History Of General Electric Company - 1709 Words

History of General Electric General Electric was founded by Thomas A. Edison in 1878 as the Edison Electric Light Company. In 1892 it merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company to create General Electric as we know it today. The mission statement of General Electric is to work on things that matter. General Electric employees will reference this as GE Works. Strengths and Weaknesses A strength of General Electric as a company is the resources that they have working at the company. They have over 300,000 employees and they all come from different backgrounds. This helps the company be able to spread around the world, because they have employees from that come from all different countries around the world. According to information†¦show more content†¦General Electric’s next strength as a company is the amount of cash and liquid funds it currently has. According to the YCharts site, â€Å"General Electric currently has 137 billion in liquid funds† (YCharts, 2014). This is one of GE’s strengths as they are able to recruit and buy other companies with that money which also would be an opportunity for them. The cash on hand helps them out if there is another recession as General Electric would have that money to help counter any loss of profits and be able to inject that money into the company. One weaknesses of General Electric is the size of the company. It is a challenging task to manage a conglomerate. General Electric’s main business units are GE Aviation, GE Capital, GE Corporate, GE Energy Management, GE Appliances and Lighting, GE Healthcare, GE Power Water, GE Oil Gas, and Transportation. As you can see that is a wide variety of businesses. They all have their individual strengths and weaknesses also, but Jeff Immelt the CEO has to manage it as one giant company as General Electric. An action that General Electric can do to lower the risk of this weaknesses is getting rid of a business sections that hurt the company overall. These business units could still be very profitable, but if it hurts the overall vision of the company then action has to be taken. They can do this by either selling the business unit or spinning it off into its own business. Both of these actions