Another cut? The question is not if, but when and where. From CFO Jeff Bornstein:
"$25 billion of what we would describe as structural costs. Those are fixed costs that don't vary with volume or you wouldn't expect, which includes SG&A, it includes engineering, it includes R&D, it includes program, depreciation and amortization, etc. And this is the bucket of costs that we are really running after.
And we talked about that $1 billion over the next few years, we have building a funnel against that. At the point in December we said we had about $1.7 billion of ideas we were running against to deliver that $1 billion. We are increasing that funnel dramatically."
This was from March 8th Power & Renewable Investor Meeting, before Immelt and Trian's meeting. They came up with $1.7B worth of potential cut but only planned to do $1B. Then, it became $2B by Trian's pressure just last week.
The call said very clearly what they are targeting. Engineering and R&D are main target. Salaries are in this pot, too, both executives and other white collar jobs -- and guess who they are going to cut? 200 experienced and slightly better paid, compared to other GE engineers, engineers or 1 SVP?