MMM 3M Company

By Allison Prang 

3M said it would work with the U.S. to implement the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to mobilize the private sector to support national defense, and pushed back against criticisms that the company was favoring higher-paying countries with distribution of its masks.

"The idea that 3M is not doing all it can to fight price gouging and unauthorized reselling is absurd," 3M Chief Executive Mike Roman said on CNBC on Friday. "The idea that we're not doing everything we can to maximize deliveries of respirators in our home country, nothing is further from the truth."

The Trump administration invoked the DPA on Thursday. The DPA requires 3M to prioritize N95 respirator orders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the St. Paul, Minn. company said in a statement.

A Florida official told Fox News that the state couldn't get masks because 3M was selling them to other countries that were paying a higher price. Mark Cuban, in an interview with Bloomberg News, also criticized 3M's distributors for "making as much money as they possibly can" from selling the masks.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump tweeted that his administration "hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks."

3M defended its mask pricing in its Friday statement.

"We are working with the U.S. Attorney General and attorneys general of every state, making it clear that 3M has not and will not raise prices for respirators and offering our assistance in the fight," the company said.

The company said the Trump administration also asked that it stop exporting N95 respirators it makes in the U.S. to Latin America and Canada, but that "there are...significant humanitarian implications" to doing so.

"Ceasing all export of respirators produced in the United States would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same, as some have already done," 3M said Friday. "If that were to occur, the net number of respirators being made available to the United States would actually decrease."

There was no immediate comment from the White House on 3M's response. The company had also said that it was looking forward to working under the framework of the order to expand its response efforts further.

"We will continue to maximize the amount of respirators we can produce on behalf of U.S. health-care workers, as we have every single day since this crisis began," 3M said.

3M has doubled production of masks in recent months. But Mr. Roman recently told The Wall Street Journal that "the demand we have exceeds our production capacity."

3M also said in its statement that China approved the company exporting 10 million of its N95 respirators that were made in China to the U.S.

Write to Allison Prang at allison.prang@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 03, 2020 10:58 ET (14:58 GMT)

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