General Electric yesterday said it would miss its annual profit forecast and warned that the credit crisis would continue to take its toll on the company’s finance arm for at least another year.
The US conglomerate told Wall Street analysts that its fourth-quarter results would be hit by a charge of up to $1.4bn to pay for additional credit losses, redundancies and other restructuring measures at GE Capital, its finance unit.
Coupled with the continued disruption in financial markets, the new charge would reduce GE’s profits for the year to about $18bn, down from the $19.5bn-$21bn it had forecast in October. Last year, GE had net income of $22.2bn.