So I would like to now invite to the podium Nutrien's Board Chair, Mr. Derek Pannell.
Thank you, Richard, and good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this Annual Meeting of Nutrien. My name is Derek Pannell, and I am the Chair of the Board of Directors. In terms of today's agenda, we will conduct the business of the meeting first, including the vote on key matters. I will then turn the floor over to Chuck Magro, President and Chief Executive Officer, for a brief discussion of our performance and plans to be followed by a question and answer period.
The meeting will now come to order. As Chair of the Board, I will act as Chair of the meeting. Mr. Bob Kirkpatrick, Corporation's Secretary, will act as Secretary of the meeting. With the concurrence of the meeting, I will appoint Nazim Nadeau and Jennifer Villarreal of the AST Trust Company Canada to act as scrutineers.
I have been informed by the scrutineers that we have shareholders present or represented by proxy who hold sufficient number of shares to constitute a quorum. I therefore declare that there is a quorum at this meeting. The scrutineers' report will be kept by the secretary with the records of the meeting. I have received the affidavits of publication of the record date for this meeting and of distribution of the notice of meeting, the management proxy circular and the proxy form. I direct that a copy of the notice, together with proof of service, be kept by the secretary with the records of the meeting.
I now declare the meeting regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. I will begin with a few comments regarding procedural matters. Only registered shareholders or proxy holders of record are entitled to vote. You will have received a ballot form regarding 3 items of business to come before today's meeting. At the appropriate time during the meeting, I will ask you to complete the ballot as it pertains to each item of business.
Following consideration of the last item of business, the scrutineers will collect the ballot forms and tabulate the results of the vote for each matter. We have set aside time for question and answer period following the CEO presentation to address shareholder inquiries that are not part of the formal meeting. I would like to remind everyone that today's meeting may include forward looking statements. These statements are given as of today's date and involve risks and uncertainties discussed in our filings with securities regulators. A number of factors and assumptions were applied in the formulation of such statements and actual results could differ materially.
For additional information with respect to forward looking statements, factors and assumptions, we direct you to Nutrien's public filings. The first matter on the agenda is the presentation of the consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2018, and the report of the In accordance with the Canadian Business Corporations Act, the statements are presented to the meeting, but no other action is required with respect to them. The next matter on the agenda is the appointment of the auditors. I move that a resolution be approved reappointing KPMG LLP chartered accountants as auditors of the corporation to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting or until a successor is appointed. I have been advised by Kelly Freeman, a shareholder in attendance today, that he would be prepared to rise and second each of the motions in respect of the items of business outlined in the management proxy circular.
Accordingly, unless there are any objections, I will take such motions as seconded with no further action needed. The motion with respect to the appointment of auditors is now open for discussion. Detect silence. So you have heard the motion. And if there is no further discussion, I would now ask each shareholder or proxy holder to record your vote on the ballot provided by indicating whether the vote is in favor of or withheld from voting in respect of the resolution.
Ballots will be collected and counted following consideration of the other items of business. It is now in order to proceed with the election of directors. The 2019 management proxy circular sets forth the background of each of the nominees and the qualifications considered in making these nominations. The proposed nominees as listed in the circular are Christopher Burley, Maura Clark, John Esty, David Everett, Russell Gourling, Miranda Hubbs, Alice LaBerge, Consuelo Madera, Chuck Magro, Keith Martel, Aaron Regent and Mayo Schmidt. Thank you to the nominees for agreeing to stand for election.
I move to formally nominate as a director each of the proposed nominees as listed in the 2019 management proxy circular. As there were no nominations in accordance with the advanced notice requirements of the company's by law, I declare the nominations closed. I move to elect the 12 named individuals as directors of the corporation and take such motion as seconded by Mr. Freeman. You have heard the motion.
I would ask each shareholder or proxy holder to record your vote. You may vote for or in respect of any individual nominee as indicated on the ballot provided. The next item of business before the meeting today is the consideration and approval of the nonbinding advisory resolution accepting the corporation's approach to executive compensation disclosed in the 2019 management proxy circular. I move that such resolution be approved and take such motion as seconded by Mr. Freeman.
The motion is now open for discussion. Thank you for your comment. Are there any additional comments? Very good. I move to you have heard the motion.
