3M
The 3M Company, originally the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, is an American multinational conglomerate operating in industrial products, worker safety and consumer goods. Based in Maplewood, Minnesota, a suburb of Saint Paul, it produces more than 60,000 products, among them adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window and paint protection films, electrical and electronic connecting and insulating materials, car care products, electronic circuits and optical films.
| 3M Company | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | NYSE: MMM, SIX Swiss Exchange |
| Industry | Conglomerate: industrial, safety, consumer goods |
| Founded | 13 June 1902, Two Harbors, Minnesota |
| Founder | Henry S. Bryan, Hermon W. Cable, John Dwan, William A. McGonagle, J. Danley Budd |
| Headquarters | Maplewood, Minnesota, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | William Brown (CEO) Michael Roman (executive chairman) |
| Products | Scotch Tape, Post-it Notes, Scotchgard, Nexcare, abrasives, respirators, films |
| Revenue | US$35.4 billion (2021) |
| Employees | Approximately 95,000 (2021) |
| Subsidiaries | 3M India, 3M Japan, 3M Canada |
| Website | 3m.com |
Among its best-known consumer brands are Scotch Tape, Scotchgard surface protectants, Post-it Notes and Nexcare adhesive bandages. The company recorded 35.4 billion dollars in sales in 2021, ranking 102nd on the Fortune 500, with approximately 95,000 employees and operations in more than 70 countries. It has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 9 August 1976.
3M is widely studied as a model of corporate innovation, built on a culture that allowed researchers discretionary time and tolerated commercially unpromising lines of enquiry. The same company has become one of the most heavily litigated manufacturers in the United States, facing multibillion-dollar settlements over per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and over military earplugs.
History
Founding and early years
Five businessmen founded the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company as a mining venture in Two Harbors, Minnesota, making their first sale on 13 June 1902. The intention was to mine corundum, a crystalline form of aluminium oxide used as an abrasive. The venture failed: the mine's holdings turned out to be anorthosite, a feldspar with no commercial value as an abrasive.
The company survived through the persistence of its backers. The co-founder John Dwan solicited funds in exchange for stock, and Edgar Ober and Lucius Ordway took control in 1905. The business moved to Duluth and turned to researching and producing sandpaper. William L. McKnight, later the executive most responsible for the company's character, joined in 1907, and A. G. Bush in 1909. 3M became financially stable only in 1916, when it was first able to pay a dividend.
The company moved to Saint Paul in 1910 and remained there for 52 years before outgrowing the site and relocating to the 3M Center in Maplewood in 1962.
Product development
The pattern of the company's growth was the discovery of new applications for coatings and adhesives, frequently arising from work not directed at the eventual product.
In 1947 3M began producing perfluorooctanoic acid by electrochemical fluorination, an industrial surfactant and chemical feedstock. In 1951 DuPont began buying the compound, which it called C8, for the manufacture of Teflon, a product that was earning DuPont a billion dollars a year by the 1990s. The decision to commercialise fluorochemistry would prove the most consequential in the company's history, though the consequences took half a century to become clear.
The original formula for Scotchgard, a water repellent for fabrics, was discovered accidentally in 1952 by the 3M chemists Patsy Sherman and Samuel Smith. Sales began in 1956, and the two received a patent for the formula in 1973.
In the late 1950s 3M produced the first asthma inhaler, though it did not properly enter pharmaceuticals until the mid-1960s with the acquisition of Riker Laboratories, which it moved from California to Minnesota and whose name it retained until at least 1985. In the mid-1990s the division, by then 3M Pharmaceuticals, produced the first CFC-free asthma inhaler in response to United States adoption of the Montreal Protocol. Fifteen years of work on topical cream delivery technology in the 1980s and 1990s led in 1997 to approval and marketing of Aldara, a symptomatic treatment for genital warts. 3M divested its pharmaceutical unit through three transactions in 2006 for more than two billion dollars; at the time it represented about 20 per cent of the healthcare business and employed just over a thousand people.
The Post-it Note is the most frequently cited example of the company's development culture. 3M launched Press 'n Peel, a sticky bookmark, in four cities in 1977 with disappointing results. A year later it instead distributed free samples directly to consumers in Boise, Idaho, where 95 per cent of those who tried the product said they would buy it. Reintroduced as Post-its in 1979, it went on sale across the United States from 6 April 1980 and launched in Canada and Europe the following year.
