Thank you so much for joining us. Our next session, we're going to do a fireside chat with Bill Brown, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of 3M. Thank you so much for being here. Such a delight. You know, star attraction, clearly, at this event. Thank you so much. With that, we're going to go into sort of informal fireside. Thank you. Thanks so much for making the trip here.
Absolutely. You planned to weather very well.
Yeah, no, I apologize for that. As I said, I think I escaped it this morning. Like, I think by the time I got out of the train, it was pouring.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so look, you know, look, Bill, a little over a year at 3M as the CEO, I think two and a half months as the Chairman. You know, biggest upside surprise, biggest unexpected challenge so far. You know, maybe we'll start there.
Okay, thanks for having me. It's great to be here this morning. Maybe a comment first on an announcement we made earlier this week on Monday afternoon. We announced a settlement with the state of New Jersey on PFAS claims. It's a case that goes back to 2019. The focus was originally on one site called Chambers Works, and that's where the state was at. It's owned by Chemours now, it was owned by DuPont up until 2001. Again, that's a quarter century ago. So 2001, we provided a PFAS product into that particular facility. Again, this claim goes back about six years.
We took the opportunity to settle the claim and use it not just to settle the site itself, which is Chambers Works, but statewide PFAS DNR claims, which, so it wrapped all into one, you know, as well as with a series of protections that are pretty broad. The state attorney general in New Jersey has pretty broad authorities to release claims. And that's all in the documents, all in our SEC filings. I'm sure, you know, people who follow the company have read about this. You know, but that was quite appealing to us. It wasn't just resolving the site. It was resolving statewide claims with a number of protection features, including a credit arrangement that allows us to claim back from the state for claims that would have been released by the AEG, which a court subsequently finds us liable for.
There was a lot of features about this that we kind of liked. The headline number between $400 million and $450 million in total value, you know, it's $285 million on a present value basis. We'll take a charge for that in the second quarter here. 2/10 of that is for Chambers Works itself, which includes the facility and other adjacent parts of that. $75 million of MPV is for the statewide claims. And that's important because it's relevant to other things going on around the company. The key thing about this is the cash flows happen over a very long period of time. It's 25 years. It's 20 years for the statewide claims starting in 2030, going to a balloon payment in 2050.
The cash terms, I think, were favorable to us and manageable for us, allows us to focus on our capital deployment priorities, which we are clearly doing. Takes a lot of risk and uncertainty off the table, which we certainly want to do. It's a good result for the company. You know, the team is really focused on executing our game plan. The three priorities I've been talking about now for, turns out, a year, you know, that I've been in the seat in terms of what we're trying to do at the company. You know, maybe one other thing, and you know, we may have come to this or not, but you know, everyone's talking about tariffs.
I think I go back to three weeks ago when we had our earnings release, and we're talking about a lot of the good things happening in the company on NPI and operational excellence and the commercial excellence initiative. All the questions were really around tariffs, you know, because it was pretty substantial and a lot of headwind there is causing some perturbations in the economy, which I'm sure we'll talk about today if the audience has interest in this. You know, you saw the deal from China. For us, when we talked about the sensitivities for tariff, we held that outside of our guidance. It was gross of $0.60 in 2025, net $0.20-$0.40 after mitigation. In that $0.60, 75% or 80% of the impact is from China. The China rates have come down quite a bit.
So has the impact on the year. At the moment, we see ourselves at the bottom end of that $0.20-$0.40 range, maybe below that. Beyond that, you know, we'll wait until we see what happens with other deals, you know, beyond 90 days here with China and the U.S., you know, but it actually has been mitigated quite a bit. Again, below the bottom end of that $0.20 range, but it's not going to be zero. I thought it was important to get those two pieces out up front. You mentioned about a year in the job and a couple of months as Chairman. It's been interesting. It's been busy. A year has gone by pretty quickly. You know, I go back to the decision I made 14 or 15, 16 months ago to join 3M. It's an iconic company.
