General Electric to sell Healthcare Financial Services biz to Capital One for $9bn

As part of its corporate reshuffle aimed at focusing on its core business, General Electric has decided to sell its healthcare financial services (HFS) business unit to Capital One for $9 billion.

General Electric has decided to give more thrust to its core business operations that include industrial, power generation, aviation, and oil and gas segments. The selloff deal is expected to complete by the end of 2015. With this latest selloff, GE is poised to offload $100-bn worth assets this year end.

Healthcare financial services operations occupy a major chunk of GE Capital's business and it was considered to be a significant contributor to the company's bottom line. However, after the global financial crisis, the healthcare financial services business has turned out to be a major burden on the company.

This situation has led GE to offload financial services business to remain focused on its core business operations. Since April, when it announced its plans to offload non-core business operations, GE sold real estate assets to the tune of $26.5billion to private equity owners.

After the selloff proceedings, Darren Alcus, CEO of GE Healthcare Financial Services, will join Capital One. GE Capital's Chairman and CEO Keith Sherin says that this sell-off would benefit company's customers and sponsors. 

"We're pleased to sell HFS to a company that is committed to expanding the business. Our customers, sponsors, and HFS employees will benefit from the synergies of combining Capital One's existing health care lending businesses with the expertise, relationships and experience of our highly regards HFS team," said Sherin in a statement.

Explaining about the future sell-off plans of GE, Sherin further adds: "We continue to demonstrate speed and execute on our strategy to sell most of the assets of GE Capital. We are on track to reduce our ending net investment (ENI by $100bn by the end of 2015 and expect to be substantially done with our exit strategy by the end of 2016."

GE Healthcare Financial Services business unit lends to several organizations with different operational sizes in the healthcare industry. GE's healthcare financial services business unit has so far lent to drug manufacturers, hospitals, medical devices makers, etc. 

After the selloff, GE will continue to hold some stake in the healthcare financial services business unit, which has about $8.5-bn worth assets. Capital One will not have entire stake in the entire unit. The major reason for retaining some part in the healthcare financial services unit is to continue with what's linked or tied to its core business operations. GE retains a part, which is engaged in lending to makers of medical equipment.

Capital One's President Michael Slocum in a separate statement said that the strategic investment will benefit the company. "This is a strategic investment in a specialty industry that we have been building out for the past several years. This addition will catapult us to a leading market position in providing financial services to the health care sector," adds Slocum in the statement. 

JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Hogan Lovells were advisors to GE on the selloff deal. Capital One's advisors were Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo Wachtell, Lipton and Rosen & Katz.