Industrial giant General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) will report fourth-quarter and full-year earnings before markets open Wednesday and the big question has to be whether the once struggling, now slowly recovering firm can keep the music playing.
Analysts are looking for adjusted earnings per share of $0.18 for the fourth quarter on revenue of $25.77 billion. For the full year, EPS is expected to total $0.62, and revenue is forecast at $92.79 billion.
While those numbers are a big improvement of the December 2018 quarter, they represent a significant drop in how analysts view GE. After GE reported that quarter’s earnings, fiscal year 2019 revenues were forecast to reach about $119 billion. Full-year EPS was forecast at $0.84.
While the lowered expectations may be easier to meet (or even exceed), GE is going to have to beat those expectations by more than just a penny or two. That’s not going to be easy.
In the third quarter, GE’s cash cow was the aviation segment that recorded $8.8 billion in sales and profit of $1.72 billion (up 3% year over year). GE’s joint venture with French aerospace firm Safran, CFM International, manufactures the Leap 1-B engines for Boeing’s grounded 737 Max passenger jets. Boeing’s decision to stop production of the plane until further notice will have some impact on GE’s aviation segment revenue and profits. Investors expect to hear more details about that on Wednesday’s conference call.
Under CEO Larry Culp, GE has tried at least to stop the decline in its power segment. Once GE’s bread-and-butter division, revenues have been declining for years, and the company’s massive electrical power generators are getting a smaller share of a shrinking market. In the third quarter, power segment sales totaled $3.86 billion, a year-over-year drop of 30% and well behind total sales of $5.02 billion in the company’s renewables segment. Neither segment was profitable, however, with power’s loss totaling $144 million and renewables’ loss dropping to $98 million.
A third major concern remains the possibility of further large write-downs for the company’s long-term care insurance business (now basically shut down) and pension benefits contributions (benefits have been frozen for employees who are still employed but remain unchanged for retirees). A short-seller attack in August claimed that the long-term care insurance overhang totaled more than $18 billion, not the $5.9 billion GE added to its reserve to pay claims.
In October, GE said it would prefund $4 billion to $5 billion in estimated pension funding requirements for 2021 and 2022 at the same time as it freezes its pension plan for about 20,000 employees with salaried benefits and another 700 or so executives with supplementary pension benefits. GE also said it would offer a lump-sum payment to about 100,000 eligible former employees who have not yet begun to receive monthly pension payments. The company’s pension plan has been closed to new members since January 2012.
GE can’t do much about the issue with the 737 Max engines except try to negotiate some compensation from Boeing. Regarding its power segment, the changes to its pension benefits wipe out $4 billion to $6 billion of the segment’s net debt. That helps, but GE really needs to reconsider when to dump the power business altogether. Unless it does so, fossil fuels will continue to bleed company cash, even after the sell-off GE’s controlling stake in Baker Hughes.
Investors have shown patience with Culp’s reconfiguration of GE, but there are still big dollars on the table, and how the company plans to minimize the risk of losing that cash should be more important than beating some modest expectations.
24/7 Wall St.Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.
Editors' Picks