I would ask each shareholder or proxy holder to record your vote by signifying on the ballot provided whether the vote is in favor or against the advisory resolution. Once you have finished, please raise your ballot and one of the attendants will collect it. Are there ballots to be collected? If not, we will take a few minutes for the scrutineers to count the votes. Nutrien is committed to making a difference in the communities in which we operate.
While we wait for the scrutineers report, please refer to the screen to learn more about Nutrien's relationship with the Saskatoon Tribal Council. I have now been provided with the scrutineers report regarding the matters previously voted on. With respect to the resolution reappointing KPMG as auditors of the corporation, I declare this resolution carried. With respect to the resolution regarding election of each of the individuals named as directors, I declare that each of the 12 nominees elected as a director of the corporation has been successful. With respect to the nonbinding advisory resolution accepting the corporation's approach to executive compensation, I declare this resolution carried.
And that terminates the business part of the meeting. And I would like now to turn it over to Chuck Magro for questions and an update on the business. Chuck?
It's like you're in a classroom. Good afternoon, everyone. It's nice to see you here just in a beautiful Saskatoon spring day. As you know, this is one of our busiest times of the year, where we're focused on helping our customers complete their fertilizer applications and their planting, and this year is no exception. Before I talk about our company and our business, I do want to take just a couple of minutes to recognize the 3 directors who are stepping off our Board today.
Jerry Grandy, Anne McClellan and of course, Derek Pannell. All 3 of these directors have been instrumental in setting the company's strategy and direction, but more importantly, I believe, influencing the culture of our company. And on a personal level, I would just like to thank each of you for your guidance and your coaching and your expertise and for spending so much time with myself and with the management team. And a special thanks to Derek, who served most recently as our Chairman. And thank you, Derek, for your guidance and your wisdom.
So please give them a hand of applause. Okay. So let's talk about Nutrien. So Nutrien's purpose as a company is to grow our world from the ground up. In essence, this is why the company exists.
Everything we do centers around helping growers become more sustainable and more profitable. Now this is both, of course, a challenge, but a huge opportunity, especially when you consider that the human population is still growing and the need for food is still rapidly increasing. Today, even though globally we are more productive and efficient when it comes to food production than we've ever been before in our history, there is just so much more we need to do. Consider food security, where 11% of the world's population is still reported as being undernourished by international standards. Or on the consumer side, where demand for transparency and traceability of food and food production is becoming the expectation, not the exception.
And the task doesn't get easier when we look ahead. But agriculture has always been an industry of resiliency, of innovation and of creativity. It's an industry that finds opportunity among the challenges. And this is where Nutrien comes in. If you look at the company, we're an integrated agricultural solutions provider.
From essential crop nutrients to agronomist insights, we bring everything that a farmer needs to be successful in their business. No other publicly traded ag company in the world has the depth and breadth of offerings under one roof. That's what makes our company so unique. We are a one stop shop. And let me highlight what that means and how we are building on these competitive advantages.
First, we have a direct relationship with the farmer, over 500,000 farmers in 7 countries. We bring them complete agricultural solutions, products, services, agronomic knowledge, financing, digital and precision tools that help them maximize their returns on every acre. Today, we are the world's largest ag retailer, and we expect to invest even more in the years ahead to expand where and how we serve our customers. 2nd, we have a world class supply chain. We can get our products and our services and our people to the farm in a matter of hours.
The extent of our network is impressive: 15,000 railcars, 3,500 agronomists, more than 2,000 distribution facilities and one of the largest mobile fleets in North America. It is a system that connects us right from the ground through to the grower. 3rd, we own world scale, world class production. It starts with the highest quality potash, nitrogen and phosphate production that we manufacture at globally competitive costs, but it extends right through to our proprietary products portfolio of chemistry and seed. In 2018, Nutrien sold 27,000,000 tons of fertilizer, more than any other company in the world, And our proprietary products portfolio achieved over $2,000,000,000 in revenue.
So when you put these three pieces together, you get Nutrien, a company that is vertically integrated with stable and resilient earnings and cash flows. Looking back on 2018, you can see the success of the strategy. We delivered $621,000,000 of synergies compared to the $500,000,000 we originally committed to, and we did that in just 15 months, not the $24,000,000 like we originally communicated. We also completed the necessary divestments and raised net proceeds of $5,300,000,000 after tax that has provided Nutrien with one of the strongest balance sheets in our industry. We also continue to execute against our growth strategy.
