Over a year after announcing plans to spin out its healthcare business as a standalone company, 3M has finally revealed the name of that soon-to-be-formed entity.
Recent spinouts in the world of medtech have largely fallen into two categories, name-wise: those that nod to their long-standing parent companies—think Becton Dickinson’s Embecta, Zimmer Biomet’s ZimVie and the newly bicapitalized GE HealthCare—and those that go in an entirely new direction, heavy on the “V” sounds, like PerkinElmer’s Revvity and Baxter’s Vantive.
3M appears to have chosen the latter, with its upcoming healthcare company now being dubbed Solventum, according to an announcement Thursday.
The new moniker is—according to 3M—a combination of the words “solving” and “momentum.” While the first half “captures the company’s dedication to finding breakthrough solutions,” the manufacturing giant said, the second “symbolizes swifter, nimbler innovation.”
Solventum’s logo, meanwhile, is a letter “S,” stylized to resemble an infinity symbol. That “expressive symbol of limitlessness,” 3M said, represents the company’s “drive to never stop solving.”
“As we build this new company, Solventum will embody our mission of enabling better, smarter, safer health care to improve lives,” Bryan Hanson, current CEO of 3M’s healthcare business and who will take the Solventum helm after the spinout, said in the release.
“The name signifies who we are as a team—problem solvers who create innovative solutions that touch millions of lives, transform the patient experience and save time for health care professionals,” Hanson continued.
The new branding will go live as soon as the spinout is complete. Though originally expected to be wrapped up by the end of this year, the timeline for the separation has been progressively pushed back; as of 3M’s third-quarter earnings release at the end of October, the company is now expecting to stand up Solventum sometime in the first half of 2024.
During the accompanying call with investors, 3M CEO Mike Roman said the spinout is “progressing” but added that there’s still “a lot of work to do.”
Among those necessary tasks are efforts to build out Solventum’s executive team and board of directors around Hanson and Carrie Cox, who has been tapped to chair the board, as well as the processes of completing regulatory filings for the spinout and setting up Solventum’s legal structure.
“The team has given us great confidence that we’re going to continue to progress, and we’re on track for the timing that we talked about in early 2024 and see ourselves getting there successfully,” Roman said. “Much of it, as we talked about, is about getting ready for the spin of healthcare. It’s also about getting ready to stand up 3M as a standalone company with the healthcare spin being completed. So, we’re putting focus there.”