Monish Patolawala
Analyst · Citigroup. Please proceed with your question.
Again, just I -- and my apologies, Andy, I am just going to reiterate our capital allocation priorities just so that everyone's on the same page. Our first priority is always go organic. We just see it's the best use of our capital, best return, as you can see, the not afraid to deploy capital. We've done that in 2020, We're continuing do that in '21, which is investing in growth, productivity, and sustainability. We were going to spend $1.8 to $2 billion this year, but with some office supply chain constraints, it's down to 1.5 to 1.6, but we still believe in the long-term growth, and so we're going to keep investing in that. As Mike had announced early in the year, we also announced a billion dollars to improve -- for our sustainability efforts. That's going to be spend over the next 20 years, but it's front-end loaded, so that's the second piece on organic investment. Dividend is our second priority, important for our shareholders. So that's a priority that we clearly are focused on. Our third priority is M&A, and you're right that we are integrating Acelity and the team's doing a very nice job by integrating Acelity into our business. At the same time, we have tons of ideas and we have a pipeline that we'll execute when we see that we get a target that we believe can add value to our shareholders at the same time, it's things that we believe that, we can add value to the target too, by using some of the strengths that we have, which is our brand, our global capability, our employee base our material science capability, etc. So that's our third and we always have an active pipeline. And then the last one, a share buyback. You've seen, we've now done 1.3 billion for the year. We did 527, that's the last priority for us from a deployment of capital perspective. But depending on the stock price and how much cash we generate, we clearly will look at that too. Overall, I would just save and I look at net debt to EBITDA leverage, which is at approximately 1.3. At that point, it gives me a lot of financial strength and optionality. It gives 3M a lot of financial strength and optionality. So depending on what opportunities we see, we won't hesitate to deploy capital because, as Mike mentioned, even some of the platforms that we've talked about, all of them are GDP plus growth platform. So that's an area we would love to keep investing in.