Can GE's industrial businesses pick up the slack?

When General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) reports earnings Friday, the question on investors' minds will be whether the company's industrial and entertainment businesses can pick up the slack from the decline from the finance side.

Most of GE's growth has come from is finance businesses over the past decade, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). That's going to change because its WMC Mortgage unit is a big player in the suprime mortgage market which has recently melted down.

WMC Mortgage rival New Century Financial Inc. (NYSE: NEW) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It remains unclear how badly the General Electric business has been affected though Reuters recently reported that WMC Mortgage had some of the worst-performing loans in the benchmark index for home equity asset-backed securities.

General Electric's strength is that if one of its businesses falters, others can make up for the shortfall.

Consider power generation. Remember that about 245 gigawats of new generating capacity will be needed by 2030, which is equal to about 817 new nuclear power plants, according to data from the Energy Information Administration posted on the Web site of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group.

NBC Universal, long a laggard, is showing signs of life thanks to improvements in the NBC television network. No one should buy GE's stock just because they like "Deal or No Deal." That unit is the smallest by revenue, while its Infrastructure business, which includes power generation is the largest.

Analysts are expecting General Electric to have earnings of 44 cents on revenue of $39.83 billion, according to Thomson Financial.