3M Company (NYSE:MMM) Goldman Sachs Industrials and Materials Conference Call December 5, 2024 8:40 AM ET
Company Participants
Bill Brown – Chief Executive Officer
Anurag Maheshwari – Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Joe Ritchie – Goldman Sachs
Joe Ritchie
All right. We’re ready to kick it off with the second track today. Really excited to have 3M here. There’s been a lot going on, on stage with us. We’ve got Bill Brown, who’s Chief Executive Officer; Anurag Maheshwari, EVP and CFO; and then, Chinmay Trivedi just joined us, took over — he’s taking over the IR function to start the year. So thank you all for joining us today.
Bill Brown
Great. Thanks for having us.
Joe Ritchie
Yes. Great to see you guys. So look, lots of changes over the past year. Bill, maybe just kind of talk about your first 7 months at 3M. How do you see the company fundamentally changing from here and we’ll take the conversation from there.
Bill Brown
Okay. Well, first of all, good morning, everybody. It’s great to be here. We had a good start to the year to start meaning it’s almost — it’s December. So it’s moving very quickly but now about 7 or so months in the job earnings per share this year were up about 30% so far through Q3 year-to-date, organic revenue about 1% but margins were up 380 basis points. So a pretty good start to the year. Free cash flow was $3.5 billion; 102% of income. So it’s a very strong cash generation. We returned $2.7 billion to shareholders, including $1.1 billion worth of share buybacks in Q2 as well as in Q3.
We took the opportunity in the last release to raise our guidance at the bottom end by $0.20. So