As everyone knows, mother mining recently laid off about 10% of her workforce. I was, in fact, one of the casualties. I feel for my fellow 3M'ers who were recently let go. Now as a shareholder, that means 9000+ less employees on the books. Assuming average wage & benefits add up to $100K/employee, 3M just freed up about $0.9B every year. That should be sufficient to pay the PFAS settlement w/out cutting dividend. Also, HC spin should yield roughly $6B for RemainCo. That should be enough to guide the company through this rough patch, including any future settlement for CAEv2 and more PFAS litigations. Monish gets lamblasted here a lot, but my guess is that he is guiding the ship through this mess.
3M beat the much lowered expectations in Q1 by 39 cents, and Q2 is expected to be better than Q1. And 2nd half is expected to be better than the first. Hope the 90% remaining in 3M will see brighter days ahead.