projects are completed fully.
With that, I will now turn the presentation to Mr. Jagan for closing remarks. Over to you, sir.
Thank you, Srinivas. Our 2021 EBITDA of INR 25.3 billion puts us back in our historically normal range, and we anticipate the demand for our products will continue to be robust. While some factors are out of our control, among them tight supplies of GPC and coal tar, European energy prices and the Russia-Ukraine situation, our team knows that we must focus on the things we can control to meet our expectations for 2022. At the top of the list is the need to monetize the investments we have made on our major capital projects.
During the past few years, we have made a cumulative investment of more than $225 million on the hydrogenated hydrocarbon resins plant in Germany, the dual solvent plant in Germany, the vertical shaft calciner plant in India, and the anhydrous carbon pellets production facility in the United States. In 2022, we are expecting that each of these plants should begin to provide the return on investment that was envisioned when they were launched. Beyond our major cap projects, we also know that we must continue to improve productivity and efficiency at every one of our facilities around the world. As always, workplace safety, occupational health, and environmental stewardship will continue to be priorities for us in 2022.
In terms of safety, we plan to use our Life-Saving Rules campaign and other initiatives to ensure that we remain a best-in-class company in terms of safety performance and move us closer to becoming an incident-free organization. As far as occupational health, we must continue to do all we can to minimize the risk of exposure to COVID. While the current Omicron variant appears to be less dangerous than previous strains, we will not let our guard down. As I have said in the past, we are doing all we can to remain a strong link in the global supply chain. Finally, in terms of environmental stewardship, we know that our sustainability activities will play an increasingly important role in the success of our company.
In response, we are constantly looking for ways to reduce our emissions and energy consumption, enhance our raw material utilization, and work with our customers to ensure they have the products needed to achieve their sustainability goals. Thank you for your continued interest in Rain Industries Limited, and we look forward to next quarter's presentation. Thank you.