Anche general electric a rischio? L'alba di un nuovo mondo...

[locco68]

difficolta' nel real estate.....ma ripeto, per l'obbligazionista importa poco..

GE's 'Honey Pot' Properties Turn Sour
By LINGLING WEI and PAUL GLADERArticle

When the real-estate market was booming, General Electric Co.'s commercial-property business earned the nickname "the honey pot" among insiders because the company could increase earnings simply by selling a building or two.

But now, the opposite is true: GE's difficulty selling its office buildings, shopping centers and other commercial property is dragging down its financial results.

Lower property sales contributed to earnings shortfalls at the Fairfield, Conn.-based conglomerate in both the first and third quarters. GE, whose $88.7 billion real-estate portfolio is one of the world's largest, posted a 62% decline in its third-quarter profit on real estate, to $244 million from $640 million a year earlier.

Earnings Previews
See what to expect in the quarterly reports of other major corporations.The drop was one of the largest percentage declines for any of its business units.

"We're not counting [on] any gains in the real-estate business in 2009," said Keith Sherin, GE's chief financial officer, during a conference call with analysts and investors last week. This year, GE hopes to earn between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion from its real-estate business. That's a sharp contrast with last year, when the roughly $2.3 billion in real-estate profit -- driven by sales of GE's property investments -- accounted for about 38% of earnings at the company's crown-jewel commercial-finance unit and 10% of total GE profit.

"The real estate business has been a consistent performer for us," said a GE spokesman. "We have a strong and diversified real-estate portfolio with conservative underwriting."

Established in 1972, GE's real-estate division has both purchased property and offered loans to other investors. Its equity operation has operated like the real-estate arm of a pension fund, endowment or private-equity fund. It would buy a property, try to improve it and then sell it after holding it for three to five years.

But that strategy has been hamstrung by the credit squeeze and economic downturn, which have driven down values while making it difficult and expensive for potential buyers to get financing. The few buyers who are out there expect big discounts.

GE isn't alone in its pain, which is also being felt by numerous financial institutions and real-estate funds that depend on maintaining a steady level of sales to meet their return projections. Some private-equity funds with big real estate investments are limiting redemptions by investors because they don't want to sell into such a bad market.

Falling property values could also hurt GE by forcing it to take hits on its balance sheet. As of the end of last year, the estimated market value of its real-estate investments exceeded what the company had paid for the properties by about $3 billion.

But if, as expected, the commercial real-estate market continues to weaken, GE runs the risk of having to take a write-down on those investments. Nationwide, as office vacancies rise, retail sales slow and travel bookings plunge, commercial-property values have already fallen as much as 20% in many areas.

GE purchased many properties at the top of the market. According to Real Capital Analytics, a research firm in New York, the company sold $7 billion of real estate world-wide last year and acquired $16.6 billion.

Among the notable deals: In July 2007, it bought nine office complexes in Chicago from Blackstone Group LP for $1.05 billion. Those properties had been owned by Equity Office Properties, which Blackstone acquired for $39 billion at the beginning of 2007 and then sold off in large chunks.

Some other buyers who bought pieces of the Equity Office portfolio fared poorly. For example, New York developer Harry Macklowe was forced to liquidate a large portion of his real-estate empire this year because of the problems he took on when he bought seven of Equity Office's Manhattan office buildings.

Until now, GE's real-estate unit has performed well, with net-income growth exceeding 10% for 12 consecutive years. During the commercial real-estate collapse of the early 1990s, the company was a big winner, making billions of dollars by buying and selling distressed assets from the Resolution Trust Corp., the government thrift-bailout agency.

The real-estate business has been "a source of incremental growth" for the company for the past five years, says Nicholas Heymann, an analyst at Sterne Agee in New York. But now, he says, the company faces difficulty managing the typical cycle of buying and selling real estate. "The big issue is finding liquidity anywhere to allow them to sell these properties," he says.

