General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) Sells Most Of Its U.S. Restaurant Finance Assets

tags: GE

Last year General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE) announced its intentions to focus on high-tech products, like jet engines and power turbines, as well as its financing operations for the energy and health-care industries. In order to achieve this GE decided to part ways with most of GE Capital, the company’s financial arm that at the time had $500 billion in assets.

The latest step towards this goal was the announcement that GE has entered into three deals to sell the majority of its U.S. restaurant loan portfolio. According to the company as of the first quarter of 2016 the deals would represent nearly $1.4 billion in ending net investment. The sale is expected to be completed by the third quarter of the year.

The buyers of GE‘s restaurant loan portfolio are three banks – First Horizon National Corp. would acquire around $637 million of the portfolio, Wintrust Financial Corp would acquire $581 million of the assets, and Sterling National Bank would acquire approximately $190 million of the loans. GE expects that collectively the deals will generate $200 million of capital.

So far GE has signed GE Capital deals worth about $180 billion and has completed around $156 billion of them. The plan is for about $200 billion of GE Capital’s business to be sold by the end of the year.

Meanwhile the stock of the company was hit hard, alongside the whole market, by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Last Friday, following the official results of the referendum GE dropped to a close 4.39% in the red at $29.82. Yesterday’s session wasn’t as grim but the negative sentiment was still strong enough to push the stock another 1.68% down the chart to a close at $29.32.