General Electric

The General Electric Company, or GE () is a multinational technology and services company. According to the Forbes Global 2000 it is the world's second-largest company. It should not be confused with The General Electric Company plc, which was renamed Marconi plc in 1999.

In the 1960s, peculiarities in U.S. tax laws and accounting practices made it fashionable to assemble conglomerates. GE, which was a conglomerate long before the term was coined, is one of the very few corporations to achieve great success with this kind of organization.

History

In 1876, Thomas Alva Edison opened a new laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Out of the laboratory was to come perhaps the most famous invention of all—a successful development of the incandescent electric lamp. By 1890, Edison had organized his various businesses into the Edison General Electric Company.

In 1879, Elihu Thomson and Edwin J. Houston formed the rival Thomson-Houston Electric Company. It merged with various companies and was later led by Charles A. Coffin, a former shoe manufacturer from Lynn, Massachusetts. Mergers with competitors and the patent rights owned by each company put them into dominant positions in the electrical industry. As businesses expanded, it became increasingly difficult for either company to produce complete electrical installations relying solely on their own technology. In 1892, these two major companies combined, in a merger arranged by financier J. P. Morgan, to form the General Electric Company, with its headquarters in Schenectady, New York.

In 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly-formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. GE is the only one that remains today.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was founded by GE and American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) in 1919 to further international radio.

Between 1927 and 1935, 52 different inventions in electricity were introduced to the company by Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah. General Electric was one of the eight major computer companies through most of the 1960s - with IBM, the largest one, being called "Snowy White" followed by the "Seven Dwarfs": Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA, UNIVAC and GE itself. (There was also Scientific Data Systems, much smaller than the seven dwarfs). GE had an extensive line of general purpose and special purpose computers. Among them were the GE 200, GE 400, and GE 600 series general purpose computers, the GE 4010, GE 4020, and GE 4060 real time process control computers, and the Datanet 30 message switching computer. A Datanet 600 computer was designed, but never sold. It has been said that GE got into the computer manufacturing business because in the 1950s they were the largest user of computers outside of the United States federal government. In 1970 GE sold its computer division to Honeywell.

In 1986, GE re-acquired RCA, primarily for the NBC television network. The rest was sold to various companies, including Bertelsmann and Thomson.

In 2004, GE bought the television and movie assets of Vivendi Universal and became the third largest media conglomerate in the world. The new company was named NBC Universal. Also in 2004, GE completed the spinoff of most of its life and mortgage insurance assets into an independent company, Genworth Financial, based in Richmond, Virginia.

For a complete list of acquisitions and divestitures, see General Electric timeline.

Today

GE is an enormous multinational conglomerate headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. The company describes itself as composed of a number of primary business units or "businesses." Each "business" is itself a vast enterprise, many of which would, even as a standalone company, rank in the Fortune 500. The list of GE businesses varies over time as the result of acquisitions, divestitures and reorganizations. General Electric's tax return is the largest return filed in the United States, spanning approximately 24,000 pages when printed out. Electronically, the files were 237 megabytes. ^*

In 2005, GE launched its "Ecomagination" initiative in an attempt to position itself as a "green" company. Currently the company is one of the biggest players in the wind power industry and also developing new environment friendly products such as hybrid locomotives and photovoltaic cells. The company has also set goals for its subsidiaries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions.

GE Businesses

GE Organization Directory

Main article: List of assets owned by General Electric

GE Commercial Finance
- Capital Solutions
- Corporate Financial Services
- Healthcare Financial Services
- Insurance
GE Industrial
- Advanced Materials
- Consumer & Industrial
- Equipment Services
- GE Fanuc Automation
- Inspection Technologies
- Plastics
- Security
- Sensing
GE Infrastructure
- Aviation
- Aviation Financial Services
- Energy
- Energy Financial Services
- Oil & Gas
- Rail
- Water
- Roadways
GE Consumer Finance also known as GE MoneyGE Money's home page
GE Healthcare
NBC Universal
- Network
- Films
- Television Stations
- Entertainment Cable
- Television Production
- Sports/ Olympic Games
- Theme Parks

Through these businesses, GE participates in a wide variety of markets including the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity, lighting, industrial automation, medical imaging equipment, motors, railway locomotives, aircraft jet engine, aviation services and materials such as plastics, silicones and abrasives. It was co-founder and is 80% owner (with Vivendi Universal) of NBC Universal, the National Broadcasting Company. Through GE Commercial Finance, GE Consumer Finance, GE Equipment Services, and GE Insurance it offers a range of financial services as well. It has a presence in over 100 countries.