It's a 123-year history of innovation. We've got fantastic brands, a lot of great people, you know, global reach, customer access. You know, I saw us having an opportunity to focus back on fundamentals, the basics of the business to drive shareholder value. I think it's playing out, you know, just that way. You know, in terms of the, you know, coming on board, I laid out the priorities I have in the store today. They're pretty evergreen. It's around top line growth, innovation, and commercial excellence, driving operational performance across the enterprise. Capital deployment is the third key priority. That includes things we're doing on the portfolio, includes what happened with the dividend, what we're doing on buybacks, but also the smart decision I think we made on capital deployment vis-à-vis the state of New Jersey.
You know, in terms of when I reflect back on the last year and what's happened, the company has responded, I think, very well to this challenge to rise up again on innovation. It's why people joined the company. You know, we were going for a long period of time where we weren't bringing new products onto the marketplace. We've now turned that around. It started to turn around. It's going to take some time. That has been a pretty, you know, I think, a good reaction, I think, within the organization. The thing that I think we've been maybe a little bit more challenged on or where I see more of an opportunity is really driving operational excellence across the company. You know, I know coming in, we had a big complex network. I mean, you can read that in any case.
There's a lot that's been published around that. But it's more around the maturity of the metrics, of the team, of the processes around how do you drive an operational excellence agenda across the organization, not just in the supply chain as well. That's important, and we're getting at that. It's around all the functions within the company. So when I talk about OPEX, it's around the enterprise itself, including R&D. You know, there's a great opportunity for us to do better at how we execute in developing new products through the R&D function. So the thing that I found, you know, probably more of a challenge was going to take some time to really get our arms around is operational excellence. You saw Q1, we had very good margin performance, up 220 basis points. So it's quite good. We'll be fine for this year.
We talked about towards the high end of the range that we gave a margin expansion for the year. Again, I think that's an area that's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take, you know, some changes in the culture to make that stick. So anyway.
In terms of any unexpected low-hanging fruit that you were able to tackle over the past 12 months?
I wish I could see the low-hanging fruit. You know, we all look for that. Look, it's a lot of hard work. It's a big company. We have a presence in a lot of countries around the world, a lot of factories, you know, a lot of complexity and innovation. I wouldn't say there's any low-hanging fruit. You know, again, what I've been very pleased about is how quickly the folks that are doing the researching, the folks out with customers, the application engineers, the product developers, you know, and how quickly they've identified new products, things that we can work on and bring to market. That responsiveness, I think, is certainly encouraging for me, and I hope it's encouraging for investors as well.
Now, that is really key to driving growth in a company, is key to driving margin, you know, multiple expansion in our stock as well. Good progress so far, and I think a lot more to do.
You know, the next question, we sort of prepared these questions before the latest news on tariffs, and I think you and I sort of talked about that things are changing fairly rapidly. You know, maybe a two-part question. The first one, because I know folks will ask, what are you seeing in your end markets and the broader economy? You know, if you can, we'd love to hear the latest demand trends. If you care to update us, I know people, everyone will ask. Then part two of this question, and as I think the question has evolved, yes, the tariffs look different.
Yeah.
Do you see, are you seeing your customers, your suppliers make any decisions to change their supply chains, their sourcing? Are you thinking about your own CapEx differently? I'm sure, like, you could probably spend an hour with us, like, talking about these three topics.
Yeah, and we only have 25 minutes to cover all those pieces.
Yeah, 25 minutes.
Okay, that's good.
Yeah.
Let me start, and you can just sort of like direct me how you want to go. Just in terms of the macro, I mean, it's been three weeks and we had our earnings release. You know, things are evolving, but it's not materially different from then. You know, we did see a, we do see today, I mean, a softening macro environment. You can see it in the GDP and IPI as well. Those are two important macro factors for us. If you go back to the beginning of the year to where we were at the earnings release, you know, dropped about 30 basis points, you know, both individually and combined between GDP and IPI.