Other developments were more obscure. By the 1970s 3M had developed a theatrical blood formula of red colourfast microbeads suspended in a carrier liquid, sold as Nextel Simulated Blood and used in the production of the 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, since discontinued. In the late 1970s 3M Mincom was involved in some of the first commercially released digital audio recordings when a prototype machine was installed at Sound 80 studios in Minneapolis, and in 1979 the company introduced the 3M Digital Audio Mastering System.
Restructuring
3M acquired Comtal, a manufacturer of digital image processors, in 1980.
In 1996 the data storage and imaging divisions were spun off as Imation Corporation. The transaction shed 20 per cent of 3M's sales, employees and product lines at a cost of only five per cent of its profits, and the parent's financial profile improved markedly in the estimation of analysts. The businesses, with annual sales above two billion dollars, had generated substantial profits that funded research across the company, but they operated in declining industries: printing products, photographic film and removable storage media. Imation sold its imaging and photographic film businesses largely to Kodak to concentrate on storage, was bought by a hedge fund in 2016 and ceased to exist as an independent business; its successor is the holding company Glassbridge Enterprises.
Twenty-first century
On 8 April 2002, its centenary, the company changed its legal name to 3M Company.
It acquired Meguiar's, a family-owned car care business, in 2008, Cogent Systems for 943 million dollars in August 2010, Arizant later that year and the Winterthur Technology Group, a bonded abrasives manufacturer, in December 2011. In 2011 it created CloudLibrary within its library systems unit to compete with OverDrive, selling the North American part of that unit to Bibliotheca Group in 2015.
In January 2012 3M agreed to buy the Office and Consumer Products Division of Avery Dennison for 550 million dollars, cancelling the transaction in September that year amid antitrust concerns. In May 2013 it sold Scientific Anglers and Ross Reels to Orvis.
In March 2017 3M purchased Scott Safety, the safety equipment business of Johnson Controls, for two billion dollars. Net sales for 2017 were 31.657 billion dollars, up from 30.109 billion the year before.
Michael F. Roman was appointed chief executive in May 2018. In December that year the company agreed to acquire the technology business of M*Modal for an enterprise value of one billion dollars, and in October 2019 it bought Acelity and its KCI subsidiaries for 6.7 billion dollars including assumed debt.
On 1 May 2020 3M divested substantially all of its drug delivery business to an affiliate of Altaris Capital Partners for approximately 650 million dollars, retaining a 17 per cent interest in the resulting company, Kindeva Drug Delivery. In December 2021 it agreed to merge its food safety business with Neogen at an enterprise value of about 5.3 billion dollars, closing in September 2022.
In July 2022 the company announced that it would spin off its healthcare assets as an independent business, retaining 19.9 per cent and divesting the holding gradually. The company became Solventum Corporation.
In March 2024 3M appointed William Brown, the former chairman and chief executive of L3Harris Technologies, as chief executive from 1 May 2024, with Roman remaining as executive chairman.
Products and patents
As of 2019 3M produced approximately 60,000 products across four business groups: safety and industrial, transportation and electronics, health care and consumer. The company obtained its first patent in 1924, acquires approximately 3,000 new patents a year, and passed the 100,000-patent threshold in 2014.
Its research culture has been widely imitated. The practice of allowing technical staff to devote a portion of their working time to projects of their own choosing, adopted decades before similar schemes at software companies, is credited with producing several of the company's most successful products, including the Post-it Note, which originated in an adhesive that had failed at its intended purpose.
Operations
3M's general offices, corporate research laboratories and some divisional laboratories are in Saint Paul. As of 2017 it operated 80 manufacturing facilities across 29 American states and 125 manufacturing and converting facilities in 37 other countries.
In March 2016 the company completed a 400,000 square foot research and development building on the Maplewood campus at a cost of 150 million dollars, bringing together 700 scientists previously scattered across the site in order to improve collaboration. 3M received 9.6 million dollars in local tax increment financing and relief from state sales taxes toward the development.
The plant at Cynthiana, Kentucky, established in 1969 with 539 employees, produces Post-it Notes across 672 stock-keeping units and Scotch Tape across 147.
Environmental record
3M's Pollution Prevention Pays programme was established in 1975, initially addressing pollution reduction at plant level and extended in 1989 to promote recycling and waste reduction across all divisions. By the early 1990s approximately 2,500 projects under the programme had reduced total global pollutant generation by 50 per cent and saved the company 500 to 600 million dollars by avoiding the production of waste requiring treatment.