We acquired 53 retail locations in our core markets and broadened our customer offerings with new products and data and digital services. In our fertilizer businesses, we delivered record sales volumes in both potash and nitrogen, which combined generated almost $3,000,000,000 of EBITDA last year alone. Finally, we returned $2,800,000,000 to our shareholders in 2018 through a combination of dividends and share buybacks. The strength of our company is supported by diversity and integrated nature of our portfolio. Our revenue was up 8% year over year, but our adjusted EBITDA was up 30%, highlighting the success of capturing the merger synergies and the value of our integrated model.
Further, we generated $2,000,000,000 in free cash flow last year. So the company is balanced and it is stable and it has a very strong balance sheet. And when you consider that fertilizer and crop prices are still well below mid cycle levels for our industry, the long term growth potentials of Nutrien are very attractive. And it shows in our performance. This is total shareholder return.
So far in 2019, we've performed well, delivering total shareholder returns that are above both our peer average and the broader S and P 500. Also in 2018, we increased our dividend by 7.5%, another sign of our confidence we have in the future. And we are still active with our share buyback program. We are executing against the 5% authorization that the Board gave in February of this year. However, the commitment to create value extends beyond just our shareholders.
We know our success requires having the trust and support of our employees. Today Nutrien has over 20,000 employees and growing. With that growth, our workforce is becoming increasingly more global, yet we share a common view of what's important. Safety, there's nothing more important than Nutrien beyond safety. Purpose, we strive to create a company that will grow our world.
And inclusion, we are committed to creating a more welcoming and accepting environment for all of our employees and our stakeholders. This extends to our communities where we are proud of what we do. In 2018, Nutrien partnered with over 2,500 nonprofits, investing 1,000,000 of dollars where we live and work. One area which I am particularly proud of is the work that we have done with our Aboriginal communities right here in Saskatchewan. You saw the video for yourself.
Our collaboration has not only helped create greater diversity within our workforce, but it's also more broadly with our supply base. Finally, I want to talk about Nutrien being a leader in sustainability. Sustainable agriculture is all about ensuring more of our products end up in the crop and less in the environment, using sustainable products as well as technology and analytics to give a crop exactly what it needs and nothing more. Environmentally, we are working hard to understand the impact of our footprint and how we can responsibly reduce it, while meeting the needs of our customers. Let me give you just a few examples.
In our nitrogen business, we are installing best available technology to reduce our emissions and drive up our overall efficiencies. In our potash business, we are investing in automation, sensor technology and robotics to make our mining operations more efficient, but more importantly, safer. In retail, last year alone, we added 30 new products to our portfolio, which are environmentally sustainable, giving farmers access products they simply didn't have before, as well as further investments in precision agronomy tools and predictive analytics to ensure that we are applying the right product at the right time. So whether you look backwards or forwards, we believe Nutrien is on the right track. In 2018, our 1st year as a company, we delivered strong earnings, we accelerated the synergy capture, and we returned significant capital to our shareholders.
As we look ahead to 2019, we have very clear priorities: grow our retail footprint, achieve economies of scale for both our customers and our shareholders lead in digital transformation of our industry, developing tools and services that help growers become more profitable and more sustainable leverage our potash and nitrogen positions to meet new demand with low cost incremental volumes. We plan to cover these priorities and much more at our Investor Day in May, and I'd like to invite you all to participate if available. So with that, I'll wrap up by saying, as the demand for safe and sustainable food continues to grow, I do believe Nutrien is well positioned to help feed the world going forward and have a success with all of our stakeholders. So thank you for listening and I'd be happy to take questions.
Okay. I have a question with regard to the movement of head office people from here to from Saskatoon to now in Calgary, as I am a long term shareholder of Nutrien and potash, I feel that since potash is the main source of your company and potash is found mainly in Saskatchewan, I'm not sure why you moved and what effort you made to get shareholders' opinions on whether you what effort you made to get shareholders' opinions on whether you should move or not. We're finding we did a motion today on shareholders' views of the executive compensation. And so I'm wondering in that light, what actions did you take to get shareholders' views on where the head office should be? I know technically it's here, but I know that most of the people are in Calgary.
