George Buckley
Analyst · Vertical Research Partners
Thank you very much, Matt, and good morning everybody. Thanks for joining us today. We really appreciate it. For the numbers, this was another very good quarter for 3M. Sales rose 14% to $7.7 billion, an all-time high for any quarter in our history. We were on track for $30 billion plus in sales for the year. Operating income was $1.7 billion and margins were nearly 22%, with 5 businesses above 20% for the quarter and the sixth one knocking on the door. We posted earnings per share of $1.60, an all-time record in the second quarter for us, and we returned $1.1 billion in cash to shareholders via a combination of share buybacks and dividends. Free cash flow was $1.2 billion, and we converted 100% of net income to cash in the quarter. What is most impressive is that we achieved these results in a quarter that had more than its fair share of challenges. If you'll recall that in our April earnings report, we described some of the headwinds that we expected would affect the second quarter, and in fact, they played out largely as we expected. We knew the second quarter was going to be the nut hole of the year. And if we could do reasonably well going through it, we'd likely do okay in the balance of the year. For example, in Japan, we expected and outlined that the knock on effects of March's earthquake would be at their worst in the second quarter. They're getting as the year went on. We estimate that this temporarily reduced our sales growth in the quarter by just under 2.5%, margins by 50 basis points and earnings by $0.07 per share. We expect that these impacts will weigh in the second half of the year, and in fact, there is reason for hope beyond that as the reconstruction phase begins. We're also more optimistic on the recovery of insurance claims. Also in the quarter, as we anticipated, we experienced fewer orders for optical films, LCD TVs. The LCD TV business is a cyclic business with the periodicity of about 2 years late over the general economic cycle and it's simply going through one of those down cycles that reflect the inventory corrections, and ultimately a less robust consumer end market. Recall please that last quarter, we describe the LCD deep channel as full, and with about 3 weeks excess inventory on hand. And we know that this always comes pricing attachment rate pressure. This is a business where the retailers make 4% margin with 15% to 20% down price annually or 4%, if you like, in 1 quarter. Retailers and set manufacturers must correct quickly in these situations to stay in business, and in fact, they did respond with sharp production cuts in the second quarter. When they do, it gives us fits and starts. On the whole, our optical films sales declined by 22% in the second quarter, causing a 1.3% drag on organic growth. LCD TV, however, remains a fundamentally good industry, driven by innovation, and OEM seeked to partner with 3M to make that innovation happen. And overall, optical is a fine business with $1.6 billion in annual sales with operating margins in the 20s. However, we do sense some weariness among some of the OEMs, as TV prices begin to approach bottom and the asymptote of total cost in price is reached. I believe in the future, the market will bifurcate or trifurcate into performance, mass and entry markets. There are very definite signs that one or more manufacturers will begin focusing only on the high-performance segment, and ultimately, we're being more value-add, more features, better pricing and some overall stability to the market. This is a market primed for a new entrant with a unique value proposition. But for now, LCD TV is less than 40% of our optical film mix and other applications such as smartphones and tablet PCs continue to grow very nicely. I will start this next part of my talk by reminding listeners that I'm not an economist. But on the economic front, there is no doubt that Q2 data suggests global economic growth moderated. And we felt that within our results. You have to be careful not to let the Japan and Optical issues cloud the 3M data. Beyond those more obvious impacts, it appears that consumer related end markets, particularly consumer electronics, are feeling the effects of stress. With our product to market mix, we tend to see those impacts come and go quite rapidly. As a team, we have a collective view that things were just a little bit harder in Q2, no collapses, no catastrophes, just that bit tighter. We've all seen this economic phenomena before and very clearly so in the last 2 economic cycles. Both recoveries were initially very fast and experienced big jumps in profits, then, too, in oil and commodity prices. Last time, it was also complete by higher interest rates. These various forces plus things like increased consumer savings rates, all impact the consumer's ability to spend money on other things. As these transient ebbs and flows occur, the economy often takes a breather or pause, if you like, as it gradually adjusts to the new realities around costs, interest rates, credit and prices. Economic recoveries are never linear, and along this recovery path line are intermittent periods of slow growth, still growth, mind you, but only slower. This is how we view today's situation. We believe that global economy's in a slow spot for a while, but will reaccelerate again as commodity prices ease, fuel cost reduce and spending is redirected elsewhere in the economy. So nothing has fundamentally changed, and we are well positioned to capitalize on that growth and certainly more so than others. Even with these challenges, we posted