During the 1990s and 2000s 3M reduced releases of toxic pollutants by 99 per cent and greenhouse gas emissions by 72 per cent. As of 2012 the Environmental Protection Agency had given the company an Energy Star Award in every year the award had been presented. 3M reported total direct and indirect emissions for the year to 31 December 2020 of 5,280 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, a reduction of 9.4 per cent year on year, with plans to halve emissions by 2030 against a 2019 baseline and to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
This record sits alongside a very different one. In 1983 the Oakdale Dump in Oakdale, Minnesota, a 3M disposal site used through the 1940s and 1950s, was listed as an EPA Superfund site after significant groundwater and soil contamination by volatile organic compounds and heavy metals was uncovered.
Controversies
PFAS contamination
The most serious and sustained controversy concerns per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the fluorochemicals commonly called forever chemicals for their extreme environmental persistence. 3M was the principal American producer of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, and its compounds were used in non-stick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics, firefighting foam and many other products.
The EPA began investigating perfluorinated chemicals in 1999 after receiving data on the global distribution and toxicity of PFOS. 3M announced the phase-out of PFOS, perfluorooctanoic acid and related products in May 2000.
The company's Cottage Grove facility in Minnesota manufactured PFAS from the 1940s to 2002. Its on-site water treatment plant was not capable of removing the compounds, which were released into the Mississippi River. 3M undertook remediation through groundwater pump-out wells and soil sediment excavation, with a clean-up estimate including a granular activated carbon system of 50 to 56 million dollars, funded from a 147 million dollar environmental reserve set aside in 2006.
In late 2010 the state of Minnesota sued 3M for five billion dollars in punitive damages over the release of perfluorochemicals into local waterways. A settlement of 850 million dollars was reached in February 2018. In 2019 3M, together with Chemours and DuPont, appeared before legislators to deny responsibility, the company's senior vice president for corporate affairs Denise Rutherford arguing that the chemicals posed no human health threat at current levels and that there were no victims. The statement was widely criticised, both for its substance and because internal company research dating back decades had documented the persistence and bioaccumulation of the compounds.
Research in 2021 determined that 3M's plant at Zwijndrecht in Belgium had caused PFOS pollution potentially contaminating agricultural products within a 15 kilometre radius, including parts of Antwerp. The Flemish government had paid 63 million euros in clean-up costs against a 3M contribution of 75,000 euros, and issued advice against consuming home-grown eggs within five kilometres of the plant.
In 2023 3M agreed to pay 10.3 billion dollars to settle thousands of lawsuits brought by United States public water systems over PFAS contamination. In December 2022 the company had announced that it would cease producing and using PFAS entirely, a decision taken as governments in the Netherlands and the United States considered action against it.
In May 2026 the Australian government began proceedings against 3M alleging that it had made false statements about the long-term environmental impact of firefighting foam containing PFAS, seeking more than two billion Australian dollars to recover the costs of investigating and managing contamination. The government described it as the largest legal claim it had ever brought. The assistant defence minister Peter Khalil stated that 28 defence sites across Australia had been affected.
Combat Arms earplugs
The Combat Arms Earplugs Version 2 were developed by Aearo Technologies for military and civilian use, a double-ended design that 3M said offered users two different levels of protection. Between 2003 and 2015 they were standard issue to members of the United States military. 3M acquired Aearo in 2008.
In May 2016 the competitor Moldex-Metric filed a whistleblower complaint under the False Claims Act, alleging that 3M had made false claims to the government about the safety of the earplugs and knew the design to be inherently defective. In 2018 3M paid 9.1 million dollars to resolve the allegations without admitting liability.
From 2018 more than 140,000 former users, principally military veterans, filed suit claiming hearing loss, tinnitus and other damage. The litigation became the largest mass tort in United States history by number of claimants. Internal emails disclosed during the proceedings showed company officials noting that the earplugs sold for 7.63 dollars each against a production cost of 85 cents; 3M responded that the price to government included research and development costs.
In August 2023 the company settled approximately 260,000 lawsuits by agreeing to pay six billion dollars to current and former service members.
N95 respirators during the COVID-19 pandemic
3M developed the N95 respirator, approved in 1972. Its ability to filter viral particulates made it central to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but supply was short, much of the company's output having been sold before the outbreak.
The shortages produced a diplomatic dispute. The United States government asked 3M to stop exporting American-made N95 respirators to Canada and to Latin American countries, and President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to require the company to prioritise federal orders. 3M publicly resisted, arguing that halting exports would invite retaliation and would harm countries dependent on its supply. The dispute was resolved when the company agreed to import additional respirators, mostly from its plants in China, and it subsequently struck a 70 million Canadian dollar arrangement with the federal government of Canada and the government of Ontario to produce N95 masks at Brockville, Ontario.
See also
References