GENERAL Electric Co may sell or seek a partner for the unit that makes refrigerators and washers, ending more than a century in an industry that helped make GE a household name, industry sources have revealed.

GE hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc to explore options that include a spinoff or auction, the sources told Bloomberg News. A sale may bring as much as US$8 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt, who took over from Jack Welch in 2001 and surprised investors with a decline in profit last quarter, has been paring consumer businesses to cope with a slower US economy. The units he's selling don't expand fast enough to help GE reach its goal of 10 percent annual profit growth. Appliances, which like light bulbs are the GE products most familiar to consumers, were 4.1 percent of 2007 sales.

"We would positively perceive a more aggressive approach to selling off slow-growth businesses," Robert Schenosky, a New York-based analyst with Jefferies & Co who rates the shares "hold" and doesn't own any, said in an interview.

Prices for some appliances haven't increased in more than half a century. In 1953, an 11-cubic-foot refrigerator was advertised for more than US$500. Today, an 18.2-cubic-foot GE model lists for as little as US$519 on the NexTag.com shopping site.

Gary Sheffer, a company spokesman, declined to comment on a possible sale.

US home prices fell the most in 29 years last quarter, making it tougher for home owners to refinance loans or borrow more money to buy goods such as refrigerators.

Kentucky-based GE Appliances provided about US$7.2 billion of GE's US$172.7 billion in sales last year and accounted for about 13,000 of 327,000 employees.

"This isn't a piece of business at this point that has got much more incremental opportunity for GE," said Nicholas Heymann, an analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach Inc in New York.