The company reported adjusted industrial free-cash flow of negative $1.2 billion, compared with negative $1.8 billion a year earlier. Some analysts had been projecting more than $2 billion in negative free-cash flow for the quarter, especially after GE GE, +3.32% warned a few months before that it expected to spend more money on restructuring in 2019, just one factor that could have proven a drag on the metric.
Instead, GE may have “significantly underspen[t] on restructuring” in the latest period, according to Gordon Haskett’s John Inch, leading the company’s results to look better relative to bleak expectations. He calculates that GE spent 3 cents per share on industrial restructuring this time around, about the same as it spent a year earlier.
And on its earnings call, GE told investors that the “timing of certain orders and customer collections” helped drive the better-than-expected free-cash numbers