The MSM is dutifully reporting the “SPECTACULAR” profits of General Electric this morning. It took me 5 minutes of reading the press releases and looking at a couple of numbers to conclude that their results are a sham and a fraud. I thought there was one number you couldn’t fake – REVENUE. But I was wrong.
GE’s revenue was reportedly up 6.2%. This is an extremely weak number to begin with considering we are two years into an economic recovery. But guess what? GE added 5 days to this year’s 1st quarter versus last year’s 1st quarter. Isn’t that precious? That is a 5.5% longer quarter. So, in reality there revenue growth was really less than 5%.
Now the real smell test. Somehow, this bastion of capitalism was able to increase profits by 77% with a 5% increase in revenue. WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That Jeffrey Immelt deserves a big raise for that accomplishment. He must be the best CEO on the whole fucking planet. I sure hope Obama calls him and gives him a big ATTA BOY.
Remember GE Capital, the part of GE that pushed them to the brink of bankruptcy and ruin in 2008? Well they just happened to report a tripling of their profits from $583 million to $1.84 billion. AMAZINGLY they did this with a 3.3% revenue gain. Are you starting to smell something? I am. I smell accountants making a journal entry to reduce loan loss reserves for the billions in toxic assets still sitting on GE’s books.
EXTEND & PRETEND IS STILL YOUR FRIEND.
So, you have a company reporting an increase of profits of $1.48 billion and $1.26 billion of the profit is from an accounting entry saying your future losses on your toxic mortgages and commercial loans will be lower.
GE BRINGS GOOD FRAUD TO LIFE.
Their profits smell like this:
GE Posts Fourth Straight Profit Rise as Industrial Orders Gain
General Electric Co. (GE) boosted its dividend for the third time since July after large-equipment orders and a rebound in the finance unit helped fuel a quarterly profit that beat analysts’ estimates.
First-quarter earnings from continuing operations rose 58 percent to $3.58 billion, or 33 cents a share, excluding a pension expense, up from $2.26 billion, or 20 cents, a year earlier, GE said. That exceeded the average projection of 28 cents a share from analysts surveyed by Bloomberg and marked the fourth straight profit increase.
Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt plans to speed sales and profit growth this year and in 2012 by focusing on energy, aviation, transportation and health care as well as a slimmer GE Capital. He is spending on research and more than $12 billion of acquisitions since October, mostly in energy, as he builds technology offerings and the oil and gas division.
“It’s rare for a diversified industrial like GE to have every cylinder running smoothly,” said Joel Levington, managing director at Brookfield Investment Management Inc. in New York. “GE had enough positives, particularly energy and GE Capital, to get its engine driving forward.”
GE gained 54 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $20.94 at 7:58 a.m. before regular New York Stock Exchange composite trading. GE climbed 12 percent this year before today, outpacing gains of 5.8 percent by the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and 7.6 percent by the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The dividend will rise 1 cent to 15 cents a share payable July 25 to shareholders of record at the close of business on June 20, Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE said. GE cut its shareholder payout in February 2009 for the first time since the Depression to money as the global recession and credit crunch drained profit from the finance unit.
The company’s total order backlog, a gauge of future profitability, was $177 billion, exceeding the fourth quarter’s $175 billion. Orders at large-equipment divisions including energy, aviation and health care rose 13 percent to $19 billion.
Sales Rise
Sales rose 6.2 percent to $38.4 billion, helped by more selling days as the quarter ended April 3 rather than March 28 a year earlier.
“A few extra days will not normally make much of a difference in the big lumpy equipment businesses (unless you luckily catch an extra lump),” Jeffrey Sprague, co-founder of Vertical Research Partners, wrote in a note to clients this week. He has a “hold” rating on the shares.
Revenue included proceeds from the disposition of NBC. The sale of NBC generated 4 cents a share, tempered by 3 cents in restructuring, acquisition and disposition costs, GE said.
GE doesn’t provide profit or sales forecasts, instead giving investors a “framework” on which to compile their own. Analysts estimated first-quarter sales of $34.3 billion, on average, according to a Bloomberg survey.
Energy Unit
This is the first quarter the company has broken out pension costs or benefits in its income statement on a per-share basis. Including a pension cost of $163 million, net income attributable to common shareholders was $3.43 billion, or 31 cents a share.
Earnings in the energy unit, which includes the world’s biggest power-generation equipment maker and an oil and gas exploration division, fell 6.8 percent to $1.38 billion amid lower prices for wind turbines. Sales rose 9.2 percent to $9.45 billion helped by acquisitions.
GE Energy said March 29 it agreed to buy most of France’s Converteam from Barclays Private Equity Ltd. and LBO France for $3.2 billion to add equipment that helps electricity flow to the power grid from devices such as wind turbines. That capped about $11 billion in energy purchases alone since October.
‘Emerged from the Recession’
The division will now concentrate on integrating those purchases, GE Vice Chairman John Krenicki said in an interview last month. GE is also expanding its solar unit, with plans to announce a U.S. plant location in the next three months.
“GE has emerged from the recession a stronger, more competitive company,” Immelt said in the statement. “Strategic investments in high-growth segments have strengthened the company’s energy portfolio and position that business to return to growth in the second half of this year.”
Profit at the aviation division, the world’s largest jet- engine maker, rose 5 percent to $841 million on sales of $4.37 billion, higher than some analysts’ estimates.
