Topic: How To Invest

Wall Street Stock Forecaster Hotline – Friday, February 1, 2019

Article Excerpt

3M COMPANY, $199.16, New York symbol MMM, makes over 60,000 consumer and industrial goods, including Post-It notes, Scotch tape, Scotch-Brite cleaning products, Scotchguard fabric protection and Thinsulate insulation. In the three months ended December 31, 2018, overall sales fell 0.6%, to $7.95 billion from $7.99 billion a year earlier. Even so, that beat the consensus forecast of $7.87 billion. If you factor out currency rates and businesses that 3M bought and sold, sales improved 3.0% in the quarter. The company reported higher sales in all of its businesses and regions. Earnings rose 6.3%, to $1.37 billion from $1.29 billion. The company spent $1.3 billion on share buybacks in the latest quarter. Due to fewer shares outstanding, earnings per share rose at a faster rate of 10.0%, to $2.31 from $2.10. Those figures exclude unusual items, among them a charge related to the new U.S. tax rules. On that basis, the latest earnings beat the consensus estimate of $2.28. For all of 2019, 3M now…