GE profit down 44 percent, shares fall

BOSTON (Reuters) - General Electric Co reported a 44 percent drop in quarterly profit on weakness at GE Capital and its lighting and appliance units, as the U.S. conglomerate and economic bellwether closed out one of the toughest years in its 117-year history.

Despite meeting Wall Street's lowered estimates, earnings at the company's GE Capital finance arm -- its Achilles heel for the past year -- tumbled 67 percent. Its energy infrastructure unit, which makes electric turbines and windmills, was the highlight, recording 11 percent profit growth.

Although Chief Executive Jeff Immelt said in a statement that he expects the rest of the year to be "extremely difficult," he later told the GE-owned CNBC television network, "We're not going to apologize for the results that we have in the fourth quarter."

The world's largest maker of jet engines and electric turbines said profit was $3.72 billion, or 35 cents per diluted share, compared with $6.7 billion, or 66 cents, a year earlier.

Factoring out one-time items, results met Wall Street's expectations, according to Reuters Estimates.

Revenue fell 4.8 percent to $46.21 billion.

But analysts and investors noted that given the brutal economic environment, GE may still have major challenges ahead.

"We believe (GE Capital) losses and growing strain on Industrial are shoes yet to drop," wrote J.P. Morgan analyst Steve Tusa, in a note to clients. He added that concerns about its Triple-A credit rating and its dividend will also pressure the stock.

GE shares fell 5.3 percent to $12.77 in pre-market trading, down from a $13.48 close on the New York Stock Exchange.

AFFIRMS DIVIDEND, OUTLOOK

The global financial crisis has pounded results at GE Capital, leading many on Wall Street to wonder if it could lose its coveted triple-A debt rating.

Immelt repeated GE plans to maintain both its $1.24 per share annual dividend and defend its credit rating, and reiterated its 2009 earnings outlook laid out in December.

GE has ceased providing numeric per-share profit targets, instead opting to spell out a rough "framework" for how its individual businesses will perform. That calls for profit at its infrastructure units and at NBC Universal to be flat to up 5 percent, with GE Capital profit down about 40 percent.

"There's been a lot of declining consensus earnings of late, and I think that's basically a sign of the uncertainty as to their outlook for their global economy," said Perry Adams, senior portfolio manager at Huntington Private Financial Group in Traverse City, Michigan.

"Maybe they've underestimated the weakness of it," he added. "That's going to be the key going forward here."

Across the industrial sector, companies are braced for a rough year. United Technologies Corp, the world's largest maker of elevators and air conditioners, on Wednesday warned that it expected a particularly brutal first half.

GE, which stunned investors in April with an unexpected profit drop, has said it would cut jobs across its operations this year, but has not given an overall target for reductions, saying those decisions would be made at individual business units. GE employs more than 300,000 people worldwide.

The Fairfield, Connecticut company is trimming back its finance arm, which accounted for about half of its profits in 2007. The company aims to rely on GE Capital for just 30 percent of its profits, with 10 percent coming from NBC Universal and 60 percent from its core industrial units.

In early December, the company sharply lowered the high end of its fourth-quarter profit forecast.

Last year, GE explored a number of restructuring ideas, including trying to sell its U.S. private-label credit-card operation and looking to sell or spin off its century-old lighting and appliance business. Both those efforts were mothballed as the credit crunch made it all but impossible to pull off multibillion-dollar deals.

As of Thursday's close, GE shares had tumbled about 60 percent over the past year, erasing some $200 billion in market capital, and sharply outpacing the 32 percent fall of the Dow Jones industrial average.

(Reporting by Scott Malone, additional reporting by Rebekah Curtis, Dominic Lau and Atul Prakash in London and Christoph Steitz in Frankfurt, Nick Zieminski and Leah Schnurr in New York; Editing by Derek Caney)