3M Company (NYSE: MMM) Q1 2026 Earnings Call dated Apr. 21, 2026
Corporate Participants:
Chinmay Trivedi — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
William Brown — Chief Executive Officer
Anurag Maheshwari — Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Jeff Sprague — Analyst
Scott Davis — Analyst
Julian Mitchell — Analyst
Joe O’Dea — Analyst
Andrew Obin — Analyst
Andrew Kaplowitz — Analyst
Chigusa Katoku — Analyst
Nigel Coe — Analyst
Chris Snyder — Analyst
Unidentified Participant
Deane Dray — Analyst
Nicole DeBlase — Analyst
Laurence Alexander — Analyst
Presentation:
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing-by. Welcome to the 3M First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]
I would now like to turn the call over to Chinmay Trivedi, Senior Vice-President of Investor Relations and Financial Planning and Analysis at 3M.
Chinmay Trivedi — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter earnings conference call. With me today are Bill Brown, 3M’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Anurag Maheshwari, our Chief Financial Officer. Bill and Anurag will make some formal comments, then we will take your questions. Please note that today’s earnings release and slide presentation accompanying this call are posted on the homepage of our Investor Relations website at 3m.com. Please turn to slide two and take a moment to read the forward-looking statements.
During today’s conference call, we will be making certain predictive statements that reflect our current views about 3M’s future performance and financial results. These statements are based on certain assumptions and expectations of future events that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Item 1A of our most recent Form 10-K lists some of these most important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from our predictions. Please note, throughout today’s presentation, we’ll be making references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures can be found in the attachments to today’s press release.
With that, please turn to slide three and I will hand the call-off to Bill. Bill?
William Brown — Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Chinmay, and good morning, everyone. We delivered solid operating performance in Q1 with earnings per share of $2.14, up mid-teens versus last year. Operating margin increased 30 basis-points to 23.8% and free cash flow was over $500 million, up double-digits. During the quarter, we returned $2.4 billion to shareholders, including $400 million in dividends and $2 billion of share repurchases. We had a light start to the year on the top-line with organic growth of 1.2%, driven by pockets of macro pressure, but we saw encouraging order trends that support our outlook for acceleration in the balance of the year. Looking forward, we remain confident in achieving our full-year 2026 guidance despite the volatile environment.
Our performance reflects strong execution on productivity, cost discipline and commercial rigor. We’re building a stronger foundation based on commercial, innovation and operational excellence, underpinned by a relentless focus on strengthening our performance culture. In commercial excellence, we’re seeing benefits from improved sales effectiveness and lower customer attrition, and we continue to make progress on cross-selling opportunities. To date, we’ve closed on approximately $80 million of new business against the three year $100 million target we laid out at Investor Day, with a pipeline of $85 million of additional cross-sell opportunities. We’ve introduced AI tools to drive growth, reduce churn and automate manual work, including an agent that analyzes our sales and opportunity pipeline data to develop customized coaching plans for sales managers to help reps meet their targets. And we believe digital tools like Ask 3M, a new AI-powered digital assistant that helps customers find solutions to design challenges using 3M products will allow us to reach a broader population of customers.
Our pace of new product introductions is accelerating with better on-time performance, reduced cycle times and clear governance and accountability across R&D. We launched 84 new products in Q1, up 35% versus last year, and we’re on pace to launch 350 in 2026. This will put us ahead of our Investor Day target to launch 1,000 new products through 2027. We’ve maintained O2 service levels above 90%, while at the same time reduced inventory by three days and delivery lead-time by 25%, improving our competitiveness with customers. OEE improved over 100 basis-points year-on-year as we optimize asset run length, run-time and changeovers, creating a stronger foundation for sustained productivity and fixed-cost leverage. And cost of per quality decreased by approximately 100 basis-points versus Q1 last year, driven by more structured root cause analysis, significantly increased Kaizen activity and tighter process controls.
What matters is that these are not isolated wins. They collectively reflect greater execution discipline and constancy of purpose and that consistency and momentum gives us confidence that we can meet or exceed the medium-term goals we outlined at our Investor Day last year, even in an uncertain macro-environment. While we continue to strengthen our foundation and shift from a holding company to an operating company model, we’re beginning a broad-based transformation of the company, simplifying and standardizing processes, reducing complexity, reshaping our portfolio and improving resilience and predictability. We see substantial opportunities to streamline operations and consolidate facilities. The transformation includes both deliberate footprint actions, as well as targeted investments in manufacturing and process technology. For example, transitioning from solvent to solvent-free coding, which brings cost, capital and environmental benefits.
Earlier this month, we closed on the previously-announced sale of our precision grinding and finishing business within SIBG, which reduced our footprint by seven factories and we closed one factory and announced three other full or partial closures, bringing our total projected manufacturing site count to below 100. At the same time, we’re investing more than $250 million over the next three years in standard, easy to replicate automation across our plants and distribution centers. By automating material handling in our warehouses, replacing manual slitters with automated systems and automating our current manual visual inspection processes, we are improving safety, reducing labor costs, increasing yield and putting ourselves in a better position to support demand as volumes recover.
To illustrate the opportunity, we have 7,000 material handlers and over 600 operators performing manual visual inspections across our network and about 500 manual sliders. When we automated the slidding operation at our Nevada facility late last year, we achieved a 30% increase in square yards per hour productivity. Over-time, this transformation will allow us to accelerate towards a structurally higher-growth, higher-margin potential portfolio of priority verticals.
