By Natasha Khan
A blaze at a Southern California warehouse that stocked Kimberly-Clark products will take an estimated $20 million bite out of the company's second-quarter revenue, executives said Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors say the fire that swept through the sprawling warehouse earlier this month was deliberately set by a disgruntled worker who posted his crime on social media. The video prosecutors say he posted appears to show cases of Scott's paper products being set on fire inside a warehouse.
Prosecutors charged Chamel Abdulkarim, 29, with arson. They say he made statements including: "I just cost these [expletive] billions" and "All you had to do was pay us enough to live." Authorities said that in a phone call with an unidentified person, Abdulkarim compared himself to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson.
Abdulkarim has pleaded not guilty.
The facility, located in Ontario, Calif., was run by a Kimberly-Clark vendor. The fire on April 7 destroyed the 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse and caused about $500 million in damage, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California. No one was injured.
The estimate of the revenue hit for Kimberly-Clark came on the company's first-quarter earnings call. The company said the $20 million hit will hurt second-quarter organic growth by roughly 0.7% to 0.8%.
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 28, 2026 11:15 ET (15:15 GMT)
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