General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) agreed with Electrolux to sell its home-appliances business for $3.3 billion. Whirlpool Corporation (NYSE:WHR) leads the home-appliance market in US with around 25.6% market share. This deal would give Electrolux and GE combined around 26.5% market share and place them above Whirlpool in the US market. Electrolux CTO, Jan Brockman, talked on CNBC about the slower European markets and bright future of the company.
Brockman said that he was happy to see slower recovery happening in the European markets. European markets were on the down trend for quite some time and has started recovering very slowly. This would definitely be happy news for companies that depend on European markets for their core business.
“In Europe, this year, we have seen a slow recovery and we are happy about that. Some Western European for sure, Southern European markets have recovered. We know the situation in Ukraine, which is a little bit dragging it down […],” Brockman said.
He added that everything that fuels the consumption would benefit their sales. He pointed at opportunity of home appliances sales through housing. With reduced interest rates for housing, many people would go for it, which would influence home appliances sales as well.
General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) was looking to unload the home appliances for quite some time to concentrate on energy and heavy industry businesses. Home appliances is a century old business for General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) with overall revenue of $5.7 billion and around 12,000 employees, but has remained has a smallest component of the company for quite some time now.
The Swedish company, Electrolux announced that they are planning to sell former GE’s products in North America under the same brand name.
One of the shareholders of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) is Berkshire Hathaway, managed by Warren Buffett, which owns around 10.6 million of the company shares as at the end of second quarter.
Disclosure: None
Suggested Articles:
Top Places To Visit Before You Die
