3M Hikes Sales Growth Target, CEO Brown Still Wants to ‘Wring Out Capacity’
The leaders of 3M Co. have raised their 2026 forecast for sales growth, saying that good work by sales teams and successful product launches will offset weaker numbers from the conglomerate’s consumer products group.
Chairman and CEO Bill Brown and his team now think St. Paul-based 3M can grow adjusted sales by more than 4.5% this year, with organic sales growing at last 3.5% when excluding PFAS products. Those forecasts are up half a percentage point from late April and come after 3M posted first-half organic sales growth of 3% versus 2.1% in all of 2025. (3M’s net profits during the second quarter came in at $933 million versus $723 million in the prior-year period as sales climbed 2.5% to $6.5 billion.)
Brown analysts on July 21 that his team’s improved outlook reflects confidence in momentum across several of 3M’s key end markets as well as a second-half boost from pricing. He characterized the quickening sales growth as being “a combination of both commercial excellence and innovation excellence, the journey that we’ve been on for two years” and said he’s confident that 3M can grow sales at roughly twice the pace of the broader economy.
“It’s not really a macro tailwind,” Brown added. “The macro on the industrial side looks pretty good but there are some headwinds in the marketplace. It’s mostly just internal performance.”
Another of Brown’s main initiatives since he joined 3M has been to improve operating efficiency, including by selling some small business units and by closing manufacturing plants. (The company finished 2025 with 108 factories and converting facilities around the world, down from 116 at the end of 2024.) Asked by an analyst if that’s still a priority given that some of 3M’s divisions are facing capacity constraints and might need capital investment, Brown was clear about wanting to “wring out capacity.”
“Over time, there might be some capital there,” he said of booming business units. “But overall, utilization is an upside opportunity for us. Fundamentally, understanding utilization […] allows us to then start to look at how do you consolidate between individual assets, cells within a factory and factories themselves. That is the unlock of what we call transformation that’s going to occur over the next three to five years.”
Shares of 3M (Ticker: MMM) jumped more than 7% to nearly $171 after executives’ earnings report and commentary. Year to date, they’re up about that much, which has grown 3M’s market value to more than $89 billion.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has been in business journalism since the mid-1990s and writes about public companies, markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications, focusing on IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal, T&D World and Healthcare Innovation. He also curates the twice-monthly Market Moves Strategy newsletter that showcases Endeavor stories on strategy, leadership and investment and contributes to other Market Moves newsletters.
With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati in 1997, initially covering retail and the courts before shifting to banking, insurance and investing. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal before being named editor of the Nashville Post in early 2008. He led a team that helped grow the Post's online traffic more than fivefold before joining Endeavor in September 2021.