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Amid a whirlwind of dealmaking, GE's returns lag
Bosses come in all shapes and sizes. One way to categorize them is to split them into two types: polishers and pickers. Polishers put their energy into products, improving and reimagining their design and production in a quest for perfection. Long after Apple had become one of the planet's most valuable firms, its boss, Steve Jobs (who died in 2011), obsessed over "the finish on a piece of metal, the curve of the head of a screw, the shade of blue on a box", writes his biographer, Walter Isaacson.
Pickers, by contrast, are capital allocators, who stand back and decide unsentimentally how the firm should deploy resources. An example of this approach is Jeff Immelt, who runs General Electric (GE), the world's most valuable industrial firm. Mr Immelt's record since taking over in 2001 shows that capital allocation is far harder than you might think.
Most chief executives would say they are more pickers than polishers. The task of creating the iPhone, devising a new drug or honing a manufacturing process is best left to geniuses such as Mr Jobs or to internal experts. By contrast capital allocation happens to a CEO, like it or not. Consider a firm that reinvests 10% of its net worth every year. By their tenth year in charge the CEO's choices about deploying cash - including a decision to just sleepwalk - will explain 60% of the firm's book value.
Taking firm control of the process makes obvious sense. In the 1970s the logic of starving lousy businesses and feeding goods ones was spread by management-consulting firms. BCG told firms to split portfolios into four buckets: cash cows worth milking, stars, dogs that should be shot and question-marks. Today the consultancy reckons that businesses shift between the buckets twice as fast as they did in the 1990s.
Mr Immelt has remade GE partly because he had a tricky inheritance. GE's shares were overvalued, its earnings were inflated by gains from its pension scheme, and it had overexpanded its financial arm, which later blew up during the banking crisis. He has globalized GE: 57% of sales now come from abroad, up from 29% in 2001. And he has loosened up its culture. Its old head office, in Conneticut, sat amid suburbs and golf courses. Its new digs in Boston are next to an art institute.
But the main legacy Mr Immelt will be as a capital allocator. He has shrunk or sold businesses that are mature or under margin pressure, such as plastics and kitchen appliances, or where GE has no advantage, such as media. He has killed off most of its financial arm. And he has bought in areas with promising growth stories where tech is becoming more important, such as aviation, power systems and medical devices. The scale of change has been huge. Outside the financial arm, looking just at industrial operations, since 2001 GE has traded businesses worth $12bn, or 167% of the capital employed in its industrial divisions. Counting capital expenditures, too, Mr Immelt has redirected resources worth a colossal 227% of GE's capital base.
The result are less impressive than you might expect. Annual free cashflow from GE's industrial business was around $10bn in 2001 and the figure has not risen even as its capital employed has increased from below $30bn to $75bn. Cash returns on capital have fallen to about 12%. Partly reflecting this, GE's shares have lagged behind the S&P 500 index over most periods.
Why does a logical strategy, methodically implemented by competent people, not succeed better? Active capital allocation carries a danger: it can be procyclical, magnifying the swings in sentiment that most industries face. Businesses that are performing well often have profits that are at cyclical highs and that are valued at inflated levels. As Warren Buffett puts it, "What is smart at one price is dumb at another."
In "The Outsiders", a cult business book, William Thorndike studies eight bosses whose firms on average have outpaced the S&P 500 by a factor of 20. They may have been obsessed with capital allocation, but they bought into deeply unfashionable things, from decrepit cable-TV networks in rural America (John Malone at TCI), to the makers of Twinkies (Bill Stiritz at Ralston Purina). Bucking accepted wisdom is, however, extraordinarily hard for CEOs of big, iconic firms, who must built a consensus among executives, directors and shareholders.
Spit and polish
The cost of churning capital in predictable ways can be significant. Schumpeter estimates that GE has paid a multiple of 13 times gross operating profits for the businesses it has bought and got 9 times for those it sold. Some nine-tenths of its industrial capital is now comprised of goodwill, or the premium that a firm paid above book value for its acquisitions. A company's capital expenditure can also be procyclical. For example, in 2010-14 GE ramped up investment in its oil and gas business, at a point when energy prices were high, then cut back after they slumped in 2015.
For businesses in aggregate, and their investors, churning portfolios brings some benefits. Firms must respond to changes in customer tastes and technology. They may be able to boost their market shares for some products, allowing them to raise prices. But it seems unlikely that hyperactive capital allocation greatly enhances wealth overall. Deals are often a zero-sum game. It is impossible for every firm to own only outperforming businesses. And the fees lawyers and bankers charge are a tax on corporate activity that corrodes value.
For Mr Immelt the jury is still out. GE's profits are rising even as its cash flows stall, as it books the gains it expects to make on long-term infrastructure projects and servicing contracts. It has launched a new jet engine, called Leap, and is investing heavily in Predix, an open data platform that it hopes will become an operating base for a host of industrial digital applications. And it is buying new assets at the bottom of the cycle, with a planned merger of its energy business with Baker Hughes, an oil-services firm. Mr Immelt will probably retire soon. His successor will surely come under pressure to undertake another massive reshuffle of what GE owns. Far better now to polish what it has.