In fact, when you look at in GDP, if you look at what the U.S. forecast there, I think it says is 1.3% for the year, but in 1.3 for the year was 2.2% or 2.3%, something like that in Q1. Of course, we all know the preliminary number is down 0.3%. Now, when I talked at the earnings release, you know, I was saying, here's what I'm seeing in our business. You know, we had gone back early in March and pulled, they actually pulled down our forecast for revenue in the quarter because we were seeing impacts on our business that weren't yet flowing through the macro factors, but we were seeing it. We're reacting to that. We've seen that. I mean, the economy has clearly softened. I mean, everybody, you know, knows that.
We have seen, you know, you can see what's happened in consumer sentiment, you know, the ISM index. You know, auto for us is an important metric. It's down 1.7% year for the full year on a build rate. You know, that's an important number, but we got to look behind that because U.S. and Europe, where we've got bigger presence, is down between 5% and 6%. It's actually down double that in the first quarter, you know, in terms of the build rate. You know, China was up in Q1. It's going to be flat to up a little bit for the year. You see not just build rate coming down, but the movement of where those builds are occurring. That's an important factor for the company in the near term and certainly over the longer term as well. Auto is a little bit soft.
Electronics has been sort of mid-single digits. Consumer electronics a little bit weaker than that, but not different than what we saw a couple of weeks ago. Of course, the consumers, you know, they're being very cautious. That's been the case, you know, for the last year that I've been there. I mean, it's, you know, their behavior is very cautious. We see that running through a lot of what we do in the consumer products business. That's kind of the landscape. We had a, I would say, a pretty good April in the sense of where the orders came in at. You know, trends pretty much, and it's continued into May, trends pretty much like we saw in the first quarter. You know, good orders in SIBG, the industrial business, you know, a lot coming in in, you know, the tapes business, the electrical markets business, EMD.
You know, we're seeing personal safety to be pretty decent, roofing granules to be okay. You know, where we're seeing weakness in the industrial business is auto aftermarket. We saw that in Q1. We expect that for the year. Claims are down 10%. There's other factors that are going on around in the automotive repair business. That's kind of what's happening there. Again, we want to look at it. The, you know, backlog was up through April. It was up about 14%-15% in the first quarter. We continue to build backlog, means our orders are coming in stronger than our revenues. I think that's a good factor as we think about the balance of Q2 and the balance of the year. You know, when we talk to our partners, you know, inventory in the channel seems fairly normal. There's no overhang here.
We feel pretty good about what's happening in the industrial business. I think that's holding its own in line with where we were in Q1. I'd say TEBG is similarly to where they were in Q1, a little bit weaker than SIBG, but we saw that in Q1. A lot of it is driven from the auto business, as I mentioned a minute ago, what's happening in the build rate that's impacting that transportation electronics business. The third area is around the consumer products. We had, I think, I guess a decent Q1. We came in flattish, up about 0.3%, you know, which I think in this market is not a bad place to be. I think we had a pretty good first quarter. We're turning that business around. You know, we start off Q2 a little light in April as we had expected.
You know, we see a build coming into May and June. We'll see better rates in May and June. For the first couple of weeks of May, I think it's been pretty good. You know, that's sort of the lay of the land across the company as a whole, as I see it. You talked about capital and factories and customers, suppliers making decisions. Look, when I sit back, we've got 110 factories around the world. We have 3,000 contract manufacturers. I've got, and I'm running my assets around 58%. They've got ample opportunity to move things up or down and move things around. We're doing that. We're trying to take advantage of where we have, you know, location where we can manufacture a product, you know, where it reduces the tariff impact on the company. We're doing all those things.
There are some short-term, no regret type decisions we're making, and those are already being implemented. Some other things that might take maybe a little bit of time to qualify a supplier, for example, something that might have gotten disqualified or USMCA because a component comes out of Korea, we've got to get it requalified. It's not hard. It takes a little bit of time, months, not years. We're doing all those things. Depending upon what happens with tariffs over time, if they stay where they're at, obviously there's, you know, maybe more significant movements in the network. If they moderate a little bit, as I expect, we're not going to go back to the rates where they were pre-inauguration, pre-liberation day, but they're going to moderate a little bit from where we happen to be today.