Slide four provides a more detailed view of growth and orders by end-market. When you look across our portfolio, roughly 60% of our businesses showed relative strength in Q1, including general industrial and safety. Importantly, we also saw strong orders in these markets, which gives us visibility and reinforces that the demand environment in these verticals remains healthy. At the same time, we experienced macro and industry-driven softness in about 40% of the portfolio that we’ve been highlighting as watch areas. In electronics, we delivered flat year-over-year growth in Q1 versus mid-single digits last year. Our performance in semiconductor and data centers was very strong, while consumer electronics was soft due to industry-wide memory chip issues, which is impacting demand.
Electronics orders were up double-digits due to significant activity in semis and data centers, which will convert to revenue in Q2 and the second-half. In automotive, the market was soft as expected in the first quarter. Global IHS build rates were down about 3% overall and 10% in China, which pressured volumes. And in consumer, we continue to see soft US consumer discretionary spending with a few pockets of strength in categories with recent new product introductions. POS trends in the US improved over the course of the quarter and were positive in seven of the last eight weeks, providing some encouragement heading into Q2. Overall, orders were up slightly over 10% in Q1 and backlog grew double digits, both sequentially and year-over-year, giving us momentum into Q2. This strength reflects the combined impact of our new product introductions, continued progress in commercial excellence and orders for longer lead-time products with some additional benefit from pre-buying ahead of recent price actions. It’s encouraging to see order strength continue into the first few weeks of April.
Turning to slide five. As part of our ongoing focus on portfolio shaping, last month, we announced the acquisition of Madison Fire & Rescue, which will be combined with our Scott Safety business to create a leading global fire and safety business. The combination of Scott Safety’s premium self-contained breathing apparatus with Madison Fire & Rescue’s premier portfolio in rescue technology and fire suppression creates an $800 million revenue business, growing at high single-digit growth rate. This strategic transaction broadens our safety portfolio, one of our priority verticals by expanding our market reach and building scale for future growth. It positions us to maintain above market growth, enhance margins and drive strong free cash flow generation.
I also want to highlight our growing data center and associated power utility business with current revenue of approximately $600 million. $100 million inside the data center and about $500 million bringing power to the facility. This is a priority vertical space where we are introducing new products like EBO or Expanded Beam Optics, a high-performance optical connector engineered to improve installation speed, reliability and operational efficiency within data centers. EBO builds on our existing twin ex copper connector for high-speed data transmission and positions us well for the copper to fiber transition underway.
With hyperscaler validation, a significant order in-hand and $1 billion-plus addressable market, we’re investing to more than double our capacity to support growing AI demand. We see additional opportunities here as demand expands to ceramics, silicon photonics and on-chip optical connectors. We have strong IP to support this evolving market and a clear roadmap to develop new products that further drive growth. Overall, I’m pleased with our progress this quarter, encouraged by the pace, op-tempo and executional rigor of the 3M team. We’re on a multi-year journey and progress won’t be linear, but we’re building a capability to execute consistently to innovate with purpose and to allocate resources toward the parts of the portfolio that deliver the most value. I’m grateful to the 3M team for their commitment, hard work and focus as we deliver progress every day.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Anurag to share the details of the quarter. Anurag?
Anurag Maheshwari — Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Bill. Turning to slide six, we had a good start to the year, performing ahead of expectations on orders, margins, earnings, and cash. Starting with top line, we delivered organic sales growth of 1.2%. SIBG showed continued momentum and grew over 3%, slightly better than expectations. TBG was flat, lighter than expectations due to ongoing weakness in certain end markets like consumer electronics and auto, as well as late timing of order intake within the quarter. In CBG, we did not see the expected recovery in the U.S. consumer market, resulting in organic sales down 1%. Notably, we saw significant strength in orders this quarter, driven by progress on commercial excellence and NPI. Overall, orders grew slightly more than 10%, with SIBG and TBG growing mid-teens, driven by industrials, safety, data center, semiconductor, and aerospace.
The order momentum accelerated through the quarter, resulting in backlog growth of 20% over last year and 35% sequentially, positioning us well for the second quarter. First quarter adjusted operating margins were 23.8%, up 30 basis points year-on-year driven by strong volume and broad-based productivity, which more than offset approximately $145 million of tariff impact, stranded costs, and investments. Operating income from the three Business Groups was up $85 million, with 60 basis points of margin expansion driven by supply chain productivity, including improvements in cost of quality and procurement and logistics, and continued focus on structural G&A reduction. Corporate was a 30 basis point headwind from planned wind down of Solventum transition services agreements. Our sustained operational performance of driving growth and productivity led to EPS improvement of $0.26 or 14% to $2.14. In addition, we benefited from lower share count, timing of tax benefit and FX, offsetting tariffs, stranded costs, and investments. Adjusted free cash flow was $540 million in the quarter, or up 10% from strong earnings growth and improvement in inventory, a decrease of three days while maintaining service levels of greater than 90%. In addition, we returned $2.4 billion to shareholders in the first quarter, including approximately $400 million in dividends, reflecting a 7% increase per share and $2 billion through opportunistic share repurchases.
Turning to slide seven, I will provide an overview of our Business Groups performance for the first quarter. First, Safety and Industrial add another quarter of 3%+ growth as we continue to gain traction on commercial excellence initiatives and realize benefits from new product launches. We delivered mid-single-digit growth across industrial adhesives and tapes, safety, electrical markets, and abrasive systems driven by continued share gains from new product introductions and targeted commercial initiatives to reduce customer churn, strengthen sales coverage, and increase cross-selling. Collectively, this growth more than offset continued weakness in roofing granules as the housing market and consumer sentiment remained soft. Even though auto repair claims were down mid-single digits, it was encouraging to see our auto aftermarket business be flat to slightly up after a couple of years of decline from good execution of the key account strategy.
