Let's go ahead to the cash flow statement and see what the year to year impact is.
So if we go to page 51, cash from investing and
we looked at this before when we did 3M with the cash flow statement.
Purchases of marketable securities and investments, 5.5 billion.
So they're buying 5.5 billion marketable securities in 2012.
They bought 4 billion the prior year, and 3 billion the year before that, so
they buy a lot of marketable securities.
But then if you look, they end up selling a lot too.
So they sell 3 billion, so
that's proceeds from sales and then proceeds from maturities.
So these are debt securities, you buy a bond that pays off,
that's about 2 billion.
The net effect is pretty small, it's about 0.4 billion.
So it looks like what 3M is doing is,
their generating as we saw a whopping amount of cash activities.
So post it notes, scotch tape, their just printing money with that.
They take that cash and just plow it into marketable securities until they need it.
Then when they need it for
something like capital expenditures or acquisitions, then they will sell
those marketable securities to be able to do those acquisitions or make those CAPEX.
So, it's almost like 3M is serving as its own bank.
And instead of putting their excess cash flow in a savings account and
getting half a percent of interest, they take that cash flow,
invest it in marketable securities to get a little bit higher return,
then when they need it for acquisitions or CAPEX they sell them or they,
they use ones that matured and then plow the cash flow back into their investments.