GE to Move Headquarters From Connecticut to Boston

The city and state also agreed to make transportation improvements in the Seaport District and to build an innovation center where GE and university researchers can collaborate. The company announced Monday it will move its globabl headquarters for GE Healthcare from suburban London, England, to Chicago.

Swapnil Shah, the CEO of an energy analytics company in Lexington, said GE will create new opportunities for college students, entrepreneurs and researchers.

NY state also reportedly made a bid to bring GE to the state, but was also rebuffed.

“The potential impact over those 20 years would be $260 million, a little bit more than 10 times the total tax incentives that we are providing GE at this point”, Barros said. “Today, GE is a $130-billion high-tech global industrial company, one that is leading the digital transformation of industry.

“We are losing everything here”, he said. “It affirms GE’s digital technology orientation and that strategic commitment for decades ahead”, said Steven Winoker, an analyst at Bernstein Research.

General Electric has been wooed from the CT suburbs to the Beantown waterfront by $145 million in incentives offered by the state of MA and city of Boston.

Employees will move to a temporary location in Boston starting this summer, GE said, with the permanent move completed by 2018.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said in an afternoon press conference that he was “disappointed” that GE chose to leave. The company has always been spectacularly successful in avoiding state income tax obligations as a CT resident.

Mr. Malloy declined to offer details on what financial incentives the state offered GE, but said “we were highly competitive”.

GE’s move of its headquarters to Boston is a vote of confidence in the innovation scene here.

It’s a huge victory for Boston who beat out efforts by Providence, Rhode Island and New York, NY (to a lesser extent, Georgia and Texas) to incentivize a move for General Electric’s headquarters and the 800 jobs promised.

These hard facts haven’t stopped idle speculation over the role of recent CT tax changes in prompting the move.

GE has been in Fairfield since 1974 where it pays $1.6 million in annual property taxes to the town of roughly 60,000, according to The Courant.

However, according to some analysts there are also some tax reasons involved, including higher corporate taxes decided in the middle of last year by the neighboring state of CT, where GE had its headquarters in Fairfield for over 40 years. GE will have about 800 people in Boston-200 corporate employees and 600 digital industrial product managers, designers and developers.

Joseph McGee, vice president of public policy and programs for The Business Council of Fairfield County, said he was told by GE officials that some Fairfield employees will move to GE offices in Norwalk.

“They deserve an apology from every Democrat lawmaker whose disrespectful comments mocked companies like GE when they raised legitimate concerns about the state budget. Connecticut’s piece of the corporate pie remains strong, and our state’s ongoing commitment to work closely with business leaders to encourage future economic growth will ensure we continue to be a great place to live, work, and raise a family for years to come”.