A Look At George Foreman’s Involvement

As of April 2024, GE is now three separate companies: GE Aerospace (the successor to the parent), GE Vernova (formerly GE Power & GE Renewable Energy), and GE HealthCare. Now that each spin-off has filed its first annual report, we can break down the former GE’s warranty expenses by industry. Broadly speaking, 55% to 65% of GE’s product warranty expenses were from the power generation industry, 15% to 25% were from aerospace, and about 20% were from healthcare.
Back in 2004, warranty industry veteran Terry Hawkins told us he believed that GE invented the extended warranty in 1935, when its Electric Refrigeration Department sold a five-year extended warranty plan for the Monitor Top Refrigerator. It is still the oldest service contract we have ever heard of, more than two decades later. General Electric, its products, and its warranties have changed so much since that interview with Hawkins 20 years ago. In the wake of the Great Recession, GE started divesting significant portions of its business. First, GE sold half of NBC Universal to Comcast in 2011, and then the other half in 2013.
The GE Capital division was hit especially hard by the Great Recession, prompting the company’s retreat from finance and re-focus on industry. GE divested the GE Capital Retail Finance Corp. as Synchrony Financial in 2014. In 2015, GE sold the majority of its property business to Wells Fargo and Blackstone. Also in 2015, GE Capital’s private equity lending portfolio was sold to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Then, in 2016, it sold the GE Appliance division (including licensing the brand name) to the China-based Haier Group. Next, in 2019, it sold the GE Transportation division to Wabtec (Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corp.). In 2020, it sold the GE Lighting division to Savant Systems Inc., a divestment that meant GE no longer sold any consumer goods, nor any financial or investment services.
Ultimately, GE’s plan for recovery from the Great Recession was attacked from two sides, with its Aviation division devastated by the pandemic, and its Renewable Energy division facing unexpected challenges with its wind turbines. In November 2021, GE announced a plan to split into three separate companies, which was completed in April 2024.
First, GE renamed its Aviation division to GE Aerospace in July 2022. Next, on January 4, 2023, GE HealthCare Technologies Inc. was spun-off from the parent GE.
In early 2024, the GE Renewable Energy, GE Power, GE Digital, and GE Energy Financial Services divisions were combined into GE Vernova. Then, on April 2, 2024, GE Vernova was spun-off from the parent GE, which renamed itself to GE Aerospace.
In February 2025, GE Vernova published its first annual report, and GE Aerospace published its first annual report since the spin-offs occurred.
We perused the annual and quarterly reports of GE Aerospace, GE Vernova, GE HealthCare, and the former General Electric, and gathered three key warranty metrics: the amount of claims paid, the amount of accruals made, and the end-balance of the warranty reserve fund. In addition, we gathered data on each corporate entity’s product sales revenue, and used these to calculate two additional warranty statistics: claims as a percentage of sales (the claims rate), and accruals as a percentage of sales (the accrual rate).
GE only reported its warranty data annually, rather than quarterly, so we’ve had to wait until now to get a breakdown of what percentage of the former GE’s product warranty costs came from each industry division. GE Aerospace and GE Vernova have followed the reporting style of their former parent, but GE HealthCare reports its warranty expenses on a quarterly basis.
On the bright side, conveniently enough, each new spin-off provided historical data for us in their 2024 annual reports. GE Aerospace and GE Vernova both provided product warranty data for 2022, 2023, and 2024 in their 2024 annual reports. GE HealthCare published its first annual report for 2022, and also provided two previous years of data.
As a result, we will have annual data from GE Aerospace and Vernova beginning in 2022 and from GE HealthCare beginning in 2020. For 2022 and 2023, we have the historical data provided by GE Aerospace and GE Vernova in their 2024 annual reports, along with the data previously reported by GE in its 2022 and 2023 annual reports. After divesting GE HealthCare, GE updated its historical totals to be sans warranty expenses from that division. GE Aerospace similarly released historical numbers that exclude the expenses of GE Vernova, even from before the two split up.
Therefore, 2022 is a very unique year in these data, since we have data available from the 2022 GE annual report, along with historical data provided by GE HealthCare, GE Vernova, and GE Aerospace in their 2024 annual reports. This is a wonderful insight into the composition of GE’s warranty expenses by industry prior to the breakup—something that was always an opaque mystery to us—since 2022 was prior to any of the spin-offs. Warranty Claims Totals
First, let’s take a look at the breakdown of the warranty expenses of GE, and its subsequent three spin-offs, from 2015 to 2024, in Figure 1.
The former GE is depicted in the following three charts by the color of the logos for each division: light blue for GE Aerospace, dark blue for GE Vernova, and purple for GE HealthCare.