3M's CEO Hosts 2014 Outlook Meeting Conference (Transcript)

Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Matt Ginter, 3M’s Vice President of Investor Relations. And welcome to our 2014 Outlook Meeting. I’ll also welcome investors today that are listening via webcast.

We’ve got a great line-up of speakers today. Of course, you will hear from our Chairman, President and CEO, Inge Thulin; and our Senior Vice President and CFO, David Meline. Also presenting today are the leaders of each of our five business group, plus our Head of International. We have Brad Sauer, who leads Industrial; Frank Little runs the Safety & Graphics Business; Joaquin Delgado, Heads up Health Care; Mike Kelly leads Electronics & Energy; Mike Vale runs our Consumer Retail Business.

And you can thank Mike for the (inaudible) sensor that I just received today. We deliberately try that put -- not put any [eagle] helmet next to the giant helmets, but we’ve made a mistake there, so feel free to swap.

Finally, H.C. Shin is going to present today. He heads up our International Operations. Each of them will describe their key strategies going forward and I think you walk away with a better understanding of the depth of the 3M portfolio. Chief Technology Officer, Fred Palensky is not formerly presenting but he'll join us today for Q&A at the end.

I’d like to mention a few upcoming events while we are here today. First, our 2014 earnings calls will be on January 30th, April 24th, July 24th and October 23rd, and all calls are scheduled for 8 a.m. Central Time.

And second, if you please mark your calendars for next December 16th, we plan ahead, when we will host our 2015 Outlook Meeting, we now plan on 8 o’clock to noon that day with the location yet to be determine and we will provide more details, obviously, as they develop.

Please take a moment to read the forward-looking statement. During today's conference call, we will make 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 the most important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from our predictions.

So very quickly here is today’s agenda, Inge will open up followed by each of the business heads and David will be our final presenter for the day. We’ll have 30 minutes of Q&A at the end, with all presenters up on stage plus Fred and we will adjourn no later than 5 p.m.

So thanks again for joining us today. And now, I'd like to introduce 3M’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Inge Thulin.

Inge Thulin - Chairman, President and CEO

Thank you, Matt, and good afternoon. It’s pleasure for me and the whole 3M team to be here today and talk to you. And a reflective on today is to say that it’s little more than a year ago we had a meeting which was November 8th last year when we laid out our plan as we move ahead and that’s where we go back to today very much.

So what you will see here, there we go. So what we will do here initially is, I will talk about the five-year plan and give you an update what we have done in the last 12 months. And I will talk about three levels that we have worked on during the last year and that is processed as we move forward on the plan, which is Portfolio Management, Investing in Innovation and then Business Transformation.

Each business group will come up. They have now been placed for 12 months. So this is a good time for them to come up and tell you relative to the strategies as we aligned organization. And then as Matt said, David, will in the end talk about the capital structure and allocation as we move ahead and then also give an outlook for 2014.

From: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1904081-3ms-ceo-hosts-2014-outlook-meeting-conference-transcript