Brooke Sutherland, Columnist

GE’s $23 Billion Writedown Stems From a Bad Bet on Fossil Fuels

The 2015 deal has been a major disappointment as demand for gas turbines slumped.

October 22, 2018 at 4:00 PM UTC

Brooke Sutherland is Bloomberg News' Boston bureau chief and writes the Industrial Strength Newsletter. She was previously a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering deals and industrial companies and an M&A reporter for Bloomberg News.

Illustration: George Wylesol for Bloomberg Businessweek

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This article is part of the October 29, 2018 issue of businessweek.

There are bad deals, and then there’s General Electric Co.’s purchase of Alstom SA’s energy assets.

The 2015 takeover of the French company’s gas-turbine operations in many ways encapsulates the mismanagement that led to GE’s current turmoil. GE vastly overpaid for Alstom, prioritizing scale over logic and ignoring signs of a peaking market. The result is the almost $23 billion writedown GE announced in October, the majority of which is tied to the Alstom deal.