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Fortune 500

5 Things You Don’t Know (But Should) About GE

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Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor
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By
Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor
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June 16, 2016, 12:01 PM ET
General Electric Building In Chicago
Exterior view of the General Electric office building at 840 South Canal Street in Chicago, IL, June 1941. View shows the front of the building featuring the General Electric sign with logo. It is a six-story brick office building. (Photo by Hedrich Blessing Collection/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)Photograph by Hedrich Blessing Collection/Chicago History Museum — Getty Images
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General Electric is such an iconic American company that you might think you know everything about it already. Not necessarily so. After all, it’s not exactly your father’s General Electric any more.

In fact the industrial giant is undergoing a rather dramatic strategic pivot under longtime CEO Jeff Immelt, shedding some familiar businesses in the process. It’s no easy task for such a massive ship to change direction: Those changes hurt revenue last year, knocking GE out of the Fortune 500’s top 10 for the first time in decades, to No. 11. The company also posted more than $6 billion in losses in 2015, on $140 billion in revenues. But shareholders, at least, have been pleased about the recent moves.

Here are some surprising facts about the firm that has been bringing “good things to life” since 1892.

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