Based on that, we'll make decisions on where we spend capital and do we do things more permanently to move production around. I think I touched on a bunch of things. I'm trying to remember your comments.
No, this is a fabulous answer. To go back, something that you sort of talked about, culture. I know that, you know, how do you change the culture at 3M? I think the focus here on performance metrics and compensation and maybe providing the right incentives. I know that there was a communication sent out inside the company at the year-end that actually resonated very positively among the people who I've spoken to.
Yeah.
Just maybe, you know, talk about that. Like, how do you change compensation? How do you change the culture? How do you change performance metrics inside the company to drive the change that you talked about?
Look, it is metrics. It is compensation. Don't get me wrong. Those are important elements of that. I think the more important thing on the culture is being clear about expectations, you know, through every one of 62,000 people in the company and doing all those things to make sure you're pushing that, you're rewarding that, you're repetitive on it, you know, it's constancy of message, constancy of purpose. I mean, it's all those things that I think go behind that. You know, if you participated in our investor day back at DNS eons ago, it seems like late February, the first thing I started off with was talking about the culture and the culture we want to build inside the company. I'm talking about a performance culture, you know, and I said it's new and it's really building a performance culture inside the company.
It starts with the customer kind of being obsessed with what do they need and delivering against. That trickles through everything inside the company, making sure we have the best talent on the planet, on the team, you know, that we're clear about expectations, that we pay for performance. You know, that's very important. People know where they stand. We drive things with speed and urgency and rigor and relentless continuous improvement. I mean, those words, those words resonate inside the company. You know, they're easy to say. It just takes time for that to build into the organization. Again, it's through communication, repetition, all these things that happen day to day, hour to hour, and how we spend our time and what we do. You know, so clearly there's going to be some, and has been some changes in the metrics.
You know, today, you know, when I joined, we had, I think, 10 people on a performance share agreement, which is equity based on some performance. Today it's 1,500. Everyone that's on an equity plan today is part of that program, which is important. It's when you get paid, we get paid kind of a thing. You know, luckily we had our annual meeting yesterday. And thanks to all the investors, we had a very good say on pay on some of the changes that we mentioned. It's preliminarily 90%, which is good. Much double where we were a year ago in terms of, you know, shareholders voicing an opinion on our executive compensation plans. So we're listening, we're making adapting to that. You know, but look, this is, you know, coming into 3M, I've been in, my career has been pretty long.
It's evident to me how important culture really is to changing the trajectory of a company. I saw a little bit when I was at Harris, importantly when we merged with L3, very different cultures, very, very different, even though we sold to the same end customer. I'm seeing it even more so here at 3M. If we get the culture right, the right people on the right team doing the right things with the right cadence, optimal urgency, get it done tonight, not tomorrow. If it can be done in the next minute, do it in the next minute. It's that sort of pace. If we can run at this pace, we've got a lot of opportunity ahead of us. I'm rambling on this question on culture, but it really, it is fundamental. It's important. We're on it. The team is pretty energized by this.
I got to tell you, we, you know, I've done a bunch of all hands since I started. The first one was around a lot of nice questions on, "Bill, what are you going to be up to?" and all those things that, you know, people ask about when you're new to the company. We had over 1,000 people in the room and over 10,000 people online just a couple of weeks ago after our earnings release. The questions were really good. It's a lot about how do we build this company's franchise going forward? How do we develop people, attract people, you know, invest in the things that are important? I mean, this is a good spot where we happen to be in.
You know, as the macro starts to heal, you know, we're going to have a good year in the next several years, I think very positive as well.
Excellent. No, thank you. And maybe just to continue sort of culture, but R&D has always been at the heart of 3M. And you're sort of once again something that you highlighted. But, you know, how do you balance here, right? Very strong engineering culture, focus on innovation, you know, but on the other hand, you know, you do run a business. And, you know, how do you make the output more commercial?