GE Healthcare, the world’s biggest maker of medical-imaging equipment and information technology systems, posted a 7 percent increase in profit to $531 million. The division’s sales rose 10 percent to $4.09 billion.
GE Capital’s net income more than tripled to $1.84 billion from $583 million as consumer finance rebounded and losses declined. Revenue rose 3.3 percent to about $12.3 billion.
Cash generated from industrial operating activities was $1.7 billion in the quarter, as the company works toward a goal of $12 billion to $13 billion a year excluding NBC. The company had $82 billion in consolidated cash at the end of the quarter.
Industrial sales declined 6 percent when compared to the year-ago quarter, because the figure includes about 1 month of NBC revenue in 2011. Excluding NBC from both periods, revenue rose 8 percent.
bluestem says:
Fisrt they manipulate the market and now the manipulate the calender? Man, we are really doomed. John
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21st April 2011 at 9:43 am
TeresaE says:
Ah, the simple beauty of added days and increased sales cost per unit.
Let the joy of recovery overtake you.
The rich are recovering, I’m sure our recovery is just around the corner.
Probably about the same time the Treasury demands we cash out of the market (crashing it) and pile into Treasuries, so that Obamacare can pay for itself for a year or so.
What fun it is to rob Peter to pay Paul. At least fun for the Immelts, Soros’ and Gates of the world.
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21st April 2011 at 9:48 am
Persnickety says:
On the plus side, we are definitely now the largest and most powerful fascist state to have ever existed. Gotta be good at something.
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21st April 2011 at 9:51 am
eugend66 says:
Indeed, chasing good money out and bring bad money in.
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21st April 2011 at 9:56 am
Administrator says:
I guess someone read my post.
By Christopher Hinton
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — General Electric Co. /quotes/comstock/13*!ge/quotes/nls/ge GE -2.11% beat Wall Street estimates for the first quarter and painted a rosy picture for its future, but apparently that wasn’t enough to alleviate some short-term concerns, analysts said Thursday. Shares of GE declined 2% to $20 each late morning after coming close to $21 in premarket trading. The stock hit a 52-week high of $21.65 on Feb. 14, but an earthquake in Japan sent the stock spinning in March to as low as $19.45, and some investors may think the stock won’t rise much further in the near term. In July, the stock bottomed out for the year at $13.75, so this may be a good time for people invested then to cash in, said Jeff Duncan, of Duncan Financial Management in Saint Louis. Duncan has a long-term hold on the GE shares and a $25 price target.
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21st April 2011 at 11:32 am
Maddie's Mom says:
Maybe Obama pressured Jeffie for some “good numbers” on their recent jaunt .
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21st April 2011 at 2:23 pm
Administrator says:
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — As far as hoaxes go, it was hilarious. Unless you got caught on the wrong side of the trade.
According to a bogus press release sent out early Wednesday, General Electric /quotes/comstock/13*!ge/quotes/nls/ge GE -2.21% CEO Jeffrey Immelt was purported to have informed the White House the company would be “gifting” a $3.2 billion federal tax refund to Uncle Sam on April 18, Tax Day, in a bid to “secure its position as a leader in corporate social responsibility.” Read full story about the hoax.
The tiny guerrilla team calling itself Yes Men claimed responsibility for the hoax, their latest in a series of stunts aimed at companies that espouse corporate citizenship while bulking up their bottom lines via generous tax loopholes. The hit on GE was especially timely given the controversy over the company’s true tax status stirred up by a recent New York Times report.
Reuters
GE’s Jeffrey Immelt listens to a reporter’s question after an April 4 meeting with Japan’s trade minister in Tokyo.
According to the newspaper, GE received a $3.2 billion tax credit on its 2010 income despite posting a $5.1 billion profit from its U.S. operations. GE officials claim nothing could be farther from the truth, though they haven’t been much help explaining what the truth is.
Meanwhile, Immelt makes an especially ripe target for these guys given his new role as an economic adviser to President Barack Obama, who, by the way, has called for narrowing the loopholes the titans of U.S. commerce use to avoid paying taxes. See First Take commentary on Immelt’s joining Team Obama .
But the hoax, dolled up as a very authentic-looking GE press release, fooled at least one news organization and then daisy-chained through other media outlets before getting yanked. But by then the damage was done.
GE shares fell 1.6% from their preopen high. Not a huge move, but enough to briefly trim GE’s market capitalization by nearly $3.5 billion.
How much of that was caused by the Yes Men? On a morning when most other companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average were pretty flat, it’s tempting to think that at least some of GE’s pullback was the result of the hoax. We may never know, but there probably are several lawyers already looking into it, either on behalf of the company or its shareholders.
The episode is also cause for concern over at the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of that agency’s many tasks is to make sure people don’t manipulate share prices, and that includes issuing false statements about publicly traded companies.
It’s far from clear whether the SEC has the bandwidth to mount an investigation. But if you were hoodwinked into selling GE stock this morning, you’d appreciate it if the regulators at least gave the Yes Men a severe tongue lashing.
Of course, that would probably have about as much impact as saying it’s time to close those tax loopholes.
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21st April 2011 at 4:56 pm
Kill Bill says:
GE. We help bring things to lifelessness.
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21st April 2011 at 5:17 pm
Opinionated Bloviator says:
Fascist government and the TBTF mentality. Turning the United States into a failed state – Yes we can.
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21st April 2011 at 9:55 pm