Turning to Transportation and Electronics. While growth was flat, orders were up low teens accelerating through the quarter, resulting in backlog up about 30%. Approximately half the business delivered mid-single digits growth, including double-digit growth in semiconductor and data center, driven by continued market demand and ramp-up of EBO that Bill referenced earlier. In addition, we saw growth in aerospace and commercial branding from better sales effectiveness. This was offset by the other half of the business, which is exposed to consumer electronics and auto, where the market was down. Finally, Consumer first quarter organic sales were down 1%, driven by weakness in USAC, as we did not see the expected pickup in retail traffic in the early part of the quarter. We did see pockets of strength. Scotch-Brite grew approximately 10% on the back of new product launches. We also saw good traction in international markets, especially in China and Asia, but it was not enough to offset the impact of USAC, which makes up majority of the CBG revenue.
By geography, in China, we again grew mid-single digits despite soft auto and consumer electronics end market, as we executed on our key account strategy and launched local NPIs in a relatively strong industrial market. USAC was up slightly with mid-single-digit growth in industrials being offset by softness in electronics and consumer. Asia had another quarter of good growth with India in the high teens as we drove higher sales coverage across the country. EMEA was down about 1% due to market weakness in auto.
Moving to slide eight. Though the macro remains uncertain, given our good performance in the first quarter, we are reiterating our guidance for the year. Organic sales growth of approximately 3%, earnings per share ranging from $8.50 to $8.70, and free cash flow conversion of greater than 100%. For sales, the strong backlog, combined with continued strength in orders in the first three weeks of April, gives us confidence that all three Business Groups will accelerate growth in the second quarter and through the balance of the year. On margins, we had a solid start with the three Business Groups growing 60 basis points despite 100 basis points year-on-year tariff impact. As we lap tariff pressure in the second half, the continued momentum on productivity and volume acceleration gives us confidence in our expectation of approximately 100 basis points margin expansion for Business Groups this year. On non-operational, we expect positive trends driven by a $2 billion share repurchase in the first quarter and lower net interest expense. Overall, we are maintaining our EPS guidance, which includes a contingency, and we will go through the components of the earnings bridge on the next slide.
Given the strong earnings growth and good progress on working capital, particularly inventory and continued capex efficiency, we believe our free cash flow will be more than $4.5 billion for the year and greater than 100% conversion. Slide 9 shows the trend of key earnings elements and the current guidance. We are trending $0.05-$0.15 higher on earnings from momentum on productivity and lower share count and interest expense. We are facing higher input costs due to the recent increase in oil price, but have implemented targeted price increases to mitigate the impact at the current levels. Given that we are early in the year and we are operating in a volatile macro environment, we think it is prudent to keep a contingency till we have more clarity about the rest of the year.
Overall, we are moving with determined pace and will continue to calibrate as the year progresses. Regarding cadence, we expect sales growth to accelerate in Q2 and the back half of the year. Backlog conversion and continued order strength is expected to support growth momentum in both SIBG and TBG in the second quarter. We anticipate consumer to improve as point of sale is on an upward trend, resulting in normalized inventory levels. On EPS, given the contingencies for the second half, we expect the first half EPS to be higher than the second half. Our 2026 financial outlook puts us on pace to exceed our medium-term financial commitments that we laid out during Investor Day around growth, margin, and cash. On capital allocation, we have already returned over $7 billion of the $10 billion shareholder returns that we had committed to. Before we open the call for questions, I want to take a minute to thank the team for a strong start to the year and being proactive in this environment to mitigate risks and control the controllable, and for the commitment to strengthen the foundation and drive profitable growth.
With that, let’s open the call for questions.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jeff Sprague with Vertical Research. Please proceed with your question.
Jeff Sprague
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Hey, Bill or Anurag. Just trying to dig into the order commentary a little bit more. Maybe you could give us a little more perspective on the pre-buy, the size of it, if you could, and I guess the pre-buy would imply getting ahead of price increases and the like. Maybe a little bit of color on how much additional price is now embedded in your organic growth forecast. Just also on these backlog numbers, obviously the deltas sound great, but it’s not really a backlog business. Kind of the question, is it law of small numbers on those deltas, or is there actually significant visibility that you can anchor to as you look into Q2?
William Brown
Hey, Jeff. Good morning. Thank you for the question. I’ll start and maybe pass on to Anurag on the backlog point. As we said, we had very good orders in the first quarter, up double digits, which was very good. You’re right, we’re not really a backlog-driven business, but backlog was very strong coming out of Q1 and continues to build into Q2. Over the course of the quarter, we saw good order growth in January and February, kind of up mid-single digits, but it accelerated quite a bit in the month of March. It’d be well over the double digit number that we ascribed for the whole quarter, and it continues into April, which I think is very encouraging. Now, how much is price? The reality is we do a price increase every year on April 1st, so it’s hard to discern how much was a pre-buy. We think there’s some of it. We’ve signaled to customers that we’re going ahead with a price increase on top of what we went out with April 1st, associated with the price of oil coming up. That could cause a little bit of a pre-buy, if you will. Again, it’s hard to discern exactly how much would that be. You asked about price for the year. For the year, we had guided before at about 80 basis points. We came in a little bit below that in Q1.
We still see, outside of oil-based increases, around 80 basis points. When you add in oil and the expected price increase from oil, it could be around an extra 50 basis points, is what we’re thinking at the moment, so price for the year, around 1.3 points.
I will let Anurag share a little bit about the backlog.