Well, thank you for your question and thank you for being a shareholder. We appreciate that. So let me give you the perspective that we've had right from the beginning when it comes to where we will locate our corporate centers. We know that we're important to Saskatchewan and that a big part of our company, about a third of our earnings comes from Saskatchewan. And so we wanted to make sure that as the company continues to grow and be successful that that supplier partnerships.
But we are also very important to other constituencies. So for example, in Alberta, we're the largest consumer of natural gas, and that natural gas is from the people of Alberta. So what we decided right from day 1 and this is really not a change, we will not have one global headquarters. For our business, the way it's growing so rapidly and because of the importance that we have in these two provinces, but other parts of the world, we thought it was best to operate with 3 in North America, 3 operating centers. So we have the one here in Saskatchewan and the potash leadership team and the CEO of the potash business, Susan Jones, lives here with the entire potash leadership team.
So the stewards of that resource, if you will, they all live here in the community and I think that's very, very important. But we also have some of our senior executives in the Calgary office and we have about a third of our senior executives actually in Colorado, where we run our retail business. So when you look at it, the model that we're trying to espouse is that everybody wins. It's not a win or lose from moving jurisdictions and we never wanted that to happen. So what we think we've been able to do is to exactly do what I've said is that every area should be seeing more, more jobs, more investment in the community, more collaboration with our supply partners, which I think is very important supporting small business.
And in fact, if you look at what we've been able to do in just the 12 months as being a brand new company, we now have 4,000 employees in the province of Saskatchewan alone, and that number is up. And the number of corporate positions that we have is up about 30%. We're really excited that across the street here, we're building a brand new office tower. We're going to take the first 8 or 9 floors of that building out of 17. The reason we're doing that, of course, is it's going to help the community, but we're bursting at the seams when it comes to our employees here.
We need more office space to house some of the new businesses and opportunities that we're bringing to Saskatchewan. So a small example of that is we did relocate our Canadian retail office facility from Alberta to Saskatchewan. The leader was here, it just made sense, but that's one example of moving optimizing our overall network and moving another business. And that business is a sizable business. It has about $2,000,000,000 in revenue and it would be one of the largest companies in Saskatchewan if it was a standalone business.
So I think we've done a good job of balancing all stakeholder needs. There is nothing more important to us than making sure we give back to the communities and that when Nutrien is successful, you see it in the community. So hopefully over time, you'll see that benefit. Are there any other questions?
On the last slide, there was a statement about leveraging a certain volume or weight of so many metric tonnes. Can you explain? I don't understand what you mean by leveraging?
Yes. So great question. If you look at our footprint here just to use the potash business as an example of that, we have 6 mines, world class, world scale all on their own. But when you put them together, really neat things happen. And that's how we think about it now.
We're looking at the potash business as a network. And when we were able to do that, what we've seen happen is our produced tons, our cost per ton goes down, our delivered cost per ton goes down because we're using the network as one operating unit instead of having, for example, our legacy would have had different companies competing. And let me just give you a quick example. So now we're able to if we're moving tonnes to the United States, we can use the manufacturing facilities that are closest to the U. S.
But if we're taking tons offshore, we can dedicate operating plants that are closer to our ports. And $3 to $5 a ton when it comes to logistics costs may not seem like much, but last year we sold 13,000,000 tons. So it does add up and that's where we're seeing just enormous supply chain and manufacturing synergies by putting these together and using the network. On top of that, this is one thing that I just I love about our potash business is our sales plan this year is to sell about 13,500,000 tonnes. We have the capacity though in the existing 6 mines to actually produce and sell 18,000,000 tonnes.
So as demand for potash grows and as we continue to grow our retail business, part of the strategy for the merger was to build out the downstream business so that we have a channel to move those tonnes. So as Nutrien invests money in Brazil and in Australia and other parts of the world, we can then run our potash mines at higher utilization rates, bringing jobs and opportunity here because we have that channel ourselves. That's leverage. That's the value and the power of the integrated model that we saw when we did this merger. It's very exciting and I think we're just getting started with that.
But as we continue to grow our retail business, we're going to drive up utilization rates and have more leverage, slide term, both in our nitrogen business, but in our potash business. So the opportunity, I think, to be an integrated solutions provider is very, very powerful. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you very much.