Hello, and welcome to the annual meeting of stockholders of Mercer International Inc. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. During the meeting, we will have a question-and-answer session. You can submit questions or comments at any time by clicking on the message icon. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Jimmy Lee. Sorry, Jimmy Lee, Executive Chairman of Mercer International Inc. Mr. Lee, the floor is yours.
Thank you. My name is Jimmy Lee. I'm the Executive Chairman of the corporation, and I will act as Chairman of this meeting. After considering the continued health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, related governmental guidance, and the well-being of our shareholders, the community, and other stakeholders, today's meeting is being held by remote communication only and is being webcast live through our virtual meeting facilities. Joining me at today's meeting are David Gandossi, our President and CEO, and David Ure, our CFO. I will start today by addressing the business portion of the meeting, and then David Gandossi will make a short presentation reviewing our 2020 results and some of our business initiatives moving forward. After his presentation, we will have an opportunity for Q&A. Online participants may submit questions by clicking on the message icon in the upper right corner of the meeting center screen.
As Chairman of this meeting, I have adopted an agenda that will govern the order of business and the rules of conduct for the meeting. If you have not already obtained a copy, copies of the agenda and rules are available through the virtual meeting facilities online in the file section in the lower left of the screen. I appoint David Ure to act as Secretary for this meeting and Harj Sangra, our Legal Counsel, to act as Assistant Secretary. Constance Adams of Computershare Investor Services Inc., the corporation's transfer agent, is appointed as the Inspector of this meeting. Most of you have already voted your proxy, or your proxy votes have already been tallied.
If you're a shareholder of record or beneficial shareholder holding a legal proxy from your bank or broker, and if you want to vote your shares now or change your votes, you may do so now with the control number you received. For those of you participating online, if you have not voted or wish to change your vote, you may do so now by clicking on the link provided online. Any shareholder who has already voted and does not want to change their vote need not take any further action. The polls are now open and will close in a few moments after the presentation of the business matters for the meeting. The next item is the notice of meeting.
I have an affidavit of mailing of William Valentine of Computershare Communication Services stating that the notice of this meeting and internet availability of proxy materials were mailed beginning on April 16th, 2021, and were sent to all shareholders of record as of March 26th, 2021, the record date for the attending and voting at this meeting. The next item is the report on quorum. The report of the Inspector indicates that there are 112 shareholders present in person or by proxy at this meeting holding 65,988,357 shares, which represents approximately 91.19% of the outstanding shares of the corporation as of the record date. This means we have a quorum present, and the meeting is regularly called, duly constituted, and ready for the transaction of business. The next item is the business of the meeting. We have three proposals for shareholders to consider at today's meeting.
They were all described in the notice of meeting and proxy statement for today's meeting. The first item is the election of directors. The first item of business is the election of 10 directors. The following 10 people have been properly nominated by the board: Jimmy Lee, David Gandossi, William McCartney, Keith Purchase, James Shepherd, Alan Wallace, Linda Welty, Rainer Rettig, Alice Laberge, and Janine North. The board recommends a vote for each of them. The second item of business is a non-binding advisory vote to approve the corporation's executive compensation as disclosed in the proxy statement for this meeting. The board recommends a vote for this proposal. Last, the third item of business is the ratification of the selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the corporation's independent registered public accounting firm for the 2021 fiscal year. The board recommends a vote for this proposal.
The discussion of the matters for shareholders' consideration is now closed, and the polls are now also closed. There will be a short pause while the Inspector completes the preliminary voting tabulation. I will now share with you the preliminary voting tabulations provided by the Inspector based on the preliminary review of the votes cast. First, all 10 nominees on the ballot for the board of directors have been elected. They will each serve until the next annual shareholders' meeting or until they earlier resign or otherwise disqualify to act as directors. Proposal two, the non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation, has been approved. Finally, proposal three, the ratification of the selection of the corporation's auditors for fiscal 2021 has also been approved. With the formal business of the meeting concluded, I declare that this meeting is now terminated.
Now, David Gandossi, our President and CEO, will make a short presentation reviewing our 2020 fiscal year and certain business initiatives going forward. David?
Thank you, Jimmy, and thank you all for joining us on our annual general meeting conference call. Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the hard work of all of our employees and contractors for continuing to work safely and following COVID-19 protocols to keep their colleagues and families safe. I could not be more proud of how our people have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 was an unprecedented year. It began with significant uncertainty about what the pandemic would bring. However, by staying true to our values and strategy, we were able to react decisively. I'm proud to say that our operations all ran efficiently, and we did not experience any operational downtime due to the COVID-19 outbreaks. We were also able to make great strides in advancing our sustainability profile.
As the global economy continues to gain momentum on the back of global COVID-19 vaccine programs, we believe the five pillars of our strategy will continue to serve us well. These pillars are: one, operate world-class assets, two, grow and diversify where we have core competencies, three, manage the integrity of our balance sheet and liquidity, four, ensure the sustainability of our operations, and five, continue developing our talent. In 2020, we invested about $80 million in capital upgrades at our operations. We restricted our spending program due to the pandemic but continued investments on certain select high-return capital projects. At our Stendal and Rosenthal mills, we continued to invest in projects that will allow us to take advantage of the German government's wastewater fee reduction incentive, a program that provides wastewater fee waivers for companies that continue to advance their environmental performance through capital expenditures.
