General Electric (NYSE:GE) chairman & CEO Lawrence Culp Jr. yesterday tabled the pending spinout of the GE Healthcare business so the industrial conglomerate can focus on the $21 billion sale of its biopharmaceuticals business.
Boston-based GE yesterday agreed to deal the biopharm business to Danaher (NYSE:DHR) – which Culp led until 2014 – in an all-cash deal. GE tapped Culp for the corner office last October.
In June 2018 GE said it was looking to sell 20% of GE Healthcare, with the rest distributed to existing shareholders as part of the spinout into a separate, publicly traded firm. By November Culp was saying that more than 20% could be on the block, but the biopharm transaction scuttled those plans at least for this year, he said yesterday.
“An IPO [for GE Healthcare] in 2019 looks unlikely at this point,” Culp told CNBC. “We are focused on completing the [biopharm] carve-out – which is 15% of the $20 billion health-care segment – and focused on managing the remaining core business.
“IPO of healthcare was Plan A, but we got lots of inbound calls about [the biopharm] business and this is clearly a superior path,” he told the network.
