3M to cut 6,000 jobs in CEO’s latest move to blunt sliding sales

3M Co. is cutting another 6,000 jobs as the manufacturer steps up its efforts to pare expenses and turn around its ailing operations.

The reductions, part of an ongoing restructuring, are expected to trim annual costs by as much as $900 million, 3M said in a statement reporting first-quarter earnings. The company has now announced 8,500 total job cuts this year, which would equate to about a 10% decline in its global workforce.

While 3M Chief Executive Officer Mike Roman said in a statement that these actions would further simplify operations and improve profitability, investors mostly shrugged.

The stock rose less than 1% at 9:32 a.m. in New York. Shares of the St. Paul, Minnesota-based manufacturing giant had declined 12% this year, the worst performance in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

“There have been countless efficiency initiatives here, and little to show for it over the years,” JPMorgan analyst Steve Tusa wrote in research note. “This seems like more of the same.”

The results highlight how the maker of Post-it notes, respirators and smartphone display materials is struggling to shake off weak demand for consumer goods, electronics and more of its roughly 60,000 products. Sales of virus-filtering respirators coming off pandemic-fueled highs and China’s choppy economic reopening have also weighed on 3M’s results.

The company reiterated its annual forecast for organic sales to decline as much as 3% and adjusted earnings to be as much as $9 a share.

3M in January announced plans to cut 2,500 manufacturing jobs to respond to the soft demand environment, the latest in a series of restructuring moves announced since Roman was named CEO in 2018.

The restructuring actions announced this year will result in pretax charges of as much as $900 million, the company said.