- The company sold 56 properties for $1.7 billion and added $7 billion of assets. The quality of the portfolio remains strong.

Capital Solutions earnings were up 1%.

The company had good core asset growth and had some acquisitions in Europe and Japan. They had some of the marks, about $15 million of the marks on retained interest were in the Capital Solutions business. But the balance of the commercial finance earnings was down year over year, driven by corporate finance. That was down 41%.

- The company underwrites a lot of loans but with the intent to sell them in the market place and at the end of the quarter. Loan index for the comparable products was about 95 cents on the dollar as the company started the year and that went down as low as 85 cents on the dollar through the quarter and towards the end of the quarter is between 85 cents and 88 cents or so, so that was about $55 million.
- The largest mark the company had was about a $40 million write-down on a Hong Kong listed wind turbine gear manufacturer and wrote off common stock in FGIC, about $36 million after tax.
- New business underwriting is at much improved pricing. The portfolio of quality and commercial remains stable and the company is reducing costs in commercial finance.

GE Money had a tough quarter.

- Revenues of $6.4 billion were up 7%. Segment profit of $995 million was down 19%. Asset growth was up 21%, really the assets are up 8% ex the foreign exchange translation impact, so the company had good core growth in Europe. The Americas had $6 million of growth year over year but that is down about 6% from year-end, so the company has taken some strong underwriting actions and it is slowing the growth in the Americas.
- Segment profit was down 19%. Global non-Americas earnings were up 15% and the Americas were down 50%. The company had lower securitization. Last year the company had additional securitizations it did in the first quarter that partially offset some of the losses it had from WMC business and the WMC losses went into discontinued operations but the securitization gains remain in continuing ops, which drives this negative variance.

- The company had higher provisions in the Americas. The company was going to have about $600 million of higher provisions. It had about $200 million driven by the Americas and then the company partially offset both of those impacts with a gain from selling the corporate card business to American Express, and in the GE Money segment, a $218 million benefit against those lower securitizations and additional provisions.
- GE Money total delinquencies at 564 are up 42 basis points and almost all of that is explained by the growth in the delinquencies in North America, in line with expected, up 100 basis points.

The company is in the process of exiting some of European platforms where it does not have scale.

- The company is on track for the U.S. PLCC sale. The company has taken the headquarters way down in the money organization. Operating expenses were down 5% despite the fact that the company is investing in global growth and adding more collectors domestically, so the team is doing a good job of taking costs out in this tougher environment.
- Cash flow of $4.9 billion was plan. It is down year over year because of the GECS special dividend from the sale of Swiss Re shares. Industrial cash flow of 8%, which is ahead of internal plan. The company started with $6.7 billion of cash. It added the $4.9 billion of cash generated, less the dividends paid of $3 billion. The company repurchased $1 billion of stock. - Plant and equipment investment was about $900 million and the company didn’t really close any acquisition or disposition activity, relatively minor. Last year the company raised the long-term bond. It used that to pay off commercial paper on the industrial side at the end of the quarter, so it lowered the total debt from where it was at the end of the year and ended with about $5 billion in cash.

Second Quarter 2008 Outlook

- The company expects revenue to be about $45 billion, up about 6%.
- Continuing earnings are expected to be $5.3 billion to $5.5 billion and a continuing earnings EPS of 53 cents per share to 55 cent per share.

Fiscal 2008 Outlook

- EPS are expected to be $2.20 - 2.30, up 0-5% from 2007.
- The company is going to be down somewhere between 15% and 20% in real estate.
- The company expects the GE industrial earnings to be up 10% to 15% for the year and GE Financial to be down 5% to 10%.

Key questions from the first quarter earnings call conducted by General Electric Company on April 11, 2008.

Jeffrey Sprague (Citigroup): How important gains still are in your earnings outlook for the remainder of the year?

Keith S. Sherin: The biggest place is real estate. If you look at our real estate book, about 50% of the assets are debt and about 50% are equity. The real estate business made about $2.3 billion last year. They are going to be down between 15% and 20%, we would anticipate, and the gains are going to be 60% of their year. We are selling a lot of real estate. We are lowering what we thought we had as we entered the year an embedded gain of over $3 billion in the properties that we have. We still have a robust global market but we are counting on real estate property sales as part of that business model that continue to be a significant piece of those earnings. At the same time, all the investment we are making is on the debt side of the business to remix it and that gives us more of a spread business going forward. We spent a lot of time on this and these numbers take into account the pressure they have seen and what they think will happen as we go forward on real estate. As far as visibility into the second quarter, we think we have got our hands around what the second quarter looks like and we have got confidence on that for commercial finance. There is still more in the quarter to get done and more in the year to get done but we think we have capture what that exposure is for us.

Jeffrey R. Immelt: If you look on the industrial side first where we have guided up 10% to 15%, it is driven by infrastructure and that is solid with high visibility in the backlog and when you think about healthcare, CNI, and NBC, if the economy gets worse, we can still accommodate that. On the financial services side, we are just looking at run-rates. What we saw in the first quarter, we are not assuming anything gets better and executing on that plan gives us a level of confidence that in commercial finance, we are going to be in good shape for the rest of the year.

Keith S. Sherin: Commercial finance made $1.158 billion in the first quarter. We are around $1.175 billion in the second quarter. It is well thought-out plan for them and we are trying to make sure we do not have this happen again.

Jeffrey Sprague (Citigroup): You have got a calendar tempo on reevaluating aircraft and other things. None of that happened in the quarter. Are you looking at any of that in the back-half of the year?

Keith S. Sherin: We will have to wait and see where those go but right now, things like the asset values on aircraft and everything continue to be incredibly strong. We can not get enough aircraft for the global demand so I would not anticipate that that is something that we are going to be dealing with in any big way in the year, based on what we see today.