General Electric To Sell Healthcare Finance Unit To Capital One

(RTTNews) - General Electric Co. (GE) Tuesday said it will sell its U.S. healthcare finance unit to Capital One Financial Corp. (COF) in a deal of about $9 billion, as the company streamlines its business to focus more on industrial manufacturing.

The deal includes about $8.5 billion of health care-related loans. Separately, GE agreed with an another unidentified buyer to sell about $600 million of healthcare finance unit's real estate equity investments.

Keith Sherin, GE Capital chairman and CEO, said, "This announcement is the next step in GE's transformation to a more focused industrial company."

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

In April, GE had revealed plans to sell most of its financial-services arm GE Capital, and shift focus on high-value industrial businesses.

"We are on track to reduce our ending net investment (ENI) by $100 billion by the end of 2015 and expect to be substantially done with our exit strategy by the end of 2016," Sherin said.

Recently, the company agreed to sell $26.5 billion worth of real estate to a group of buyers led by Blackstone and Wells Fargo, while revealing plans to sell its private-equity-lending unit to Canadian pension fund Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).

GE closed Tuesday's trading at $25.71, down $0.53 or 2.02%, on the NYSE. The stock, however, gained $0.07 or 0.27% in after-hours trade.