Abbott Labs and GE balk at altar

Even as improved earnings pushed General Electric Co.”™s stock over the $40 mark for the first time in five years, GE cancelled its $8 billion acquisition of Abbott Laboratories”™ diagnostics business, with the companies saying they were unable to reach agreement on final terms and conditions of the deal.
GE also revealed plans to dump its WMC Mortgage unit based in Burbank, Calif., whose earnings have been hard hit by failures in risky home mortgages it has backed.
GE is based in Fairfield and is the county”™s second-largest employer with more than 6,000 employees, approximately half of them with GE Commercial Finance and GE Money.
In the second quarter, GE had a $5.4 billion profit on sales of $42.3 billion, with both profits and revenue up 12 percent from the second quarter of 2006.
Norwalk-based GE Commercial Finance had an 18 percent improvement in earnings, led by its burgeoning GE Real Estate unit. That performance trailed only GE Industrial”™s 23 percent hike in profits, which benefited from a 67 percent spike in revenue from a year ago in the sale of equipment to oil and gas companies.
GE Healthcare, which has been struggling with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration shutdown of a medical device manufacturing facility, saw profits fall a company-worst 8 percent in the second quarter.