3M Earnings Call Insights: Industrial Dynamic, Security and Transportation

3M Co (NYSE:MMM) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Industrial Dynamic

David Begleiter – Deutsche Bank: Inge, just on Industrial sequentially sales declined $73 million, but operating profit declined $106 million sequentially. Can you just describe exactly what drove that dynamic Q3 versus Q4 in Industrial?

Inge G. Thulin – Chairman, President and CEO: We have some businesses that do well and continue to do well like automotive did well. I think one of the impact is the RED business that we had an issue with and have had during the whole year. And the way we look upon RED is that is relatively small division for us, generally speaking, it is a $400 million business and you can look upon the segment that as segments; one, conservation and one generation and conservation is like the window film for us that was type of flat and on generation side which is wind and solar, as you know, on the global market that is declining market. So, we were down in that side. So, I think, that was a big piece for us during the quarter for Industrial in total.

David W. Meline – SVP and CFO: If I could, David. As we look at Industrial performance in the quarter the sales were quite reasonable in terms of 4% growth year-on-year. Certainly Q4, we always see a decline in activity including margins and as you know as we called out we were also impacted by the cost in Ceradyne.