But how did this company come into being? How big is it really? What are its buried stories? And what little-known secrets are waiting to be discovered? Let's find out.
Prelude
In 1889, Thomas Edison created the company by merging several companies. Thomas Edison, through the merger of several companies, financed by JP Morgan Chase and Anthony Drexel, was able to create a new company. Drexel and JP Morgan Chase to create General Electric, known simply as GE. But he was not a modest man, at least in some ways.
In those days, he did a lot of unethical things to promote the company. Electrocuting animals was one of them.
Edison's misdeeds aside, in 1886 GE became one of the first twelve companies to be listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. GE became the only one of the original twelve companies still listed on the index.In the early 1900s, GE became one of the first companies to enter the audio broadcasting industry. It created the Radio Corporation of America, known simply as RCA, which is still in operation today. At the same time, GE invented the electric toaster and the electric stove. It sparked a mini-revolution in home cooking.
In the 1930s, GE introduced consumer finance in response to the Great Depression, enabling customers to pay for new appliances in installments.
In the 1930s and 1940s, GE led the way for more innovations. Examples include the incandescent light bulb and the commercial autopilot. It's interesting to note that in the 1950s, General Electric became the first company in the world to own a computer. It was also, the largest user of computers other than the U.S. government. Since then, GE has started producing its own mainframe computers and even its own operating system. General Electric became one of the eight largest computer companies in the 1960s, along with IBM, Honeywell, and others. This continued into the 1970s. That is, until GM sold its computer division to Honeywell.
General Electric expanded its business into a number of areas throughout the 20th century, including the energy industry. And in 2002, it took over Enron's wind energy assets when the company went bankrupt. At the time, Enron Wind was the only remaining major U.S. producer of wind turbines.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries. GE became a household name and an international giant.
Today (Present Day)
Today, GE's revenue ranks 24th on the Forbes 500 list. Let's just take a look at some aspects to get a feel for his actual size.
General Electric has about 305,000 employees, $146 billion in revenue. And assets worth more than $650 billion. More than the GDP of Sweden and Norway, and about twice the GDP of Singapore. It also sits at number nine on Forbes' list of the world's most valuable brands. All this sounds pretty good, so how did it get rich. Before I answer that question, I'd like to ask you to think about another question: what is GE's biggest source of revenue? This is such a brainless question. Could it be, isn't it energy? Yet it isn't.
This table shows the distribution of GE's revenues over a three-year period. As you can see, GE's largest revenue actually comes from finance, at 31%. Operations include personal loans, credit cards, energy financial services, and more. It's worth noting: GE's market share within capital markets is almost half that of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank Group. However, GE has begun to sell off its financial division and currently has a market share of between about 10% and one-sixth of the aforementioned banks. The three banks mentioned above are the result of the merger of 28 banks since the 1990s. So it's by no means easy for GE to have achieved what it has.
GE's second-largest division is energy and water, which accounts for 18 percent of total revenue. It encompasses gasoline, wind and steam turbines, nuclear reactors, solar power, and generators.
Next up is the aerospace division, which accounts for 14% of total revenue. Its business involves aviation services and systems, as well as military and commercial engines.
Further down is the medical segment, which accounts for 12 percent of total revenue. Its businesses include magnetic **** vibration, CT scanners, X-rays, and surgical and molecular imaging equipment. GE's market share in the medical equipment industry is about 39%.
As for oil and gasoline. Surprisingly, they account for only 10 percent of GE's total revenue.
In addition, GE makes a few other things, such as refrigerators, freezers, electric ranges, gas ranges, stove tops, dishwashers, dryers, microwaves, and so on.
The Darker Side
Taking a turn for the worse, let's look at the other side of the coin: GE's history hasn't been a smooth one. At certain times in its history, GE was not seen as a base for innovation. The problem lurks in the information that cannot be easily learned from GE's official website. The people of the world once rallied against GE. Let's go back to that past.
Nuclear Weapons:GE VS The People
Nuclear Weapons:GE VS The People
In the United States of America in 1984, GE became the largest manufacturer of system components for all major nuclear weapons. It also marketed nuclear weapons to the government. Little is known about GE's close relationship with the president at the time.
Ronald Reagan was a member of the board of directors of GE before he became president. Reagan was a GE spokesman before he became president.
In 1984, Calle. Lauria founded an organization called Corporate Accountability International. Its sole purpose was to stop GE from producing nuclear weapons. That same year, Kelleher's organization launched an international grassroots campaign. Films were made in forty countries. It exposed the naked truth behind GE's corporate image.
General Electric builds weapons for profit. Not for patriotism, not for country or flag, but for profit.
The campaign also has a joint boycott of all GM electronics. The movement gained considerable momentum, however would it succeed?
In 1989, three years after the boycott began and five years after the entire campaign began, GE's branding dollars had risen to four times what they had been in the past four years combined. to preserve its brand image.
By 1990, four million people had joined the boycott against GE in the United States alone. The movement also grew to Canada and Western Europe. It caused major retailers to take GE light bulbs off the shelves.
In April 1993, after seven years of boycotts, the people finally won. GE withdrew from nuclear weapons-related trade, claiming it was a purely business decision. The boycott cost GE more than fifty million dollars in medical equipment sales alone.
When the movement first began in 1984, the U.S. had 50,000 nuclear warheads on standby. And the U.S. was still making five new ones every day. And by the end of the campaign, GE had stopped production of nuclear weapons altogether. But that was far from the whole story; the dark side of GE was actually much darker, and the American public was particularly victimized.
General Electric bought NBC in 1986. In 1989 alone, GE secured nearly $2 billion in arms contracts for equipment that was eventually used in the Gulf War. Of course, this wasn't the first time GE had supplied the U.S. government with weapons. The atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were developed and produced with the help of GE. As a result, NBC's parent company designed, manufactured, and supplied the components for all of the major weaponry used in the Gulf War. This included Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as various systems for the Stealth and B52 bombers.
So money actually served as the wrong driver. While NBC correspondents and paid consultants boast about the performance of American weapons, they are actually praising the products of General Electric, which pays their salaries.
During the heat of the 1991 Gulf War, retired Army and Navy generals appeared frequently on NBC. The more they emphasized the need for war, the weaker the public's resistance to it became. The ensuing contracts allowed General Electric to make a fortune out of the war, and part of that fortune went into the pockets of the generals. This is still not happening much. Thirteen years later, in 2004, GE still benefits greatly from military spending, meaning that NBC's coverage of the war in Afghanistan may have been skewed as well. What exactly is the motivation for this? With a single missile costing over a million dollars and perhaps tens of thousands of missiles to be launched in a single conflict, one can only imagine how lucrative the war is.
It's very unfortunate that this happened, but things ended on a preferred note.
In 2013, General Electric sold NBC to COMCAST, which wasn't the most desirable outcome, but it finally lifted a long-standing conflict of interest.
Conclusions
What can we conclude? We learned that General Electric was a huge company, involved in many fields, but ultimately both good and evil. GE has accomplished many great achievements and innovations, but the dark side of its past should not be ignored. All in all, on the bright side, while GE is still the largest defense contractor to the U.S. government, it no longer produces weapons and its main business has shifted to engine production.
That's it.