GE Gets Back to The Simple Life

The $30 billion sale of its jet-leasing unit finally ends the company’s often-troubled foray into financial services, returning GE to its industrial roots

- James E. Ellis and David Rocks

Despite its storied history as an industrial icon founded by Thomas Edison, General Electric Co. by a decade ago had morphed into a massive financial- services company bigger than all but a handful of U.S. banks. That transformation brought with it a maddeningly complex web of businesses, opaque accounting, and financial risk that dogged it for years. So when Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp on March 10 announced a $30 billion deal to unload GE’s aircraft-leasing business, the move returned something long absent from GE: simplicity.

Jet lessor GE Capital Aviation Services, or Gecas, was the biggest remaining business of GE Capital, the once-sprawling financial-services company that in 2010 had more than $600 billion in assets. After the unit’s sale to Irish rival AerCap Holdings NV closes a year from now, GE plans to transfer what it says are just $21 billion in remaining GE Capital assets onto its industrial balance sheet. It will also stop reporting results for GE’s financial-services, industrial, and combined businesses separately, streamlining the complex financial reports that fueled criticism that trouble could—and sometimes did—lurk for years in those accounting statements before revealing itself.

“That’s why I say this is so transformational for us,” Culp says. “We end up being all about our core four industrial businesses. We’re really not going to talk about Capital going forward.”