GE 2008 Annual Report Download - page 8

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We remain a great source of liquidity to companies, consumers, and projects. We
provided $48 billion of new loans in fourth quarter 2008 and plan for about $180 billion
in 2009. We are a leader in mid market commercial lending around the world. We
continue to support many customers in infrastructure industries like aviation, healthcare,
transportation, and energy.
We intend to stay anchored in what we know, own, and manage. We underwrite
all loans and leases to our standards and typically, as senior lenders, we are secured
in collateral. In addition, we are prepared to hold these assets through the cycle.
At the same time, we are repositioning our fi nancial services business to operate as a
more focused and smaller fi nance segment. We continue to have a set of strong businesses
in core lending to mid market customers, who benefi t from our expertise in energy,
aviation, and healthcare; in global consumer lending, including our banking and joint
ventures; and in real estate. We will be taking a close look at nonstrategic assets in these
businesses, such as equipment services businesses, most of our consumer mortgage
books, and a dozen or so small or subscale commercial and consumer platforms that we
will reduce over the next few years. These moves will allow us to focus on our core
operations and our ability to self-fund by growing our deposit base.
We are targeting our returns in fi nancial services to be about 15%. We remain
convinced that we have an effective fi nancial services business model. We have over
10,000 global originators who understand their customers better than banks because
of GE’s industrial presence. We believe that our fi nancial services can drive earnings growth
over the long term.
Sustaining Competitive Advantage
GE is a 130-year-old growth company. By my count, we have survived nine recessions
and one depression. What drives our results through the cycles is our ability to perform
and change. We will continue to invest in initiatives that will give GE a solid competitive
advantage over the long term.
BE GLOBAL. Our non-U.S. revenues have averaged 13% annual growth this decade. We
expect our global growth to outpace the U.S. in 2009. This is a source of competitive
advantage for GE. We are perfecting an approach called “connected and scalable
localization” whereby we accelerate growth by expanding our local product lines, serving
new customers, and creating strong partnerships with local champions. GE has
25 countries each with more than $1 billion in revenues, so empowering our local teams
is critical to driving growth.
Global diversity is important in this cycle because it diversifi es revenues and risk. We
expect Healthcare’s diagnostic imaging business to suffer in the U.S. as our customers
grapple with budget cuts. However, we have a $9 billion global healthcare business that we
expect to experience strong demographic growth, offsetting weakness in the U.S.
Drive Innovation
Lead with
technology and
content innovation
Leverage Strengths
Use GE’s size, expertise,
fi nancial capability,
and brand
Build Relationships
Grow customer and
partner relationships
worldwide
Be Global
Connect locally,
scale globally
OUR STRATEGY
Our strategy borrows our key strengths from the past and makes them
relevant to a new era of global business:
6 ge 2008 annual report