double-digit growth in the second quarter in 4 of our 6 businesses, with particular strength in Industrial and Transportation at 25% and Safety and Security and Protection Services at 20%. Organic volumes rose 3.2% for the quarter, impacted, of course, by Japan and H1N1. And without these transient headwinds, volume growth was closer to the 6%. TVs added another 1.3% drag to this total. I do not tell you this on an excuse or exclude basis, I do it solely to help listeners understand the underlying strength in our model remains good. As the coming quarters roll out, Japan's effects will subside and pass. H1N1 is already closer rolling off, and LCD TV will do its normal cyclic thing coming back as innovation producers of new products and consumer spending increases. Currency was, again, a help to us. But even with that benefit, we had 5 or 6 businesses increase their sales in local currencies. Selling prices increased 0.8%, a noticeable improvement versus the first quarter, reflecting a lot of good progress by our business leaders to offset raw material increases. And finally, acquisitions added 4 points of growth year-on-year. So these are the highlights for the quarter. All in all, I'm well pleased with our performance, and please now turn to Slide #4. On last quarter's call, which was shortly after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan. We provided our early review of the potential impact on our business. I thought it would be helpful to provide our latest update today. On the whole, things are progressing about as we expected. From a sales standpoint, demand has been stronger than anticipated in the automotive OEM and also in energy-saving window films used in the construction and repair of residential and consumer -- commercial buildings. Offsetting this to some extent has been consumer electronics, where our OEM customers slow production in the second quarter to work off excess inventories. Weak end market for demand, for LCD TV demand was also a factor. In terms of cleanup and reconstruction, the Japanese government approved 2 budgets totaling $60 billion. From that amount, funds have been released to support temporary housing construction efforts and to partially support the cleanup. There remains a massive amount of debris that needs to be cleaned up before any rebuilding can be done. So it's unclear exactly when that rebuild will begin. But efforts are methodically in motion, which is not surprising given the magnitude and complexity of the required effort in Japan. As things improve, we have of course working to capture additional sales for our businesses. But here, I highlight 3 focus areas in particular. The first relates to cleanup and repair, where we expect to see some nice demand for our Personal Safety products, as well as do-it-yourself consumer goals used to repair homes, buildings and factories. The second area relates to energy savings, namely in the area of energy reusing protective window films. And finally, as the rebuild goes into motion, we expect to see some demand pickup in our infrastructure-related businesses such as traffic signage, telecoms and utility solutions and commercial construction. In the second quarter, we estimate that the earthquake and its aftermath ended up costing us about $160 million in sales, which, as I mentioned, hurt our total company growth rate by 2.4 percentage points. The corresponding loss in pretax[ph] profits was $80 million or about $0.07 per share. These estimates are largely in line with our expectations. It appears that the second quarter will be the worst of it, and we expect a modest $0.01 to $0.02 negative impact in the second half of the year. At this point, these estimates do not include any possible insurance recoveries. This should tell us that we will be successful in recovering a meaningful proportion of these losses, but we have taken a conservative stance at this point, and we'll share more details as the situation in Japan unfolds. Let me quickly take you through the performance of our businesses. If you please now turn to Slide #5. In Industrial and Transportation, which represents over 1/3 of our company, we posted another excellent quarter. Sales increased a whopping 25% to $2.6 billion with all major geographic regions posting double-digit growth. In addition, all units within the business contributed to that growth, reflecting our strategy of broad-based investment and to getting more of our businesses growing. The weak dollar also added to sales, contributing about 7 points of growth in the quarter in TV [ph]. There were some real stars in Industrial and Transportation this quarter. Renewable energy, for example, grew its sales by 61%, so the recent investments we've made in Singapore and elsewhere are really paying off. Abrasives grew its sales by more than 50%, a combination of double-digit organic growth, along with the newly acquired sales from Winterthur, which we bought in March of this year. On a sidenote, for interest, our Cubitron II platform recently won the TechAmerica Foundation's American Technology Award in the manufacturing category, a real achievement by our people. As I stressed many times before, this is proof positive that innovation can be applied everywhere, and it works to differentiate the company no matter how superficially slow, uninteresting or boring a market might seem to be to some people at first blush. Our Aerospace and Aircraft Maintenance business also grew sales by 35%, and in 3M's largest divisions, Industrial, Adhesives and Tapes, sales growth was 25%. The list could go on. Profits in Industrial and Transportation