“In all candor, we haven’t seen it in our numbers.”
In his typical jargon-free style, Fastenal Co. CEO Dan Florness on Jan. 20 said the broader industrial economy is unlikely to do the distributor of fastener and other manufacturing and construction supplies many favors in 2026. Despite some indicators—including the Federal Reserve’s Industrial Production Index—suggesting the factory sector is beginning to ramp up. After several rough years and Fastenal’s fourth-quarter daily sales rate climbing 11% from late 2024, Florness said the overall picture for the first part of this year remains mixed at best.
“If there’s a green shoot or two that’s popping up, we welcome it,” Florness said on a conference call discussing Fastenal’s Q4 results. “It’d be nice to have the market give us a little lift as opposed to the Fastenal organization doing it solo.”
3M Co. Chairman and CEO Bill Brown is on the same page. Talking to analysts after his team—which is based in St. Paul, roughly 100 miles northwest of Fastenal headquarters in Winona, Minnesota—reported its Q4, Brown said executives are closely watching several key end markets for the conglomerate. Among them are automotive (Brown called recent data points “not so good across all of the regions”) and consumer electronics (“a little bit more flattish”).
Those readings have led the 3M team to assume that industrial production in the United States won’t grow this year and that output in China will grow 4% compared to 6% last year.
“We expect the macro in 2026 to be a little bit better at 1.5%, maybe 1.7% range, something like that,” Brown said.
Executives at both Fastenal and 3M have been leaning on various tactics to stay ahead of those tepid macroeconomic numbers. At Fastenal, Florness and his team have focused their sales energy on customers that buy at least $10,000 per month of goods: Year over year, the number of those clients rose nearly 9% to more than 10,700. The 3M team has hammered on both operational efficiencies and rolling out new products to drive up sales, which rose 2.7% in 2025.
The initiatives at 3M, most of them launched when Brown took over as CEO nearly two years ago, have leaders targeting organic sales growth of 3% this year—up from 2.1% in 2025—and pacing ahead of their target to generate $1 billion in sales more than their overall markets by the end of 2027. But, like Florness, Brown won’t turn down a helping hand from the broader economy.
“I feel really good about the trajectory we’re on and the momentum we’re building here,” Brown said. “This is really, I think, moving the needle. With a little market tailwind, we’ll see even greater pickup.”
