General Electric Company (GE) Event: 2014 Electrical Products Group Conference Date: May 21, 2014
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Company Name: General Electric Company (GE) Event: 2014 Electrical Products Group Conference Date: May 21, 2014 This document contains “forward-looking statements” – that is, statements related to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address our expected future business and financial performance and financial condition, and often contain words such as “expect,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “believe,” “seek,” “see,” or “will.” Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain. For us, particular uncertainties that could cause our actual results to be materially different than those expressed in our forward-looking statements include: current economic and financial conditions, including volatility in interest and exchange rates, commodity and equity prices and the value of financial assets; potential market disruptions or other impacts arising in the United States or Europe from developments in sovereign debt situations; the impact of conditions in the financial and credit markets on the availability and cost of General Electric Capital Corporation’s (GECC) funding and on our ability to reduce GECC’s asset levels as planned; the impact of conditions in the housing market and unemployment rates on the level of commercial and consumer credit defaults; pending and future mortgage securitization claims and litigation in connection with WMC, which may affect our estimates of liability, including possible loss estimates; our ability to maintain our current credit rating and the impact on our funding costs and competitive position if we do not do so; the adequacy of our cash flows and earnings and other conditions which may affect our ability to pay our quarterly dividend at the planned level or to repurchase shares at planned levels; GECC’s ability to pay dividends to GE at the planned level, which may be affected by GECC's cash flows and earnings, financial services regulation and oversight, and other factors; our ability to convert pre-order commitments/wins into orders; the price we realize on orders since commitments/wins are stated at list prices; the level of demand and financial performance of the major industries we serve, in cluding, without limitation, air and rail transportation, power generation, oil and gas production, real estate and healthcare; the impact of regulation and regulatory, investigative and legal proceedings and legal compliance risks, including the impact of financial services regulation; our capital allocation plans, as such plans may change including with respect to the timing and size of share repurchases, acquisitions, joint ventures, dispositions and other strategic actions; our success in completing announced transactions and integrating acquired businesses; our ability to complete the staged exit from our North American Retail Finance business or the acquisition of the Thermal, Renewables and Grid businesses of Alstom as planned; the impact of potential information technology or data security breaches; and numerous other matters of national, regional and global scale, including those of a political, economic, business and competitive nature. These uncertainties may cause our actual future results to be materially different than those expressed in our forward-looking statements. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements. This document includes certain forward-looking projected financial information that is based on current estimates and forecasts. Actual results could differ materially. GE’s Investor Relations website at www.ge.com/investor and our corporate blog at www.gereports.com, as well as GE’s Facebook page and Twitter accounts, contain a significant amount of information about GE, including financial and other information for investors. GE encourages investors to visit these websites from time to time, as information is updated and new information is posted. <<Steven Winoker, analyst, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC>> Anyway, now it’s time for me to hand it off to our leading Francophile and highlight of the conference, Mr. Immelt, Vous avez la parole. You have the floor. <<Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer>> Great Steve. Steven, might I add that was an awfully bold decision you made. Stay here really, you teach us off. So good morning or as we like to say at GE bonjour, it’s good to be with you. Just at the highlight look, 2014 is looking good, on track, no change to the model; we feel good about where we’re positioned. We are executing the strategy to do the retail finance spend, executing on our key initiatives. But what I really want to spike up today is some ways the company is different, some big advantages we think we are building in areas like analytics and globalization and some portfolio moves and really give you a sense of some of the big changes that are going on inside the company right now. 1 So the environment, I would say, generally getting better. U.S. gets a little better. Everyday we see demand for credit. You probably heard this week, Europe growing again. Emerging markets, we’re still quite positive and bullish on the emerging markets. Good value gap, so inflation is benign and lots of volatility around governments around the world. And our big themes continue to be in tact. So we are, I would say more bullish on the environment and feel pretty good about the way GE is positioned in that regard. The segments, really no update on the segments, off to a good start in the first quarter this year. Power a little stronger, Healthcare a little weaker, but really across-the-board, I would say pretty consistent with the expectations we set out at the beginning of the year. The team is executing well and we are seeing some good acceleration in some key segments. And so we like the profile of the segments and how we are doing. And we think some of the businesses that got off to a tough start, like Energy Management, are going to rebound in the second quarter and ought to still meet objectives for the year. No change to the way we think about Corporate, I just wanted to highlight a couple of things. Corporate costs are going to be down $500 million, so simplification is driving across the entire platform. And we still plan to do more restructuring than we have gains. So we’re doing a ton of restructuring this year; somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion now to help us this year, next year and into the future, and that’s why Corporate remains a drag. So the earnings to the company would be even higher and the earnings growth rate would be higher if not for the uncovered restructuring, which we think is going to position us going forward. No real change in cash expectations for the year or revenue expectations for the year. We started off industrial organic growth at 8%. So we feel good about the profile of the company in terms of where it goes. We are executing the strategy. We expect to do the Retail Finance IPO in the third quarter so on track for that. And I think we’ve got more certainty around the timing. We feel good about the third quarter for execution of the IPO. Industrial earnings growth – double-digit earnings growth driven by organic growth in the 4% to 7% range and we continue to see good margin enhancement across our businesses. GE Capital is on track to earn $7 billion this year. We expect to get a $3 billion dividend from GE Capital this year, but that’s the precursor to getting a ton of cash out of GE Capital next year when we do the Retail Finance spin. So no change in expectations along those lines, and good steady earnings growth while we’re going through the portfolio transformation. So we expect to continue to grow the dividend aligned with earnings. We expect the share as we do the RFS split to get the shares down to 9% to 9.5%. We still expect to do at least $4 billion of dispositions this year, $4 billion of cash. The balance sheet is extremely strong in financial services and we’re on track to hit the return on invested capital of 17% by 2016 as we talked about in December. So we’re executing the strategy and very focused on the things we’re doing there. We still expect to get a gain in Retail Finance. It’s unclear whether that’s going to be in continuing 2 operations or discontinued operations, it could very well be in disc ops by the time we get there. So that’s kind of the lay of the land on strategy execution. And the profile of the businesses, look, we really feel like the industrial businesses are gaining momentum, a good backlog. Our initiatives are pretty powerful in terms of sustaining the kind of organic growth we’re getting this year. We see good margin enhancement this year that’s sustainable and leading into the future. And we’re looking at the portfolio and either getting margin enhancement of some of the underachievers or find ways to create value along those lines. GE Capital, I would say, we now are thinking about by 2015, once we do the Retail Finance spend, a number more like $300 billion in ENI versus $350 billion. So we are going to execute the spend. We are still looking hard at the red assets and see a lot of non-core opportunity. We are seeing good growth in the core GE Capital assets and looking for ways to making GE Capital even more capital efficient as times goes on. So this is the way to profile the company going forward.