What happened
General Electric (GE -1.75%) investors have had a tough year. As the S&P 500 surged more than 16% over the past 52 weeks, GE stock went the other way. It's still down 23% -- and lagging the S&P's performance by about 40 percentage points!
That being said, things have been turning around a bit for GE stock of late. Since the start of the month, in fact, GE shares are up a solid $1. That may not sound like much, but at a share price as low as the one GE has sunk to, if you include today's 6.2% gain through 11:20 a.m. EDT, it works out to a 16% gain in the past 16 days. Not bad for a half month's work.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
Helping GE out with its stock price have been several bullish pronouncements from Wall Street. For example, Deutsche Bank cites "undeniably higher" expectations from the industrial sector this week, Bank of America reiterates its buy rating on GE stock, and Goldman Sachs says shares could rise as much as 50% this year (reports TheFly.com).
Today, GE got a further bit of good news when Reuters reported that the government of Sudan has signed a "memorandum of understanding" regarding the purchase of "up to 470 megawatts" worth of mobile gas turbine generators to upgrade three of that country's power plants.
Now what
No purchase price on the generators has been stated, but Reuters noted in the report that Sudan has put the price of upgrading just one of the plants in question at $915 million. Multiply that by three, and we're looking at roughly $2.7 billion in potential new revenue for GE's beleaguered power division. That segment's sales, which have been declining for four straight years, were down 12% at midyear 2020 (according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence).
One note of caution, though: The deal hasn't been confirmed, and the value of the deal, if it happens, hasn't been confirmed, either. Even if both the deal and its price do get confirmed, the $2.7 billion won't arrive all at once in a neat little package -- and it won't be near enough to replace the more than $17 billion in annual revenue GE's power division has shrunk over the past four years.
