GE to sell bulk of finance unit, return up to $90b to investors

General Electric Co will shed most of its finance unit and return as much as $90 billion to shareholders as it becomes a "simpler" industrial business instead of an unwieldy hybrid of banking and manufacturing.

The company on Friday outlined a restructuring plan that includes buying back up to $50 billion of its shares, selling about $30 billion in real estate assets over the next two years and divesting more GE Capital operations. GE stock jumped 8.5 percent.

"The stock has been under-owned by institutional investors, and that's going to change now," said Tom Donino, co-head of equity trading at First New York Securities.

The repurchase program, which will be partly funded by $35 billion through money returned from GE Capital, is the second-biggest in history after Apple Inc's $90 billion plan. GE, which had 10.06 billion shares outstanding on Jan. 31, said it expected to reduce that by as much as 20 percent to 8 billion to 8.5 billion by 2018.

In all, GE said it planned to shed $275 billion in GE Capital assets. That includes the previously announced spinoff of its Synchrony Financial credit card unit and the real estate transaction announced on Friday.