It appears that Boston and Massachusetts have won the prize: General Electric will move its headquarters from Fairfield, Conn., to the hub, according to the Boston Globe, citing an unnamed official close to the process.
Update: The news is now official.
The formal announcement will be Thursday, according to the report. Coins2Day reached out to GE (GE) and Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s office for comment and will update this report as needed. A spokeswoman for the Boston Mayor Marty Walsh had no comment.
If true, this is a huge blow to Connecticut, which is experiencing a tax shortfall and an exodus of businesses.
State officials there were trying hard to keep the company in-state. GE, which makes heavy industrial gear, jet engines, and appliances (although that business is on the block), has a market cap just north of $271 billion, and trailing-twelve-month revenue of roughly $146 billion. As of the end of 2013, the latest figures provided, it employed 307,000 people worldwide. Some 800 people now work in its Fairfield headquarters, according to the Globe.
GE’s new “Current” business, focusing on the Internet of things, was already slated to operate out of Boston as Coins2Day reported in October.
Reports swirled of late that GE was considering a headquarters relocation either to New York City, where it already maintains a big presence, nearby Westchester County, or Boston.
Or it could have stayed right where it was, although the chances of that dimmed last fall. For a pitch to GE execs, the slides in Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy’s deck featured an image of a jet engine. Unfortunately for the home-state team, it was a Pratt & Whitney, not a GE, jet engine. Pratt & Whitney, part of UTC (UTX), is a fierce in-state rival of GE.
A move could save money in taxes and other costs, and also serve notice that GE, founded in 1892 and seen by many as a rather grimy industrial giant, is reinventing itself as a shiny new technology company with strengths in the Internet of things and other cutting edge technologies.
Boston, as usual, played up the local universities—MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Northeastern, Emerson—and the steady flow of bright graduates and its vibrant biotech scene. And then there’s the surfeit of hospitals and medical schools, many of which buy large numbers of GE CAT scans and other complex gear.
There’s a lot of work being done in the area around connected devices, a key thrust of GE’s.
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But for all that Boston itself has had trouble keeping big company headquarters around for long. A steady flow of tech startups have been bought by Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), Google (GOOG), and other tech powers. There are now precious few headquarters in the city. Big names like John Hancock have also been acquired by outsiders.
WATCH: GE to sell off almost all its financial arm.
While all of those companies retain a presence in Boston, none are based anywhere near the city. Or even the state. So GE would be a win, provided Boston Mayor Walsh (a Democrat) and Massachusetts Governor Baker (a Republican) did not give away the store to get the deal done.
11:42am EST, 01/13/2016: This story was updated with a statement by a spokeswoman from Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s office.