GE also sold their small household appliance business to Black and Decker in 1992.
And in 2020, GE sold the light bulb business to Savant Systems, and the division that makes locomotives to Wabtec in 2019. There’s probably a long list of former General Electric subsidiaries.
Well, not anymore. Sprint was bought by T-Mobile in 2020, and seems to no longer exist as a distinct brand.
Many years ago Securitas bought one of the last Pinkerton’s in America. They kept the name for years although I noticed the last time I looked it up it was called Securitas.
Not sure where you got this from, but AT&T has always been the abbreviation for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
In the past couple of years, GE has also spun off it’s aerospace and heath care divisions into two different companies.
I was amazed at how small and really insignificant General Electric has gotten. It helps ease the pain of having it move out of state from Fairfield, Connecticut.
Since Eastern Airlines went belly up in 1991, 3 different companies have retained the name and, in some cases, paint scheme of the original via purchasing in bankruptcy or buyout.
The current owner does only cargo. It had been doing a Miami-Santo Domingo passenger route that ran once a month for regulatory reasons but that ended in Feb. (I think Tom Scott’s Lateral did this but I can’t find the video.)
Similarly, Pan Am exists now as a small railroad in northern New England.
Honestly not sure if it could be said GE exists anymore so is ripe for this thread.
GE spun off power generation to GE Vernova, which is separately listed in the stock exchange, similarly GE Healthcare was spun off with its own shares.
GE aerospace is ‘spun off’ but they just kept the GE stock listing and renamed to GE Aerospace .
So other than convenience of reuse of the listing , GE really doesn’t exist , there is no corporate structure that manages all those entities, yet they all continue the GE meatball .
ETA: Wikipedia has GE as “Defunct April 2, 2024” so that’s like a famous person moving from ‘Is’ to ‘was’ .
It’s actually very sad, given GE’s long and distinguished history; it dates back to Thomas Edison himself.
(Incidentally, I’ve wondered why Edison didn’t seem to leave a larger fortune. If his family or a charitable foundation still held even a single percent share of all of the companies that resulted from his inventions, it would be a really big fortune.)
The Australian branch of Woolworth’s still exists, long after the US and British ones have disappeared.
The Australian Woolworths has no corporate relationship to the American chain. They named it that because they wanted people to think it was a part of the American Woolworths though
Likewise, Wimpy started in Indiana in 1934, but all its US locations closed by the end of the '70s, and now its HQ and most of its locations are in South Africa. The current corporation originated as the South African sub-franchisee of the original Wimpy’s UK franchise.
By most accounts, Edison was a very poor businessman. He earned a fortune through patents but then made horrible investment decisions. He complained about the supply of iron, which was critical to his businesses, so he built his own iron plant, which failed miserably. He lost a huge amount of money due to equipment failures, and when he finally got the kinks worked out of the plant, new iron mines opened up which sold good iron cheaper than his plant could make. He ended up closing the plant at a huge loss. He also made a lot of really bad real estate investments. He also spent a lot of money developing his inventions, often spending more than he made on the profits of those inventions. He ended up close to bankruptcy on several occasions.
Still, he ended up with a net worth of $12 million at the time of his death (according to this cite) which isn’t too shabby for the time.
GE was the result of combining Edison’s electric company with the Thomson-Houston electric company of Lynn, Massachusetts. The Thomson Houston R&D division, headed by William Darcy Ryan, becanme one of the company’s chief R&D sites. Ryan invented the Scintillator to raise the company’s profile. They had lost our electrigfication contracts ast the Wold’s Fairs to Westinghouse
GE tried to move its headquarters to Boston only a couple of years ago. When I heard about GE’s breakup, it seemed sort of appropriate that it kinda ended up near Boston, where it hsad begun.
The GE plant is still there in Lynn – GE Aerospace. They have notices up that they’re still hiring, and their plant is pretty hefty. It was weird when I was reading Roger Sherman Hoar’s/Ralph Milne Farley’s book The Radio Beasts and he talks casually about the GE plant in Lynn. That story came out in 1925.
GE Aerospace, power generation ( Vernova) and the Medical equipment part all make very good equipment, so I don’t see them going away anytime soon and I am sure they will continue to grow and hire. There is just no value in having the corporate overhead entity and costs ( and GE knew how to do expensive corporate overhead) to tie those 3 companies together , they all working very different fields and so the shareholders can decide what markets they want to be exposed and not have that risk made up by very expensive headquarter team.
I guess there is potentially some inefficiencies because each company now needs their own HR, IT, treasury ,etc but in my experience of GE companies, each division pretty much was self sufficient including all the usual corporate functions , with the added bonus of a lot of GE hq overhead not doing much.
The Schwinn Bicycle Company went bankrupt in 2001. A company called Pacific Cycle acquired the trademark and now uses the Schwinn brand on cheap mass market bikes from China.
Volvo isn’t a defunct company, and IIRC they still make trucks, buses, and construction equipment. But Volvo sold their car division to Ford in the late 1990s, who then sold it to Geely Motors of China in 2010.
This may not be what the OP had in mind, but how about Pebbles cereal? I was at the grocery store tonight and saw the Pebbles in the cereal aisle and wondered if anyone under 50 knows who those two guys pictured on the box are. There was even a new (well, new to me) variety of Berry Pebbles with Wilma and Betty on the box.
I don’t know if Flintstones Vitamins are still around. I looked for them a few years ago without success, but wasn’t super dilligent about it.
In 2023 Kellogg’s split into two companies:
WK Kellogg Co., for North American cereals (e.g. Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, etc.)
Kellanova (what a horrible name) for all other brands — e.g. Eggo, Pop Tarts — and for cereal outside North America.