“we have a long runway for improvement toward our target of achieving less than 4% cost of quality as a percentage of cost of goods sold.”

In context

“ne at our Jinshan plant in China, we were able to increase utilization from 63% to 81% by optimizing visual defect controls and reducing curing system downtime, freeing up enough capacity to double our share of an electronics customers business. Quality is another critical aspect of operational excellence and is a company-wide priority. Our cost of poor quality in the quarter was 5.7%, down 40 basis points sequentially and 150 basis points year-over-year. Our focus on quality has driven yield launch reductions across all 3 business groups as we leverage Kaizen events and AI tools to optimize changeovers, use automation to replace manual visual inspection and deploy design for manufacturing in our new product development efforts to reduce scrap during scale up. While we're making progress, we have a long runway for improvement toward our target of achieving less than 4% cost of quality as a percentage of cost of goods sold. Our third priority is capital deployment. We returned $900 million to shareholders in Q3, $400 million in dividends and $500 million of share repurchases. Year-to-date, we returned $3.9 billion to shareholders. Consistent with what we said at Investor Day and since then, we continue to evaluate our portfolio at a profit center level to shift our businesses towards higher growth, higher profit potential markets. Addressing this portfolio will not only be accretive to earnings over time, but importantly, we'll free up management time to focus on higher-value opportunities. We previously communicated that 2% to 3% of revenue was under review for being divested. And in the quarter, we made progress with an agreement to sell our precision grinding and finishing business within our SIBG abrasiv”