Anurag Maheshwari
Yeah. Thanks, Bill. You are right that we are largely a book and ship business. About 75% of our revenue in a quarter comes from book and ship. We do get backlog coverage as we enter the quarter. The numbers that we mentioned, which was about 35% up sequentially to 20% year-over-year, provides us about 400-500 basis points of additional coverage as we enter into the quarter, which is not insignificant given the growth acceleration that we expect from Q1 and Q2. I think it’s really good to kind of see that we are starting with a very good backlog coverage for the quarter, combined with the order momentum that Bill spoke about in the first 3 weeks of April. It gives us real confidence for acceleration of growth through second quarter. Typically, we do not talk about orders and sales because of the book and ship, because they converge together. This time you could see the big spike, and as Bill mentioned, part of it could be the pre-buy, but a lot of it is the commercial excellence, NPI, and other initiatives that we are driving, which resulted in order acceleration.
Jeff Sprague
Great. Maybe just a quick follow-up then. Just a comment about then accelerating in the remainder of the year. By that, do you mean each quarter will be a faster growth quarter than the one that preceded it, even though the comps are getting tougher in the back half of the year?
William Brown
Yeah, we see Q2 being better than Q1, and we see the second half being better than the first half, is the way we’re currently looking at it, Jeff.
Jeff Sprague
Great. Thank you very much.
William Brown
You bet.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Scott Davis with Melius Research. Please proceed with your question.
Scott Davis
Good morning, everybody.
William Brown
Good morning, Scott.
Scott Davis
Just to follow up on Jeff’s question, are customer inventories low and there’s a little bit of a restock occurring, or are they balanced? How do you guys kind of see that element right now?
William Brown
We track it pretty carefully. On the Safety Industrial Business Group, the distribution inventory is relatively normal. I’d say maybe a tick below what we typically would see. We would typically see 65-70 days, and it’s a bit below that. On the consumer side, it’s about normalized from where we were last year, around 13 weeks of supply. Coming into the year was a bit higher, maybe 13.5, but right now we’re around 13. On the consumer side, fairly normal. On the Safety Industrial side, I’d say normal to maybe a bit light in the channel.
Scott Davis
Okay. Helpful. Hey, I think you mentioned your factory footprint is down like 10%. Is there another 10%? How do you guys kind of think of where the endpoint on that journey is?
William Brown
We’re going to keep talking about this with investors as we go forward. At the end of last year, we had 108. We sold and closed on PG and half the Precision Grinding business, which was 7 factories scattered across Europe, 1 in Asia, a couple in the U.S. It was not a large business, but a big factory footprint. That brought it down by 7. We closed 1 in the first quarter. We announced a couple of others. That’ll close over the course of this year into next year. That puts us below 100. The number will be below where we happen to be today. We’ll continue to look at that and size it for investors as we go. Clearly the footprint at just under 100 is bigger than we really need today.
Scott Davis
Okay. Best of luck, guys. Thank you.
William Brown
You bet.
Scott Davis
Appreciate it.
William Brown
You bet.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Julian Mitchell with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.
Julian Mitchell
Hi. Good morning. Just wanted to start maybe if you could give any color around the second quarter dynamics in a bit more detail. Understand the organic sales growth accelerates year-on-year from the 1% in Q1. Also, I think, Anurag, you’d said first half EPS more than second half because of the contingency. Just want to gauge sort of how much sequentially or year-on-year EPS could grow in Q2, and what the sort of margin embedded in that guide would be.
Anurag Maheshwari
Sure, Julian. Let me answer those questions. First, just on the revenue growth. As we mentioned, because of the good backlog and the order momentum, we expect organic growth in the second quarter to be higher than 3%, with all the three BGs accelerating. SIBG, which was at 3.2%, obviously going higher than that. TBG, low single digit, and CBG flat to positive. So, that’s the expectation on the revenue growth acceleration. Obviously, that’s going to come with high flow-throughs. We’re going to continue with the productivity that we did in the first quarter. We’ll continue to the second quarter. Between volume and productivity, we’ll offset all the last quarter of the tariff year-over-year impact for us, a pickup in stranded costs and investments. You will see operationally for us, it’s going to be a solid margin, about 24.5% and a good EPS flow-through coming from that.
On below the line, we will see a couple of pennies of headwind relative to last year. Last year, in the second quarter, we had a divestment of an investment that we had in India, which was about $0.08-$0.10. You see a little bit of tax, which was favorable in Q1, coming back in Q2. Those are two headwinds. Of course, they’ll be offset by the share buyback, which we did in the first quarter, which is going to help us in the second quarter, plus a little bit on the non-op pension side. You put all of that together, we should grow more than $0.05 in the second quarter, which for the first half would put us at about $0.30+ of EPS growth, which is more than half if you include the contingency for the full year.
Now, the contingency, as I mentioned, we kept it for the second half of the year, depending on how things evolve. If we continue performing the way we do, revenue grows over 3% in the second quarter, which is a good exit rate as we enter into the second half. If it continues at that a little bit better, with good volume flow through, no tariff headwind, the margins in the second half could be much higher than the first half. Yeah.
Julian Mitchell
I appreciate all the color. Just one very quick follow-up. That was very thorough. Maybe on the pre-buy dynamics, credit for calling that out, but trying to understand what you’re assuming for how much that sort of reverses, because you’ve got organic sales growth accelerating in Q2 with maybe some sort of, I don’t know if a pre-buy is helping that or the unwind hurts that. Maybe flesh out that pre-buy sort of dynamic over the balance of the year.
William Brown
Julian, it’s hard to discern exactly how much is pre-buy. We had orders coming in. It’s quite strong. We are seeing much better traction on new product introductions. A lot of momentum building on commercial excellence. Keep in mind, part of what was driving Q1 growth, including into early April, are some longer lead products that will go into semis, more importantly in data centers, delivering in Q2 in the back end of the year. You have all these factors in there. I think when I step back and look at the full year, as we said, we’ll see acceleration into Q2 and then in the back half and all these pieces to come together. Any pre-buy that’s happened will wash out in Q2. We do see acceleration in the back half on the back of really core operating fundamentals around NPI and commercial excellence.
