A $12 billion offering of new stock by NBC Universal parent General Electric was priced Thursday morning at $22.25 per share. That’s below Wednesday’s closing price of $24.50 and exactly the strike price of the warrants the company issued to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to buy $3 billion of common stock as part of a deal that also included $3 billion in preferred stock. Not surprisingly, GE’s stock price quickly fell to right around the pricing of the new issue.
GE lined up Banc of America Securities, Citi, Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and UBS to handle the sale of 547,825,000 new shares. If the offering is oversubscribed, an additional 82,173,750 shares will be made available.
