Departures slow for Norwalk division of General Electric

Months after making a portion of its Norwalk office space available to other companies, General Electric detailed the extent of its ongoing dismantling of its GE Capital arm, listing just 2,000 jobs remaining in a subsidiary that just five years ago supported more than 20 times that number.

In a downsizing initiated by former CEO Jeff Immelt and continuing under Larry Culp Jr., GE has offloaded GE Capital loan portfolios through a mix of sales and spinoffs — including the 2016 creation of the retail finance giant Synchrony Financial, which remains a major employer in Stamford — as well as layoffs and employees otherwise leaving on their own accord.

During the final three months of 2019 alone, GE found takers for $8 billion in GE Capital assets, including $3.6 billion in its former PK AirFinance group, which issues loans secured by aircraft as collateral, acquired by a private equity investment consortium.

In its annual report filed Monday with the Securities & Exchange Commission, GE disclosed it shed 78,000 jobs globally last year, including 27,000 in the United States. The company entered 2020 with 205,000 people on the payroll, about 70,000 stateside.

In an email response to a query, spokesperson Mary Kate Mullaney noted the vast majority of those departures were the result of GE divesting its controlling stake in Baker Hughes, which provides a range of services to companies that extract oil and gas; and from the sale of its former GE Transportation locomotive manufacturing division to Wabtec.

“Excluding those two big moves, global headcount was close to flat,” Mullaney stated. “While these jobs are no longer with GE, they continue to exist under their new managing companies.”

A year after GE Capital jettisoned more than 2,000 jobs, the company lowered its headcount by 300 people in 2019.

Mullaney did not provide an immediate update on how many people GE employs in Norwalk and Connecticut. Last year, the company reported having 1,400 workers in The Towers complex just off the Merritt Parkway. After securing space in an adjacent building next door that until recently was Diageo’s North American headquarters, GE put that space back on the market last year.

Under CEO Alec Burger, GE Capital now focuses its finance activities on GE’s core industries of aviation, energy and medical equipment. GE Capital contributed $8.7 billion in revenue in 2019, representing less than 10 percent of GE’s total for the year, compared to a third of revenue on the eve of the Great Recession a decade earlier.

Both Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poors rate as “stable” the long-term outlook for debt owed by GE Capital and GE, but Hearst subsidiary Fitch Ratings maintains a “negative” outlook.

“GE Capital ... is much smaller than in the past, but is still large in absolute terms,” Fitch analysts said last summer in their most recent assessment of General Electric debt. “Other diversified industrial companies typically do not have substantial finance businesses.”