Julian Mitchell
Great. Thank you.
William Brown
You bet.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Joe O’Dea with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
Joe O’Dea
Hi. Good morning.
William Brown
Good morning.
Joe O’Dea
On the $0.05-$0.15 of contingency tied to oil macro uncertainty, can you just outline kind of roughly how you think about the split on the demand side versus the cost side of that in your planning assumptions? Really looking for any color on the oil exposure sort of across the business and where you’re thinking about that contingency could flow through if you need to use it.
Anurag Maheshwari
Okay. Let me start with the contingency and then Bill, you can add from there on. On the $0.05-$0.15 of contingency that we kept is actually across the two buckets that you mentioned around here. As I mentioned, second quarter will be above 3%, which is a good exit rate as we go into the second half. If there is a little bit of an impact on the volume piece because of macro, which we are not currently seeing right now, or a little bit of the input cost that goes up. I guess it gets spread between the two, Joe. To be honest, our objective right now is to continue driving what we control on the NPI commercial excellence, continue to outperform the macro and drive more productivity so that we don’t have to use the contingency in the second half.
William Brown
Joe, on the oil price, the way we look at it is really two pieces. One is on the supply side, the other is demand. On supply side, we have about 45% of our cost of goods is raw materials, and about a third of that, so it’s about $6 billion of raw material spend, and about a third of that is its basis in petrochem. It’s ethylenes, propylenes, esters, acrylates, all those various things, and we are seeing some upward cost pressure on that. What we’ve seen so far and expect is about $125 million of cost increase there, which we’re offsetting into pricing. That’s why I mentioned earlier on that we expect about a 50 basis point uplift on price coming from that oil-based exposure. How that affects the overall macroeconomy, what’s going to happen with consumer spending, auto, that’s still all unfolding as we speak, and depending upon what happens in the Middle East, but that’s our current assumption as we speak today.
Joe O’Dea
Got it. Just on the Transportation & Electronics Commercial Excellence Program, can you talk about where you are on that trajectory? I think you started to see traction in SIBG last year, and that continues. Just the efforts that are underway, and as we think about the growth acceleration, just any quantification of how you’re thinking about commercial excellence contributing to better T&E growth as you move through the year.
William Brown
Yeah. It’s a good question. They’re doing a great job on this. They’re following right behind what we’ve done in SIBG, which has been very successful. I’m very pleased with the traction on the sales force, on pricing discipline, on cross-selling, on churn reduction, and looking very hard at attrition with the predictive AI models that we have in place. The team at TEBG is doing the same sorts of things. I think the cross-sell opportunity is not going to be as robust. They move very aggressively on improving on the sales force and better incentives, better targeting, more close one targets. They’re tracking attrition rates, which I think is very good. They have the same predictive models tailored for TEBG into that business. They’re making good progress. It’s going to roll out over the balance of the year.
One of the key things they’re focused on is making sure we have the right mix and focus of our sales reps versus application engineers. Do we have the right mix between the two, and are they calling at the right level in the customer, for example, in automotive, at the OE versus the tier? It’s a little bit different than what we see in SIBG, but they’re working it pretty hard, and I think you’re going to see in the back end of the year, certainly improvements in TEBG coming from a lot of that commercial excellence work.
Joe O’Dea
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Obin with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
William Brown
Good morning, Andrew.
Andrew Obin
Good morning.
Anurag Maheshwari
Good morning.
Andrew Obin
On the transportation electronics, just to dig in a little bit further, also double-digit orders. It seems like a lot of questions into the quarter about weakness in consumer electronics. Does that mean that we are offsetting consumer electronics into the second half?
William Brown
Yes, Andrew, that’s exactly what’s happened and will happen, in fact. Again, when you discern with TEBG, just in Q1, they were flattish, but half the business was up mid-single digits and half the business was down mid-single digits. You can really isolate that in the two areas, which is auto, OE and commercial vehicles, and consumer electronics. We show in our slides that electronics as a whole is flattish. What you see there is very strong semiconductor data center business offsetting a weaker consumer electronics business. As we look at the balance of the year, we see electronics starting to get modestly positive. Again, I think CE or consumer electronics may soften a little bit, but we are seeing better trajectory and growth in the data center and the semiconductor business.
Andrew Obin
Bill, just to follow up on that. At CES, you showcased some pivot in strategy on consumer electronics. You’ve also talked with your first analyst day about the need to rebuild the R&D pipeline, particularly on the electronic side. Can you just talk about how these two internal initiatives impacting your growth and the growth trajectory over the next 12 months, let’s say? Thank you.
William Brown
Yeah, that’s a great question. We’re putting a lot of time and effort into making sure we have good new product introductions in consumer electronics, both for the premium segment as well as for the mainstream segment. Wendy’s been talking about this quite a bit. We are seeing good traction here. Unfortunately, the market isn’t cooperating with us. We do see a greater downturn in LCD, which is where our strength happens to be. We do see a lot of innovation in this space. We are gaining some share modestly in the mainstream side. We look at content per device. Three of four China OEMs have increased their content per device in the first quarter, and the fourth one we saw a pretty good order for. I think we’re making some progress here, and this comes on the back of a lot of the NPI work that’s happened in TEBG, and there’s more to come.
Andrew Obin
Thank you very much.
Operator
Our next question comes from Andrew Kaplowitz with Citigroup. Please proceed with your question.
