General Electric shifts tack
General Electric announces 4th quarter earnings Friday. The company is deep into a restructuring that involved selling off most of its financial arm to center its attention on its industrial core.
“GE is quite a different company, but it’s also the same company it’s always been,” said Eric Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
Gordon said GE has chosen to focus on its strengths, like aviation, locomotion, healthcare and power generation. It recently closed the huge acquisition of Alstom, a French power-generation company.
However, the company faced two headwinds in 2015, said Barbara Noverini, an equity analyst with Morningstar, including the falling oil prices and the slowing growth of emerging markets.
“Companies like GE that sell equipment into those markets, whether they’re infrastructure-related equipment or building-materials equipment, those types of sales have slowed.”
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