Interestingly, over half of GE's revenue is derived from financial services, ostensibly making it a financial company with a manufacturing arm. It is also one of the largest lenders in countries other than the United States, such as Japan. Even though the first wave of conglomerates (such as ITT, Ling-Temco-Vought, Tenneco, etc) fell by the wayside by the mid-1980s, in the late 1990s, another wave (consisting of Westinghouse, Tyco, and others) tried and failed to emulate GE's success.

GE's brand

General Electric has one of the most valuable corporate brands in the world."Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard." BusinessWeek. CEO Jeffrey Immelt had the new brand commissioned in 2004, after he took the reigns as chairman, in order to unify all the diversified businesses of GE. The brand included a change of the corporate color palette, small modifications to the General Electric logo.png, a new customized font, called GE Inspira, and a new slogan, "imagination at work" replacing the longtime slogan "we bring good things to life". The new brand requires many headlines to be lowercased and adds visual "white space" to their documents and advertising to promote an open and approachable company. The new brand was designed by Wolff Olins and is used extensively on GE's marketing, literature, and corporate website. GE BrandCentral^* is a website dedicated to managing the brand and requests for font and logo usage. It is closed to the public.

Jack Welch

The CEO from 1981-2001 was Jack Welch, who many regard as one of the premier business managers of his era. Nicknamed "Neutron Jack", he presided over a 28-fold increase in earnings (on a 5-fold increase in revenue) with his policy (referred to by detractors as "rank and yank") of sacking the worst performing 10% of his staff every year. In running GE's many diverse businesses he maintained a policy of only keeping those businesses which were #1 or #2 within their respective industries. In 1987, GE was the United States' second largest nuclear power company and third largest producer of nuclear weapons systems. Jack Welch introduced the use of the six sigma quality system, originally developed at Motorola, within GE.

For more on Jack Welch, see his book "Straight From the Gut."

Corporate information

The company's market capitalization (is almost $100 billion higher than that of Microsoft ([http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=msft). In 2004, GE was named number one company for employers and employees on the Forbes 500 Global Player list.

Jeffrey Immelt succeeded Jack Welch as CEO of General Electric and holds that office today. Current members of the board of directors of General Electric are: Sir William Castell (Vice Chairman, and Executive Officer), James Cash, Jr., Dennis Dammerman, Ann Fudge, Claudio Gonzalez, Jeffrey Immelt, Andrea Jung, A.G. Lafley, Robert Lane, Ralph Larsen, Rochelle Lazarus, Sam Nunn, Roger Penske, Robert Swieringa, Douglas Warner, and Bob Wright.

Over the years, GE has received several awards honoring them for their accomplishments, values and reputation:

In Fortune Magazine's 2005 "Global Most Admired Companies" list, GE ranked first overall. (February 2005)
In Fortune Magazine's 2005 "America's Most Admired Companies" list, GE ranked second overall. (February 2005)
GE was named to the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index as one of the world's leaders in environmental, social and economic programs.
GE ranked ninth on Fortune Magazine's "50 Most Desirable MBA Employers" list. (April 2004)

Superfund Sites

General Electric has agreed to pay the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up three superfund sites contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The three superfund sites are composed of a 200 mile stretch along the Hudson River, a section of the Housatonic River in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and a transformer facility near Rome, Georgia.

Analyst coverage

See Yahoo! analyst converage

Germanotta, Jeffrey (William Blair & Company, L.L.C.)
Cornell, Robert (Lehman Brothers)
Parent, Nicole (Credit Suisse First Boston)
Dray, Deane (Goldman Sachs)

Financials

SEC filings including 10-k

References

External links

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