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3M Company
3M makes and sells thousands of everyday industrial, safety, and consumer products, from sticky notes and tapes to respirators and abrasives.
3M is the company behind a huge pile of things you've probably used without thinking about it: Scotch tape, Post-it notes, sandpaper, reflective road signs, and the N95 masks that became famous during the pandemic. It sells these products to factories, hospitals, construction crews, and ordinary shoppers all over the world. There is no single 3M aisle; its stuff is scattered across hardware stores, office supply shelves, auto body shops, and hospital supply rooms.
The business works because 3M is a master of materials science. It takes a basic idea—something needs to stick, something needs to be sanded, something needs to protect a worker's lungs—and turns it into a cheap, reliable product sold by the billion. Its mouse traps and sticky notes are famous for a reason: small, clever items that cost little to make and sell in enormous volume. That volume, spread across many different markets, is the engine of the company. 3M grew from a failed Minnesota mining venture in 1902 into a giant, and for decades it was a favorite of long-term investors. But the recent story is messier and more important to understand. The company has been fighting lawsuits over its earplugs sold to the U.S. military and over chemicals called PFAS found in firefighting foam and other products. Those legal bills have been enormous and have weighed heavily on the stock and on management's attention.
To steady itself, 3M spun off its health care business into a separate public company called Solventum in 2024 and has been cutting costs and reshaping its portfolio. It still pays a sizable dividend and remains a sprawling industrial conglomerate—roughly $30 billion in annual sales in recent years—but the honest picture is a mature company dealing with a mountain of legal risk, not a fast-growing one. Its fortunes now depend less on inventing the next sticky note and more on how cleanly it can settle its past.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
3M's own customers give it a 74% satisfaction score, putting it barely ahead of Corning
- 74% Customers satisfied with 3M
- 26% Customers not satisfied or neutral
On a customer satisfaction measure, 3M scores 74%, a hair above Corning's 73% and well clear of Honeywell and General Electric at 65%. That matters because 3M sells thousands of small industrial and household items, from tapes to respirators, where buyers stick with a brand they trust rather than shop around. A score near the middle suggests loyalty that is decent but not deep. Source: Comparably, data from 2026
Timeline
Two Harbors Failure Becomes a Pivot
In 1902, five investors started a company in a small Minnesota town to mine corundum, the hard mineral used to make sandpaper. The mine didn't deliver: the rock was low-grade, and sales were weak. So the founders gave up on mining and started buying abrasives to make sandpaper instead. That early stumble set the pattern for everything after — when one idea fails, try another until something sticks.
Richard Drew Invents Masking Tape
A lab assistant named Richard Drew watched painters struggle to mask off car parts and came up with masking tape. It was a hit, launched the Scotch brand, and taught the company that a steady stream of small new products was a better bet than any single big one.
Scotch Tape Finds a Depression Audience
Drew then coated cellophane with the company's adhesive to make Scotch Cellophane Tape. It turned out to have hundreds of uses — and during the Great Depression, people used it to mend documents and stretch what they had. A cheap fix for hard times became a household staple.
3M Lists on the New York Stock Exchange
In 1946, the company put its shares on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time, opening the door to outside investors and marking its arrival as a big public company.
Post-it Notes and VHB Tapes
In 1980, the company introduced Post-it Notes, a product nobody had asked for and a whole new category nobody knew they needed. The same year it rolled out VHB Tapes, strong enough to replace rivets and screws. Small sticky things were turning into serious business.
A Big Write-off for Old Tape
By 1996, some of its older, less profitable products — like videotape and audiotape — were dragging down earnings and the stock. Institutional investors pushed for change, and the company announced it was exiting those businesses, spinning off most of the division, writing off six hundred million dollars, and cutting five thousand jobs. Investors cheered: the stock jumped about fourteen percent in a week and a half.
The Name Finally Catches Up
As employees celebrated the company's centennial in 2002, '3M Company' became the legal name, finally replacing Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing — a fitting end for a company that had long since stopped being about mining.
The Earplug Problem
In 2022, the company faced litigation over earplugs that were alleged to have caused hearing damage for more than two hundred thousand veterans, with a worst-case exposure of over two hundred billion dollars. The stock fell nearly twenty percent in thirty days as revenue and earnings came in light and uncertainty spread. Short interest surged to around thirteen billion dollars — investors were betting against it.
An Outsider Takes the Helm
In 2024, William Brown was picked to succeed Mike Roman as CEO, the first outsider to lead the company in nearly two decades. He was brought in to fix operations and bring back the innovation culture that had made the place famous.
Solventum Spins Off
That same year, the company completed the planned spin-off of its health care business, which launched as an independent company called Solventum. It was a way to shed non-core operations and focus on the high-margin industrial and technology side.
A Six-Billion-Dollar Amazon Deal
By 2026, 3M had expanded its commercial deal with Amazon — worth up to six billion dollars in future purchases of fiber-optic gear for Amazon's cloud and AI data centers. It followed a July partnership with Microsoft that made 3M a key supplier for AI infrastructure. Brown was betting big on data centers, putting the sticky-tape company at the center of the AI build-out.