Andrew Kaplowitz
Good morning, everyone.
William Brown
Hey, good morning, Andy.
Andrew Kaplowitz
Can you give us more color into what you’re seeing in consumer? I know you talked about share gain actions in consumer, so maybe you can elaborate on what you’re doing there, and how much discounting do you have to do to get there? Should consumer contribute to your margin performance this year, or could consumer margin continue to be pressured a bit over the year?
Andrew Obin
Look, I’m pleased with what’s happening at Consumer. The market for us, we’re 70% U.S., so it’s really focused on the U.S. consumer. We sell a discretionary product. As Anurag mentioned, we had a couple of pockets of strength in the year from new product introductions. I think the team has really gotten back to basics, focusing on priority brands and started to innovate again. The reality is we went for a lot of years without a lot of new product introductions. A lot are class three, so they’re incremental. Some are class four, but really starting to kind of be more aggressive on new product introductions. I think we’re holding our own and, in fact, starting to gain back shelf space because we have new product coming into the marketplace. Yeah, it’s not a segment that we see upward movement on pricing.
We’re trying to contain the discounting that happens to be here. Again, the market’s a little bit soft. For the year, we expect to see some growth. It’ll be positive. It won’t be a meaningful driver of the overall 3M growth in the year. But again, we’re down 1.3 in Q1, down a little bit more than that in Q4. We were up sort of modestly for the first nine months of last year at 0.3 points. So they’re hanging right around flat to up a little bit. When the consumer starts to spend more, we’ll have the right products with good innovation, great commercial excellence efforts there, and we’ll see that business return to growth.
Andrew Kaplowitz
Helpful. Bill, maybe just a little more thoughts about portfolio management. You obviously opted for a JV structure with the purchase of Madison, despite seemingly leaning into safety as one of your priorities. Maybe a little more color on why you chose the JV structure there, and then stepping back, can you give us an update on how you’re thinking about overall 3M portfolio? I think you’ve said in the past 2%-3% of your portfolio is actionable in terms of divestitures, 10% is commodity-like. Are those still the right numbers for the company?
William Brown
Yeah. Look, I’m really pleased with the structure and the conclusion of this Madison Scott SCBA joint venture, where 51% owner is going to be consolidated. It’s a strategic bolt-on acquisition in what you just referred to as a priority vertical. It is. It does strengthen our SCBA business. It’s a great brand. We have been innovating in this space. We talked last year about some new innovations coming onto the marketplace. This also creates some scale by putting this business together for future organic and inorganic opportunities. Madison, and all of its fire and rescue products, have been performing very well. They bring a terrific management team. They’re growing double digits. The margins are coming up. I think it’s a great combination in a space that we like quite a bit. Bain Capital is our partner on this. They’re 49%. We know them well.
They are very good at post-merger integration. They bring a lot of operating rigor, and good expertise on driving incremental M&A while we focus on other areas around the company. When you put all that together, I think it’s a strategic opportunity for us. It gives some optionality for do we pull it back or do we suit something else over time. The reality is, it’s a terrific deal that is going to be accretive to our growth margins, earnings over time. I feel pretty good about that particular deal. We closed on PG&F, the precision grinding business, on April 1st. It wasn’t very big, but businesses that don’t perform sometimes can be difficult to transact on. I’m very pleased that that one got over the line. We continue to look at the rest of the portfolio.
Yes, around 10% of our business is more commodity-like, where we don’t have a clear right to win, not a lot of technology differentiation. We said 2%-3% was in flight. PG&F was part of that. We continue to evaluate this, and we’ll talk to investors as we go on what that shaping happens to be. The reality, investors should see that the transaction on Madison with Scott is an important strategic signal for investors around the things that we want to do to reshape our portfolio to be structurally higher growth and higher margin potential.
Andrew Kaplowitz
Appreciate all the color.
William Brown
Sure.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Chigusa Katoku with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your question.
Chigusa Katoku
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. First, can you maybe recalibrate us on the outlook for U.S. IP and electronics you’re embedding in your assumptions for the full year? I think it was U.S. IP flat, electronics up mid-single digit last quarter.
William Brown
Sorry, Chigusa, you’re talking about IPI, the macro?
Chigusa Katoku
Yep. The US IPI.
William Brown
Okay. Well, thanks for the question, and I guess congratulations in the role. Welcome to the call. Just in terms of the macro, as we came into Q1, we saw some of the similar trends we saw in 2025 continue. Maybe a couple of comments relative to where we were in January. The global IPI is still around 2%. It’s not moved around very much. U.S. is up a little bit better. EMEA is down a little bit. China’s still mid-single digits. Interestingly, those trends are exactly what we saw in our business through Q1. U.S. up a little bit, Europe down a little bit, China mid-single digits. It’s pretty much aligned with that. GDP is still sort of in that same 2.5% range. Auto builds are still floating around between flat to down 1%. It’s really early in the year.
I think that tends to be more of a backward-looking indicator, but right now it’s sort of flat to down a little bit. U.S. retail is flattish. The place that we’re watching a little bit is consumer electronics, where the outlook is for a little bit more softness as we get into the back end of the year. Overall, the macro is trending about where we saw it in January and through last year.
Chigusa Katoku
Okay, great. Thanks. Then on this contingency, I was just wondering what it would take for you to remove this. I think it’s prudent that you’re including in guidance, but you’ve been seeing good order trends. You’re operationally raising guidance by about $0.025. Without this contingency, it would have been a $0.10 raise. Kind of what would it take for this to be removed?