Yeah. Look, it's a good question. It comes up a lot. I mean, it's, you know, it's a balance between inspiration and perspiration, I guess I'd say, because, you know, look, the people have to be inspired, but I do believe that you can better mechanize this factory we call R&D. I use those words inside the company. I used it at the Investor Day. I'll say it again today. It's a function. It's a business process. There are ways you can measure it. You can drive performance, better efficiency, better effectiveness. You know, from the July of last year first earnings call I did at 3M, I highlighted what I was seeing, you know, in innovation and what we're doing in R&D. The fact is we spend over $1 billion a year.
We have 5,000 people doing R&D work. You know, the amount of time and effort that was put on new product development had come down quite a bit. You know, the new product launches dropped by a lot. We were 7,800, seven, eight years ago. You know, and in 2023, before I joined, we were at 128. So we bottomed that out and it is coming back up. There are ways of getting at this. You can inspire innovation and give people time to think about what are the next solutions we can bring to customers, spend time with customers, but at the same time, better manage it. You know, we were not talking to investors. In fact, we were not talking internally around, "Oh, how many products are you going to launch this quarter?" "How many are you going to launch this month?" All right.
Now, "How are you going to launch this week?" The reality is when you drive it like that, you get results. If you're asking people, "How much time do you spend in a given week and how much is not value-added time?" they'll give you a long list of things that we could do differently to better spend the dollars that we're spending on R&D. You know, we never talked about on-time attainment of launches. I remember, you know, in October, the Q3 earnings release last year, I talked about how many products we were launching and gave a sense for where we'd be for the year. We came in far better than that. In fact, early December, it was a number x. We came in almost double x by the end of December.
You say, "Wait a minute, it takes me 14 months or 13 months to develop a product. Why wouldn't I know about that in early December and launch at the end of December?" Clearly, somebody does. The ability to track this and drive this and measure it is really important. I think you can inspire people. You'd still drive a lot of these metrics into the company. We're done. We're just, you know, I'm talking to you about new product launches. The reality is, are we getting revenue from it? Are we getting profit from the revenue? You know, those are the things that will really squeeze inside the company. I'll talk a lot more about that with investors as we get more mature in these KPIs. Andrew, this is an area that really is going to make a big difference over time, I think. We're seeing some good progress so far.
Thank you. So, you know, clearly product, you know, reinvigorating growth, I think, is at the heart of your agenda at 3M. You know, you've touched on product launches. Maybe we can drill down because it seems that you have three segments. It seems that sort of it is different for every segment. Maybe, and I'm talking about the recipe for reinvigorating the growth. Maybe we can start with safety and industrial. I think you've highlighted that customer retention and churn has been an issue impacting the growth. Why was safety and industrial impacted more than other segments?
It's, you know, it's a very complicated portfolio. We have 135,000 SKUs in the safety and industrial business. 90% of the business goes through distribution. Distributors have lots of choices on what they carry and what they sell. Let me just define a situation. We're delivering, you know, in the low 80s on time and full. It's lower than the other two businesses. That's been a persistent issue. It's improving, but it's improving relatively slowly. We haven't been launching a lot of new products across the company, including in safety and industrial. When you have inflation, you're trying to push out price. You can imagine you're sitting here at a distributor, a salesperson selling to a distributor, you know, and you're getting a product that's sort of like what it was before because there's no NPI. You're pushing price increase.
I can't get it on time. That opens up the aperture to look at other alternatives. There are a lot of things on the market that aren't quite as good as 3M, but they might be available. We start to see business loss. It's not a new trend. It goes back a number of years. We say attrition churn. It's share wallet loss is really what's happening. You know, we've got to get at the underlying pieces of it, which is on time and full. We got to launch new products. You know, we got to make sure we're pricing effectively and looking at cross-sell opportunities. All of those things that we're doing, you know, but the reason we started in the SIBG on all of our commercial excellence initiatives was really for this reason. You know, I saw this would be the biggest opportunity.
