Multinational conglomerate corporation General Electric (GE) its starting up talks with a number of potential buyers who are interested in purchasing their light blub business. This move represents a changing of the guard for GE, as they have been in the light blub business for over a century. In other business news, noted robot maker Boston Dynamics has been sold to Japanese multinational telecommunications company SoftBank by Google's parent company Alphabet.
General Electric finally cuts the lights
Yesterday General Electric announced its plans to sell GE Lighting, which is its last remaining consumer division and the oldest part of the company.
GE revealed that it is already in the process of starting talks with interested buyers and says that it could sell the division in pieces, instead of offloading all of GE Lighting in one go. This move comes after GE has spent the last few decades moving towards creating big-ticket products in its other divisions like aviation, transportation, power, healthcare, oil and gas. It has also focused more effort in recent years on developing an interdependent software business.
For General Electric, their light blub division was by far the least profitable one. It had an operating profit margin of 2.1%, with the next closest GE division being renewable energy at about 6%. In a statement, GE said that it hopes this moves would allow the company to "streamline its portfolio."
Boston Dynamics is sold
Back in 2013 Google's parent company Alphabet purchased robot making company Boston Dynamics.
Now, only four years later they have come to an agreement to sell the company to SoftBank. Also thrown into the deal as part of SoftBank's purchase was fellow Japanese company Schaft, which is a company that works on creating bipedal robots. The terms of the deal between Alphabet and SoftBank were not divulged to the public.
Boston Dynamics, which is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, has become noted in recent years for their variety of two-and-four legged robot machines that have a remarkable ability to stand upright. The videos that the company posts on YouTube of their robots are extremely popular, getting millions of views. For SoftBank this shows their continued investment in the robotics industry, with hopefully the future potential to turn this venture into hit products that change the future and made the company a lot of money.