Anurag Maheshwari
Yeah. Thank you for the question, Chigusa. Listen, we’ll probably give you an update in our next earnings call on that. As we go through the next couple of months, we’re pretty confident with the backlog and auto momentum on the Q2 revenue. We’ll see how that plays out, as well as we have executed. We have a very good playbook which we adopted from the tariffs last year in terms of working with the customers and pushing out the price increases over there. That’s an area we will kind of monitor on the yield over there over the next couple of months. Plus, see where oil’s at which levels it’s at after a few months. If we continue performing the way we did in Q1, both on the productivity as well as on operational excellence, then come July, we will give you an update on where we stand for the full year.
Chigusa Katoku
Okay, great. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Nigel Coe with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question.
Nigel Coe
Oh, thanks. Good morning. Thanks for the question. We’ve covered most of the major topics, so I just wanted to, a couple of quick follow-ons. Just going back to the pre-buy comments. Just trying to understand why you think there may have been a pre-buy. Is it because you’re trying to rationalize the strong orders, or is it something else that you’re hearing from customers? Just maybe cover that. Then on the 50 basis points of the initial price, is that in the form of a surcharge? It certainly seems like a surcharge, so that rolls back if oil comes down. Would that hit in 2Q or is that more in the back half of the year? Thanks.
William Brown
Really, Nigel, thanks for the questions. Look, it’s hard to avoid the fact that we’re pushing pricing a little bit more aggressively. We know there’s an inflationary environment. We know the price of oil is going to go up. We know the impact on our company. We know perhaps what we did four or five years ago, maybe not moved as quickly on pricing when oil came up, which we’re correcting for that. I think we’re being a lot more attuned to what’s going on in the macro, and we’re enforcing it better. If a shipment goes out beyond a date, that shipment will have a price increase associated with it. I think customers have seen that and heard that. Maybe when you put all that together, it gives a sense that perhaps there’s some advanced buying from these price increases that are going out.
Again, we’ll know more in the next month, six weeks, how much of that might be pre-buy, simply because we’ll watch the orders through the balance of the quarter into May. That’s kind of basically how we’re thinking about the pre-buy here at the moment. On pricing, yeah, we do see right now about $125 million worth of cost impact, which would have been relayed into pricing, and that would translate to about 50 basis points. That’s factored into the guidance of about 3% organic for the year. That’s kind of what we’re thinking at the moment on pricing.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Chris Snyder with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.
Chris Snyder
Thank you. I wanted to also follow up on pricing and I guess a little bit on price cost. When do these surcharges take effect? I would imagine some point in Q2, but any color on when they take effect would be helpful. It just seems like with the $120 million of cost inflation that you referenced, Bill, and the 50 basis points of price, the plan here is to, I guess, be neutral on price cost. I ask because if I remember a year ago, you guys were actually EPS negative on the tariff inflation. Just want to make sure I have that neutral view right. Thank you.
William Brown
Chris, I think we’ve learned a little bit. Yeah, we’re moving a lot faster than we did last year on tariffs. Tariffs came on and I think maybe we’re a little tentative up front, but I think we ended up offsetting a good part of the tariffs with cost and price. We’re trying to be careful on that. Yeah, exactly. We will offset cost increases associated with oil through price increases and that’s the assumption that we’re making here. I mean, you’re right. Historically, we have covered material cost inflation with pricing. Historically, with a 2% material inflation, that would translate into roughly 50 basis points of price. For the year, we are guiding to about 80 basis points. Again, a little bit lighter in Q1, but inflation in Q1 came in a little bit lighter as well for the year, 80 basis points.
With oil coming in, that’s driving an incremental 50 basis points of price. Total about 1.3 points roughly for the year on pricing. That’s our current expectation. It’s not a surcharge. The price is going out embedded into the pricing of our products, and it’s dependent on the product and the geography, but generally speaking, it was less of a surcharge, more being built into the underlying price.
Anurag Maheshwari
Yeah. In terms of the rollout in the timeline, we’ve already started in April in a couple of countries in Asia, and then in the United States, it starts in May 1st and Europe as well. It is imminent right now with all the letters going out to the customers knowing when the surcharge is going to impact them.
William Brown
Price increase is going to impact them. Yeah.
Chris Snyder
Thank you. I appreciate that. Maybe if I could follow up, just any color you could provide on how firm or how much flexibility is there on these delivery dates for these orders or what’s in the backlog? I guess ask, because I remember a year ago, there was elongation on those orders, I think tied to some of the pre-ordering ahead of tariffs, and it seems like there could be some of that again now. Just kind of wondering, trying to gauge that as a potential risk into Q2. Thank you.
Anurag Maheshwari
Yeah. Chris, the delivery is limited to the lead times that we have. It’s not like an order can be placed for 6 or 12 months of delivery. It’s definitely within the time frame that is we always prescribe. Yeah.
Chris Snyder
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Amit Mehrotra with UBS. Please proceed with your question.
Unidentified Participant
Good morning. This is Neil on for Amit. I know we just got first quarter results, but if I could ask about the growth algorithms into 2027 because the outlook suggests some meaningful improvement in trends exiting this year. If I just look at new product introductions, for example, I mean, these are accelerating and if we add maybe 2 points of macro growth to new product introduction, would that math imply that 3M is growing around 4.5% organically next year?
Anurag Maheshwari
Thanks for the question. We said this year that we will grow about $330 million above macro. As we get into the second half of the year, from the exit rates, we will be north of 3.5%, which would imply we would be above where we are in the first half and above the full-year average. We feel very good as we enter into next year with what we are doing on NPI and commercial excellence and how that is translating. First, we have to grow in the second quarter above 3%. If we grow above 3.5% in the second half, it gives us good momentum to accelerate growth into 2027. It is a little early to talk specifics; we will provide more color as we go through the year.