Just in the last six months, we've seen a lot of good work that's happening in that business, things that we might not have known a year ago what we need to do. It's not just changing a Salesforce incentive plan. That's one of a hundred different levers you pull to get better on commercial excellence. That's why we focused on churn or attrition in SIBG. The same process is now being embedded over in TEBG in the transportation business. Very different metrics, very different way of going to business. There's another approach we can take to drive commercial excellence in that business as well. I mean, that's sort of with a state of play that's happening in safety and industrial.
Just as I think on time and full, you know, as IPG still lags down the peers. If you look at your forecast, pretty steep climb into the year. What makes you comfortable? Or what incentives do you give to sort of, you know, folks in the business to achieve those?
It's a sticky problem. It's stickier than I thought it would be, frankly. I mean, we're in the 83%-84% range. We'll do a little bit better this quarter. You know, we want to get to 90% by the end of this year. It's a steep climb. We're not, you know, we want to bring down working capital. We want to bring down inventory. That's not the issue. You know, we're going to prioritize on delivering on time and full to customers. A lot of it is these are long-lived assets, you know, legacy assets. There are certain suppliers that have not been as reliable to us. Fundamentally, it gets back to how we do our demand forecasting, demand planning, supply planning, you know, the PSYOP process, sales inventory operation planning. It's just not as robust in that business as we'd want it to be.
You know, we've not focused on what is the forecast and what tools can you use to better predict demand. Some things come choppier. Other things are more smooth. There are ways to get, and we're getting at this is how do you anticipate demand? Then making sure that you drive that back to your factory, what's on hand and back to the suppliers. You know, there's a lot that we can do differently. This is not rocket science. This is not particularly hard. It's going to take us a little time to get there. The team is focused on it. You know, look, every single week, you know, the top management of the company gets an update on what's happening in OTIF, you know, across each of the businesses, divisions, factories, what drives it, where it was this past week.
When you give that visibility, when you shine the light down on a problem, it gets better over time.
Maybe just shifting to transportation electronics, I think the issue there is somewhat different. Yeah. You know, my understanding is it's really sort of medium-term plan for new product introductions. What is the medium-term plan for new product introductions? What industry verticals excite you the most?
Yeah, I mean, they all excite me. Let me just say that. Everything that they're doing is very good. Look, they're important in aerospace, important in semiconductors, electronics, automotive. I mean, those are the big ones. Those are the key ones that are part of our priority verticals that we laid out at the investor day. You know, it's a bit different in TEBG in terms of new product introductions. It's a much more complicated product. We're stretching technology, stretching, you know, we have to do bench-to-bench cooperation and collaboration with our customers, more what we call class four, class five, so new to the world type solutions, more spec-in opportunities than what we see in SIBG. I mean, most of our R&D dollars goes to those two divisions, I mean, segments. The consumer side maybe not as much, definitely not as much.
You know, but that's what's happening in TEBG. We expect to double the new product launches over the next couple of years. The team is working on compressing the cycle time. What Wendy and her team are really focused on is how do you get really close to the customers that we're selling to? It's not, you know, a sales relationship. It's not necessarily top to top. It's also sort of as you think about people developing new products, things that, you know, a new vehicle, whether it's in the U.S., Europe, China, new consumer products. A lot of times it's making sure that we actually have the capability in our factories to scale up and produce it. I mean, we are pushing the envelope of technology around film technology goes into consumer electronics. What we do is the best in the world.
You know, and sometimes it runs at a faster pace than what our assets in our factories allow us to run at. We have to make sure that we develop products that, you know, are great for our customers, but we can manufacture them at scale in our factories. When I think about the quality issues sometimes we have, sometimes it's because we push the limit on a product that we do not yet have the tooling or the sensors or the capacity in our factories to actually manufacture it. TEBG is very different in many ways from SIBG in terms of new product introduction.
The semiconductor, you know, all this infrastructure in Arizona, right? Because you would imagine that a lot more of the supply chain was probably going to come there. Does that create a unique set of opportunities? Or 3M as a U.S.-based manufacturer with a lot of basic science?