increased 17% and margins were 20.6% for the quarter. Moving to Health Care now, sales rose 14% to $1.3 billion and, if you don't pardon the pun, margins remain very healthy at nearly 29%. Acquisitions contributed 5 points to growth in Health Care, which was largely attributable to our October 2010 acquisition of Arizant, a leader in patient and food warming systems for hospitals. This business continues to exceed top and bottom line objectives and quickly became earnings accretive. So thus far, we like what we see. Lastly, our market leading Littmann brand, electronic stethoscope was used on the space shuttle to transmit astronaut's heart sounds to earth. It's a very nice exposure for this important new product platform in Health Care. In Consumer and Office, sales increased 9% for the year, about half organic and half due to currency. We're doing all regions of the world with particular strength in Latin America at 23% growth, and Asia Pacific at 21% growth. Europe also drove 20% plus growth, also caused by currency, but still the business drove mid-single-digit organic growth in that region. U.S. growth was 1% year-on-year, comparable to the results from most major retailers and influenced by low consumer confidence levels and persistently high unemployment. I have pointed out in the past, and it's still true today that consumer companies in general are struggling to grow. So comparatively, our results are quite good. Our consumers in many places are strapped. Encompass in general is low. Our team continues to find new opportunities to expand the business. Profits in Consumer and Office declined 4% in the quarter, reflect the continuing ongoing investments in new products, brand development, marketing sales coverage in developing economies. These investments are delivering hugely accelerated growth in China, for example, where sales increased 51% in the second quarter, and in India, which grew its Consumer and Office sales by 29%. This, I think, bodes very well for the future. But even with these investments, Consumer and Office generated close to 20% operating margins in the second quarter. I should also mention that just this past week, we announced the acquisition of the do-it-yourself and professional business of GPI Group. This deal will give us an excellent array of complimentary products from brands in the area of DIY tapes, hooks, insulation and floor protection products, and importantly, will be become a critical beachhead for our DIY business in Western Europe. I know sales here are just under EUR 100 million. And we expect the deal to close sometime in the fourth quarter. Turning now to Safety, Security and Protection Services, sales rose an impressive 20% in the quarter, including about 7 points from currency. All geographic regions generated double-digit sales growth, with particular strength in Latin America at 32% and Asia Pacific at 24%. Worldwide organic growth in this business was north of 5%, despite a near 3-point drag for H1N1 related comparisons. On the other hand, we saw some additional sales of personal and protective equipment related to the cleanup efforts in Japan. Less than the loss of H1N1, it helped the growth rate regardless. Operating profit increased 23% and margins were a strong 24% for the quarter. Moving now to Display and Graphics, second quarter results were $973 million in sales, a decline of 7% year-on-year. Operating income was $222 million, and margins were just shy of 23% for the quarter. As I mentioned, optical was the biggest driver of the sales decline, with LCD TV related declines, partially offset by continued strength in smartphones and tablet PCs. On the new product front, optical recently introduced a family of new film solutions for tablet applications. They increase both brightness, enhance outdoor viewing and reduce the overall thickness of the backlight films. So while the LCD TV space may be tough at the moment, the pace of innovation never really slows. Elsewhere in Display and Graphics, sales increased year-on-year in commercial graphics and architectural markets. Traffic Safety Systems also had positive second quarter sales growth, albeit all currency related. So underlying growth was down slightly in that business. Highway construction spending remains soft in both U.S. and Western Europe, but we'll begin to flow eventually, but we're not counting on it from a planning perspective. Finally, Electro and Communications had another very good quarter. Sales rose 14% to $864 million. Operating income was also increased 14% to $200 million, and margins were still at 23.1%. We, again, posted double-digit local currency growth in our electronics markets materials business, driven by solutions for semiconductor and consumer electronics, most notably tablet PCs. We continue to see this as an attractive area to invest, and in fact, during the quarter, we opened a new temporary wafer bonding application lab in Taiwan for 3D integrated circuits and ultrathin wafer handling. We also posted strong double-digit sales growth in the electrical markets business, which serves the power utility and infrastructure markets. Our team here was energized by yet another win in the area of high-voltage overhead power contractors, or ACCR as we call it. A major Brazilian unit utility just installed 3M's ACCR in Sao Paulo coastal area, which represents the 7th application to date in South America. ACCR will turn about $40 million in profitable sales this year, and we are excited about its potential in the future. This is a quick summary of our business segments. Now I plan to turn the call over to David. David?