GE to Buy Most of Citis Commercial Lending Unit - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times

GE to Buy Most of Citis Commercial Lending Unit - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times


Citi has been selling its assets left and right. Lets recap some of the sales:

• Sale of commercial and leasing unit to GE,
• Sale of leveraged loans to private equity,
• Sale to Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) of consumer and business deposit accounts and loans, totaling $500 million in deposits and $60 million in loans,
• The closing of several branches around the country this year -- eight in Texas, six in Florida, three in New Jersey, one in California and one in Maryland,
• Halt plans to open two branches in Florida, two in California, and two in Maryland,
• Sale and lease back of real estate: it has conducted several sale and lease back transaction on some of its buildings,
• Selling or closing some retail branches and consumer-finance operations in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Most of Citi moves have one thing in common: protect the international franchise, while shedding all US retail operation to a minimum. Citi is in a tight bind and they rather sacrifice the US operations for the growing international units. I think Citi will emerge from this realignment as an international investment and commercial bank mainly rather than a mega super store financial institution, which is fine as long as they have a solid and clear vision of themselves.

Additional moves made by Citi, from Forbes magazine:

- MORTGAGES: Earlier in March, Citi said it would reduce the residential mortgage assets of its U.S. mortgage business by about $45 billion over the next 12 months.

-- WEALTH MANAGEMENT: Citi said earlier in March that it would reorganize its wealth management business.

-- LAYOFFS: Citigroup, having eliminated 17,000 jobs last spring before the credit crisis even began, announced in January it was reducing its staff of about 320,000 by another 4,200, and that more layoffs were likely to come. The bulk of these job losses are in the company's investment banking group. -- OPERATIONS ABROAD: On Monday, Pandit gave more autonomy to Citi's operations around the world by naming executives to head the Asia Pacific region; the Western Europe, Middle East and Africa region; the Central and Eastern Europe region; and the Mexico and Latin America region. Meanwhile, Citigroup said earlier this year it would be merging its Japanese businesses with the ones it now runs after acquiring Japanese brokerage Nikko Cordial Corp.