We have completed the majority of the Friesau Phase II sawmill project. The main focus of this phase was the sorting equipment, which is now in the commissioning phase. The Friesau investments over the past two years make the mill one of the largest, most modern, and flexible mills in the world. We also began the work to expand the Stendal pulp mill's capacity by 80,000 tons per year, taking its capacity to 740,000 tons. We expect this work to be completed in late 2021. Our growth ambitions were tempered somewhat due to the uncertainty created by the global pandemic, but we remain committed to growing Mercer in areas where we have a leadership position and/or a strong competency. Our future growth will focus on pulp, wood products, wood extractives, and green energy.
As we emerge from the pandemic, Mercer is in a strong financial position and able to take advantage of growth opportunities, including organic growth such as our Stendal expansion and other continuous improvement opportunities. However, we will continue to take a disciplined approach in seeking potential acquisitions, whether they be highly aligned with our existing assets or our other businesses that would create additional shareholder value. In early 2020, the uncertainty around the pandemic required us to consider our balance sheet position. Despite our strong liquidity position at that time, we took the conservative approach of reaffirming our cost control culture and reducing discretionary spending, as well as more conservative management of our working capital. As a result, we entered 2021 on a solid financial footing.
That financial strength allowed us to opportunistically issue $875 million of new 5.125% senior notes maturing in 2029 and using these proceeds to replace our 2024 and 2025 senior notes. Not only will this save us roughly $12 million per year in interest costs, but we also pushed our earliest debt maturity out to 2026 to further strengthen our overall financial position. Operating EBITDA in 2020 totaled approximately $193 million, down approximately $18 million from 2019, reflecting lower pulp pricing in the year, and we recorded a net loss in 2020 of approximately $17 million or 26 cents per basic share compared to a net loss of $10 million or 15 cents per basic share in 2019.
As we look forward to 2021, we are optimistic that the strengthening markets we experienced in Q1, where we recorded EBITDA of $82 million, will remain in balance for the remainder of the year. We have long recognized the importance of maintaining sustainable operations as a core value for our organization, and we are committed to providing our customers with low-carbon products from sustainably managed forests. Despite the pandemic, we were able to complete several valuable projects in 2020 that will allow us to continue to increase the sustainability of our operations. In 2020, we published our sustainability objectives and targets. This document is available on our website, and it serves two key purposes. First, it defines how we think about sustainability at Mercer by defining our priorities into six distinct categories. Second, it sets out how we are targeting these values to create actions for each of our operations.
I encourage our listeners to read this document. In 2020, we were also able to establish GHG emission reduction targets for each of our manufacturing operations, and we completed a detailed assessment of our Scope 3 GHG emissions to better understand our climate change mitigation opportunities in our supply chain. We're looking forward to working with our customers and suppliers to further reduce our GHG impact. We also continued our commitment to stakeholder engagement through many local initiatives, including ongoing discussions with potential indigenous groups in Alberta, as well as community outreach efforts at all of our mills. In addition, we focused some of our engagement efforts internally. In 2020, we completed an internal employee engagement survey to better understand the needs and perspectives of our employees and improve employee engagement.
We also launched our efforts to champion diversity and inclusion initiatives through the establishment of diversity, equity, and inclusion working groups in each of our operations. Finally, health and safety remains our most revered value at Mercer. We are committed to the health and safety of our employees and contractors. And while I'm proud of our overall safety effort this year and the ongoing development of our safety culture, our safety metrics took a small step backwards. Our stated goal is zero injuries, and while we have kept COVID-19 from impacting our production, we are not yet where we would like to be from an injury-free perspective. We are continuing our efforts in 2021 with a particular focus at our more recently acquired operations.
All of these efforts will help us reach our goal of zero injuries, which in turn contributes to Mercer being an employer of choice for the most talented people. In terms of our markets, 2020 was a volatile year. Pulp markets began the year in a weak position and slowly strengthened over the year on the back of pandemic-driven tissue product demand and increasing economic activity. Today, pulp markets are essentially in balance, with Europe particularly tight considering this time of year. Looking forward, we believe pulp markets will continue to be balanced as economic activity grows with the ongoing rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. On the lumber side, we saw demand go from a low point during the spring as economies locked down at the beginning of the pandemic but fairly quickly moved to record U.S. market pricing in the summer. Today, very strong U.S.
Housing market demand and demand from do-it-yourself home projects continue to keep lumber prices at record levels. We expect lumber markets to remain strong throughout 2021. As we look forward, we believe that Mercer's strategy and financial strength have us well-positioned to capitalize on strengthening markets and value creation initiatives while remaining focused on our continuous improvement culture, including our many ESG-related initiatives. We look forward to reporting our progress against our strategy in the years ahead. In closing, I would like to thank all of our shareholders for their continued support, Jimmy Lee and my fellow board of directors for the strategic and thoughtful oversight, our very capable management team, and all of our employees for the initiative and dedication. That concludes our prepared remarks. We would be happy at this time to take any questions from shareholders.
As a reminder, you can register your questions by clicking the messages icon in the upper right corner of the virtual meeting center screen. We'll pause for a moment to queue any questions. David, are there any questions?
David, there appear to be no questions at this time.
Thank you, Dave. That being the case, we will conclude the web conference. Everyone, on behalf of Jimmy and the rest of the board, I would like to thank you all for joining us today and for your continued support of Mercer. We look forward to speaking with you again as our year progresses.
This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.