General Electric Company (GE)

[Elmer Phud]

hopester

I went to Morningstar and downloaded all their Annual Reports from 2001 thru 2014 and it's quite puzzling just what happened to all those shares that were bought back. Here is the number of shares outstanding at EOY for each year from 2001 to the present:

Shares in Thousands

2001 9925938
2002 9969894
2003 10063120
2004 10586358
2005 10484268
2006 10277373
2007 9987599
2008 10536897
2009 10663075
2010 10615376
2011 10573017
2012 10405625
2013 10060881
2014 10057380

There are also various numbers of Preferred shares from 2009 to 2014 ranging from 30 million to 50 million shares at present.

You are welcome to download the annual reports yourself off Morningstar. They're free to anyone.

So we (yes I am a GE shareholder) are essentially at the same share count we were at in 2003. What did we get for our $45 Billion? Where did it go if it didn't reduce the share count? Maybe I'm wrong here and someone can explain this but on the surface it seems that the $45 Billion went to replace shares that were issued for other purposes. As I mentioned before, some companies use their buybacks to replace shares granted internally. Is that what happened here? All I know for sure is the share count didn't seem to go down appreciably.