General Electric could spend up to $30 billion on acquisitions over the next two to three years while continuing to raise its dividend and buy back shares, a top official said Wednesday.
But John Rice, a vice chairman of the largest U.S. conglomerate , cautioned that "$30 billion-ish" figure is not a commitment to spending.
"That doesn't mean that we'll spend that money; it doesn't mean that we won't do more with the dividend or with the buyback," Rice, who heads the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company's technology infrastructure unit, told an investor conference in New York. "If we were to conclude that there aren't the deals out there that make sense, we might do less than that. We're not going to chase bad deals just so that we can say we spent 'X' billion on M&A."