“It was a strong finish to an extraordinary year and I would say I’m proud of the way we led in the middle of the pandemic.”. This is what 3m’s Chairman & CEO, Mike Roman, has to say in a CNBC interview about how his company turned out with regards to their Q4 2020 earnings results. All of these were achieved through the company’s efforts to outperform its peers even amidst the pandemic. “We stepped up to deliver the respirators, 2 billion was produced and distributed in 2020 but we also invested in growth at the same time, and in some of the positive trends,”.
3M Company (NYSE: MMM) is a mining and manufacturing business that offers a variety of products which includes adhesive tape, abrasives, and similar related materials. The company currently has a $101.8 billion market capitalization. It successfully delivered a decent 47.36% return in the past 3 months and settled at $175.02 per share at the closing of February 2nd. 3M’s Q4 2020 results show that its sales were up 5.8% which is equivalent to about $8.6 billion and the organic local-currency sales of the company were up 5.5%. Both its GAAP and adjusted EPS settled at $2.38, while its operating cash flow amounted to $2.5 billion.
According to Mike Roman, they’ve been investing in growth areas like personal protective equipment, home improvement, home care electronics, and more but some segments of their business continue to underperform. “We’re seeing improvements in automotive build rates,– People are still working remotely, so we see our stationery and office supply business impacted because people are not in the office using those products. We’re seeing our commercial solutions business impacted as people are again not maintaining or upgrading their office and commercial settings.”, said Roman adding that they are faced and are currently facing uncertainties in the middle of the pandemic and how long these uncertainties will run depends on how Covid-19 progresses and how the economy will continue moving forward. “There are segments that are still challenged. We talked about elective procedures and health care still being down year-over-year and that’s projected to continue as we go through 2021.”, he stated while also noting that they begin to notice hospitals working to preserve and move Covid patients while preventing the virus to spread.
“Those end markets that we’re strong, and some that we’re improving, you can see the underlying dynamics stabilizing. The caveat is how the pandemic progresses can impact that.”. Roman mentioned that they have guidance ranges around some of their businesses and assured that they are confident that the underlying stable trends of the market they’re in are improving. “We’re looking through the whole year on expectations. We’re also building it off of a view of each of these markets and so the projection build rates for automobiles are expected to be up. Those are the things that fundamentally are giving us a little better view through the markets in 2021.”, he concluded.
