Will GE do better as three companies than as one?

Investors are not mourning the end of GE as they, their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers knew it. On the eve of the split the company’s market value hovered at nearly $200bn—and more than $230bn if you add GE Healthcare’s (see chart 1). In November 2018, shortly after Mr Culp took over as boss, the whole group was worth $65bn, the least since the early 1990s. That June it had been ignominiously kicked out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), an index of American blue chips. In the past year both GE and GE Healthcare have handily outperformed the DJIA. Their shares have also done better than those of most American spin-offs (see chart 2). Mr Culp says that the group could not continue as an “all-singing, all-dancing GE”. Instead, GE’s corporate progeny will become less general and, amid the energy transition, more electric.