3M has a plan to keep the Post-it note relevant to young smartphone addicts

December 29, 2013 Leave a comment

3M has a plan to keep the Post-it note relevant to young smartphone addicts

By John McDuling @jmcduling December 26, 2013

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Newspapers, magazines and telephone directories are all paper products that have fallen prey to the rise of digital technology. But the humble Post-it note has thus far dodged the bullet. These small squares of paper with a strip of adhesive on their rear, which have been selling for more than three decades, have proven indispensable to many offices and households. And they’ve continued to earn nicely for their maker, industrial conglomerate 3M.​Post-it note sales are estimated to total $1 billion a year, which would represent nearly a quarter of the 3M’s steadily growing consumer and office products division. That’s contributed to 3M’s overall stellar 2013; its shares are up 45%, with impressive profit growth, a dividend hike and its biggest share buyback program of the year in December. And yet, the Post-it note is not immune to disruption in the digital age. It can be far more efficient to save a reminder on your smartphone, using one of the many free memo apps available, than to scrawl something down on a sticky piece of paper that might get lost.

On Dec. 17, at an investor briefing, 3M outlined its plans to safeguard the Post-it note’s future. “The evolution of what’s going on in the office market space,  and the generational change that’s occurring, we focus now on a deep push to continue to make Post-it more relevant to the new millennial generation that’s coming into the workforce,” Michael Vale, head of 3M’s consumer and office business said. In recent branding initiatives, the company has sponsored VH1′s Do Something awards for charity work and advertised in the education market.

Last year, it launched a smartphone app collaboration with digital organizer Evernote, which allows users to upload photos of Post-it notes to Evernote’s system. The technology can extract the handwriting from the notes, file them into specific notebooks, tag them, and assign reminders to them. The company cited the partnership as a sign of becoming ”more relevant to the increasingly digital habits” in offices and homes, while hinting at more to come in 2014.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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