It does, actually. I mean, look, we've got a big footprint in the U.S. So that's going to be very helpful to us. We are very active in the semiconductor space. It's not a big part of the company, but it's significant and it's growing. You know, we've got a good opportunity there. It's going to take, you know, again, alliances, partnerships, you know, trade associations, a lot of different things we need to do and some capital. The reality is it does require investment and lab capability to be more significant in semiconductors.
It's something you would consider?
Absolutely.
Maybe consumer, you know, what struck me, I think it's the first time in a decade that I think 3M, maybe more than a decade, that 3M was talking about the segment as a growth platform and actually willing to back it up with investments in areas like advertising and merchandising. What made you excited about the consumer growth opportunity?
Everyone loves a Post-it and Command Strip, I guess. I don't know.
I think Wall Street Journal had like how to use Command Strip properly.
There you go. Yes. Yes.
Like they literally wrote a future on it.
Thousand uses of a Post-it. Yeah. Look, there's, I think Carina and the team have done a really good job at repositioning the business. You have to look back over a couple of years. You know, they had a program to simplify the portfolio, to simplify the geographies they go into. That was a painful process adapting to that. That was the last couple of years. You know, we had not invested in advertising, merchandising through the restructuring program. There were a lot of folks that were pulled out of the system, including salespeople. We were not putting any investment in developing new products. We were sort of out of focus. What's happened is we're now largely through the simplification process of portfolio and geographies. We've stepped up dramatically the amount of time we're putting on new product introductions.
In terms of the new product launches in Q1, they were pretty significant. There were several that I think are moving the needle for us this year. We're starting to lean more into four-focused brands and more ad merch. When you put those pieces together, you laid a fertile ground. You've got new product introductions that are coming in, a more simplified portfolio that's focused. You know, and now you're doing some advertising and merchandising. We're seeing that come back. By the way, we've got a lot of footprint in the U.S. for the consumer business. You put all those things together, you know, we'll perform better than macro because of that. You know, if the macro was better for us, we'd see much better results. You know, we're preparing ourselves when the consumer starts to come back.
You know, and that's going to end up happening. The team's doing a great job. You know, it's an important business for us. It's $5 billion. It's one we got to pay attention to.
This is one area where you should get nice relief from the tariffs, right?
You know, there's going to be because a lot of what we bring in from China, probably 70%-80% or more, is for the consumer business. So yes, that will be a relief for that particular business.
We have a minute and a half left. I'll squeeze one in. Capacity utilization and sourcing strategy, right? I mean, clearly equipment utilization is one of your key metrics. With the exit of PFAS manufacturing, A, you sort of remark how, you know, you're relatively low capacity utilization. Then exit, continuing exit of PFAS manufacturing frees up capacity at key facilities. What opportunities does it create for you to streamline your internal manufacturing supply chain?
Look, we have too many factories at 110. Running them at 80, 58% is not where you want to be, obviously. That is something we are focused on. Getting out of PFAS, I mean, those PFAS assets are specific to manufacturing PFAS. By the end of this year, we will not be manufacturing it. Those assets will be dismantled. They are in factories, you know, so there are absorbed costs. We have to deal with stranded costs. The team is working this. We are working this very, very hard. It frees up space, but does not free up necessarily capacity and machines where we have to be manufacturing PFAS. You know, we are on this issue around utilization. It is going to help us in a number of different dimensions. Certainly, as we think about longer term, it is consolidating the network. You need to know that it is fundamental.
Over time, it's going to reduce our capital spending because I'd rather, you know, use up the capacity I have than spend for new capacity. That's going to be important. It's also important to just surge capacity. You know, right now, some things come in for, they want it in a day or an hour or the next week. Sometimes the assets, even though we are highly underutilized, running that asset is hard for us. If we can drive some more headroom in some of these key assets, you know, our on time and full will come up as well. It's fundamental to running a manufacturing network. You know, again, we've got 190 assets, 38 of our big factories, about half our production volume. We track regularly on utilization. That's just going to grow over time. You know, we're on it about four points from last year. That's an important element in driving OPEX across the company.
That's fantastic. Thanks so much.
Happy to do it. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.