Update: 10:20 am EST. We spoke to Seth Martin at GE Corporate and he declined to comment. However we have spoken now to two other GE Lighting contacts, as well as a press contact, and we are told that Lighting is not included in the potential offload of GE Appliances.
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Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that GE is trying to offload it’s Appliance business, what is unclear is whether this includes its Lighting business. The WSJ article is 651 words, the word lighting is mentioned one time.
The reason for the confusion is that Lighting reports through the Appliance business and together they earned $381 million in operating profit last year—just over 2% of GE’s total operating profit. So the question remains will GE offload the Lighting business if it is successful in offloading the Appliance business?
Your humble editor spoke to a former co-worker who is employed with GE Lighting. He told me that the word in Nela Park is that Lighting is not part of this potential sale. We attempted to contact Seth Martin at GE HQ, and hope to hear from him soon. Developing…