Mark Costa
Board Chair and Chief Executive Officer at Eastman Chemical
Thanks, Kevin. And a very important question. We spend a lot of time trying to think about how our cadence of earnings and value creation go through the year. When you think about this year and you look at sort of the guidance we gave for the second quarter and add that together with what the results that we had in the first quarter, the first quarter first half looks to be around $4.75, if you look at -- use the midpoint of our second quarter guidance. So to get to our midpoint of our full year guidance, you're talking about $5 a share in the back half, which is about 5% higher than the first half, to your sequential question, or $0.75 a share on a year-over-year basis.
So that's a strong back half quarter for us. We don't really have it normal that we can look to in the past because we've had so many different events that our first or second half floated if you look at 2018 to now. But we can recognize that's a little bit stronger than normal. And I think the easiest way to talk about it is on a year-over-year basis. And when you really think about delivering that $5 a share in the back half of the year, it really comes down to a question of what is AM going to deliver relative to what normalization in CI occurs?
Because obviously, the steam line event in the first quarter, we had a sort of significant setback on that to the first half of the year. So when you look at it and do the math on sort of the midpoint of our guidance for the full year of AM of $650 million to $700 million, that means we basically have to be about $200 million over the back half of last year. Now roughly half of that -- actually probably greater than half of that, will come from how we're managing spreads.
So almost all of the spread compression last year that occurred in this segment was in the back half of last year. We've been incredibly successful in implementing price increases in the -- to begin the first quarter and get the spreads that we were aiming to get that we discussed in January, and that sequential improvement in spreads is still expected in the second quarter. So we have a lot of great momentum in the pricing actions we've taken, including implementing a whole set of additional price increases in this month, to cover the inflation that occurred through the first quarter.
So you've got $100 million -- greater than $100 million, really, of spread improvement in the back half of last -- in the back half of this year relative to the compression that occurred in the back half of last year, right? So recovering that compression, if you will. So that's half of it, or more than that. And then you've got strong volume growth. And the volume growth in the back half will be a little bit different.
First of all, you've got incredibly unmet need, especially in specialty plastics, given how we were not able to serve that market. So markets are incredibly strong. No one has inventory. So the likelihood of destocking in the fourth quarter is much less because there's nothing to destock. You've got the automotive market, we're assuming, starts to get better in the back half relative to the first half.
And we expect logistics to -- constraints to ease, which is really one of the bigger limiters of our ability to sort of serve demand. And then you've got the production catch up, right? So we lost about $75 million of volume in the first quarter, and we think roughly half of that will be recovered through the year. But most of that recovery is going to occur in the third and fourth quarter because we're just ramping up production.
And with logistics these days, getting all that out the door and recognizing that in the second quarter is going to be a bit of a challenge. So a lot of factors that drive volume to be a lot better. So then you weigh that against what's going to happen in CI normalization. And I think we've taken our standard approach of assuming it's going to normalize at some point. And for now, we're expecting that in the back half of the year, and there's some higher gross spend.
So you put all that together, you net out, you're going to come up with positive EBIT relative to last year in a meaningful way. And then you've got $0.45 a share from the share repurchase we're doing to replace the divested earnings. So $5 is a very reasonable improvement to get when you think about it and those dynamics, and that gets you that sort of 5% sequential improvement versus the first half.