So far this year, GE has sold $8 billion of real estate, and it plans to sell $6 billion to $10 billion more over the next 12 months. Many of the sales have involved properties overseas where the credit markets were sounder until recently.

Buyers have typically been institutions that could finance deals with either their own cash or loans from insurance companies and other creditors that hold loans to maturity.

But the timing hasn't been so good for many of GE's sales in the U.S. For example, it sold an office complex in Santa Monica for $35.1 million in June, according to industry sources. That property probably would have been valued 15% to 20% higher a year ago, market participants say.

To get many deals done in coming months, the company will probably have to offer financing, according to real-estate experts. GE has provided $700 million in so-called seller financing for the $8 billion of property it has sold this year.

Even as GE is paring its property holdings, it is beefing up its business of originating and investing in commercial real-estate debt to capitalize on the greater returns resulting from the cutback in lending by banks and other lending sources.

So far this year, GE has originated and invested in a total of $19 billion of commercial real-estate debt at a projected return on equity of about 25%.

GE is known as a conservative underwriter, and delinquencies on its commercial-mortgage portfolio have so far remained very low. "As we muddle through the crisis, they're likely to be the strongest survivor," says Dan Gorczycki, a managing director at Savills Granite LLC, an investment-banking firm.

Still, some analysts and investors worry that defaults could go up as the weakening economy and falling property values make it harder for borrowers to repay debt. "They have to have their eyes open for new businesses," says analyst Richard Hofmann at research firm CreditSights.

Write to Lingling Wei at lingling.wei@dowjones.com and Paul Glader at paul.glader@wsj.com

[mbyt]

Originalmente inviato da Jack67

quoto in pieno

questo vale x il ribasso di ieri.

e da inizio anno

[birbo31]

Originalmente inviato da mbyt

questo vale x il ribasso di ieri.

e da inizio anno

quanto quota oggi la GE CAP EUR TV 2016 per favore???

[JP Donn]

Originalmente inviato da birbo31

quanto quota oggi la GE CAP EUR TV 2016 per favore???

Ultimo scambio a 73,41 ( +3,39%)

[killbill]

73,41,+0,43%

[birbo31]

Originalmente inviato da JP Donn

Ultimo scambio a 73,41 ( +3,39%)

grazie !!!

[andrea64]

Impostando www.creditgrades.com per Ge oggi 17 ottobre viene 170.Il 2 ottobre era 105.

[LoLandese]

Originalmente inviato da andrea64

Impostando www.creditgrades.com per Ge oggi 17 ottobre viene 170.Il 2 ottobre era 105.

in questi ultimi giorni aumenta il rischio di defaul per ge....effettivamente a me qualcosa continua a non quadrare...le obbligazioni non danno segnali di recupero...per me c'e' sotto qualcosa...e qualcuno sa...

[T.H.Huxley]

Originalmente inviato da LoLandese

in questi ultimi giorni aumenta il rischio di defaul per ge....effettivamente a me qualcosa continua a non quadrare...le obbligazioni non danno segnali di recupero...per me c'e' sotto qualcosa...e qualcuno sa...

Se si facesse uno sforzo di osservare a fondo le cose anche da parte di chi non è competente,come il sottoscritto,si eviterebbero post ripetitivi e poco costrutivi.
Se infatti sul sito certigrades si cerca il grafico di Ge e lo si osserva insieme a quello del suo settore,ovvero quello diversificato,si vede senza problemi che l' impennata del rischio è uguale a quella di tutto il settore,anzi persino minore:come a dire che all' interno del settore delle aziende con grossa diversificazione è messa meglio rispetto alla media.....

[Lorixnt2]

Grazie ad Andrea perché non conoscevo il sito e ad Huxley per la precisazione. Per parte mia mi sono limitato a guardare il livello di General Motors trovandolo a 1313. Certo, ormai, una volta scottati dall'inattendibilità dei ratings, anche l'acqua fredda fa paura al profano. Qual è l'effettiva attendibilità tecnica di questa certificazione ?