Unidentified Participant
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Deane Dray with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
Deane Dray
Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
William Brown
Good morning, Deane.
Deane Dray
I was hoping we can address the point of sale momentum. That’s a surprising number, up seven out of the last eight weeks, given the pockets of macro pressure. Just your impression here, is this consumer-driven? Is it more on the commercial side at all? Just some context and the momentum into April.
William Brown
Dean, it is consumer-driven because in the Consumer Business Group, I think it’s very encouraging for us to see POS up. That’s a sell-out, 7 of 8 weeks, which I think is really good. It does kind of make us feel a little bit better going into Q2 and that consumer business stabilizing, perhaps growing a little bit in Q2 and the balance of the year. Those are good trends. I think it reflects the team’s very aggressive efforts on driving promotions, getting shelf space, driving NPI, being really aggressive at hustling at the customer interface, good on-time performance, still in at 95%-94.5% range. Just really good work. Anurag talked a little bit about a couple of pockets that are growing a bit better, but it’s pretty broad-based. We see really good trajectory here through the first quarter now going into Q2 on the clubs, which is not surprising, given where consumers happen to be today. We feel good about the trends and good about the outlook for Q2 so far.
Deane Dray
Good to hear. I’d love to hear a bit more about the Expanded Beam Optics opportunity. There’s a lot of focus on this. It’s addressing the data transfer bottlenecks in AI processing. Just where do you stand competitively? How quickly can you ramp on this? Is there any question of manufacturing capacity? Because the take rate on this is one of the fastest-growing right now in data centers.
William Brown
Well, Dean, exactly. That’s why we’re so optimistic about it and why we’re talking more about it, and the fact that we’ve had some really good, robust IP protection around the technology. It is Expanded Beam, so it’s not a point-to-point fiber connection at the data center. It’s sort of like an easy click between two pieces of multi-fiber devices, ferrules, that come together, and we can put that together at 80% less time with a less trained technician. Better reliability, can operate in a dusty environment, which is why it’s gotten some good take rate. We’ve had at least a validation by at least one hyperscaler. A second one is in testing. I expect that will be positive as well. We had a fairly large order come in in Q1 relating to the hyperscaler that has certified it. We are in a ramp-up mode.
We will double capacity towards the back end of the year. We’re investing quite significantly to expand capacity. We’re relying on other partners in the space. Hyperscalers won’t go with a single source of supply, so we’ve got to make sure we have some dual source, either couple of factories or us with a contract manufacturer. All of this is working. We’re working the ecosystem. The pace at which this has happened is very encouraging, and the team is pushing hard. I’m really optimistic about where it’s going to go from here. This is a polymer EBO. As it moves to ceramics, which is more EBO or fiber to the chip, I think it opens up a lot more opportunities with a lot of other players in the space. Look, it’s encouraging, which is why we wanted to share it today with investors.
Deane Dray
Great. Thank you.
William Brown
Sure.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Nicole DeBlase with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.
Nicole DeBlase
Yeah, thanks. Good morning, guys, and thanks for fitting me in here. I’m just going to ask one since we’re near the top of the hour and we’ve gotten through a lot of the questions on my list. Just on some of the margin puts and takes. Have you guys made any changes to your full-year productivity assumption or stranded costs or growth investments? I guess, was any of that kind of front-loaded into the first quarter? How are we thinking about phasing throughout the year of those three items? Thank you.
William Brown
Right. Thanks for the question, Nicole. We said that we have a contingency of $0.05-$0.15. Let’s say at the midpoint it’s $0.10. About half of that is because of productivity, and most of that was in the first quarter. I would say the only two changes that we made from our previous guidance of $0.05 of that was very good productivity, both on the supply chain side as well as the G&A, and a lot of it we saw in the first quarter. Obviously, we can try to continue with the momentum that we have.
Anurag Maheshwari
The second $0.05 at the midpoint, I would say, is because of our active capital deployment, where we bought back $2 billion of shares in the first quarter out of $2.5 billion, which obviously gives us accretion through the course of the year and active cash management with the cash balance that we have. Those are the big changes.
William Brown
We’re not changing our productivity guidance, stranded cost guidance at $150, tariffs. That all stays the same as it was back in January. Yep.
Nicole DeBlase
Got it. Thanks, guys. I’ll pass it on.
William Brown
Thank you, Nicole.
Operator
Our final question comes from the line of Laurence Alexander with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.
Laurence Alexander
Good morning, and thanks. Very quickly, can you address what your customers are saying about potential supply chain bottlenecks in the sulfur, helium, and methanol derivatives chains? Are those factored into your contingency, and do you see ways to work around those shortages if they develop in the back half of the year?
William Brown
Laurence, it’s a good question. That’s probably affecting some of the pre-buy activity, perhaps. Look, I think we’re all working through this. We’re in direct contact with all of our suppliers, trying to manage all of our sources of supply, making sure we’ve got a variety of players that we can go to. It’s on our minds, so I know it’s on theirs, and it’s going to affect behavior as we go through the next several months, and we watch what’s happening in the Middle East and through the Strait of Hormuz. We’ll keep you updated on that, but it’s certainly a factor that’s on everyone’s mind today for sure. Thank you.
Operator
This concludes the question and answer portion of our conference call. I will now turn the call back over to Bill Brown for some closing comments.
William Brown
I know we’re a couple of minutes late, but thank you all for joining today. I want to thank again all of the 3Mers for their efforts, for their dedication in executing against our priorities, strengthening the foundation. As Anurag said, controlling the controllables, delivering value to our customers and shareholders. Thank you. Thank you all for joining today. Have a good day.
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]