Baker Hughes is one of the three large diversified oilfield service companies, alongside SLB and Halliburton. The modern company was formed in April 1987 by the merger of Baker International and Hughes Tool Company. Hughes Tool grew out of the partnership between Howard R. Hughes Sr., father of the aviator and industrialist Howard Hughes Jr., and oilman Walter B. Sharp, who tested a dual-cone roller drill bit at Goose Creek, Texas, and received U.S. patents on August 10, 1909. The bit crushed hard rock instead of scraping it, which made rotary drilling practical at depth. The Baker side started with a casing shoe that Reuben C. Baker patented on July 16, 1907 and the Baker Casing Shoe Company he founded in 1913. For decades the combined company sold the tools, chemicals and field engineering used to drill and produce wells.
The blocked Halliburton megamerger
Oil prices began falling hard in the second half of 2014. On November 17, 2014, Halliburton and Baker Hughes announced a definitive stock-and-cash agreement valued at $34.6 billion that would have left two large service companies instead of three. The U.S. Department of Justice sued on April 6, 2016 to block it, arguing the loss of competition would raise prices for producers, and European regulators had objected as well. The companies terminated the agreement on May 1, 2016, and Halliburton paid Baker Hughes the $3.5 billion termination fee by May 4. Baker Hughes had spent about 18 months on a process it could not complete, during the worst of the downturn.
The General Electric years
General Electric moved next. Its oil and gas division had manufacturing scale, including the Nuovo Pignone turbomachinery operations in Florence, Italy, but limited field service reach. The combination closed on July 3, 2017: Baker Hughes shareholders received a special cash dividend of $17.50 per share and 37.5% of the new company, GE took 62.5%, and Lorenzo Simonelli moved from GE Oil and Gas to run it. GE then began to leave almost immediately as it worked through its own debt problems. It cut its holding to about 38.4% in September 2019 for roughly $2.7 billion of net proceeds, announced in July 2020 that it would sell the rest, and still held an 11.4% economic interest in Baker Hughes Holdings LLC at the end of 2021. The 2022 Form 10-K records that GE no longer had an economic interest as of December 31, 2022. The company had been renamed Baker Hughes Company on October 17, 2019 and its stock moved from the New York Stock Exchange to Nasdaq on December 7, 2021, keeping the ticker BKR.
What the GE deal actually bought
The lasting consequence of the brief GE marriage is the turbomachinery business. It builds the gas turbines and centrifugal compressors that liquefy natural gas, and increasingly the generators and drives used in gas-fired power plants and industrial facilities. That business is the reason Baker Hughes now looks different from its oilfield peers. In FY2025 Industrial and Energy Technology revenue rose 10% to $13,409M while Oilfield Services and Equipment revenue fell 8% to $14,324M, and IET segment EBITDA rose 21% to $2,482M while OFSE fell 9% to $2,618M. The equipment is sold once and serviced for decades: Gas Technology Services held $16.1B of remaining performance obligations at the end of 2025 against $3,028M of annual revenue, and total company remaining performance obligations reached a record $35.9B.
The energy technology pivot
Baker Hughes now describes itself as an energy technology company rather than an oilfield service company, and its order book has widened accordingly. For the second consecutive year non-LNG equipment accounted for about 85% of IET orders, which hit a record $14,871M in FY2025. Awards in the year included gas turbine and refrigerant compressor scope for Train 5 of the NextDecade Rio Grande LNG facility, six LM9000 turbines for Commonwealth LNG, more than 40 BRUSH generators for gas-fired power plants totalling roughly 7 GW, compression and power generation for the Tengiz gas separation complex in Kazakhstan, and a steam turbine generator set for an Aalo Atomics small modular reactor demonstration plant whose power is planned for an onsite data centre. Climate Technology Solutions, covering carbon capture, hydrogen, clean power, geothermal and emissions abatement, reported $647M of revenue.
FY2025 results and the Chart acquisition
FY2025 revenue was $27,733M, essentially flat against $27,829M, with attributable net income of $2,588M. Adjusted EBITDA reached a record $4,825M, a 17.4% margin, orders a record $29,585M and free cash flow a record $2,732M. The company then reshaped the portfolio again. On January 1, 2026 it closed the sale of its Precision Sensors and Instrumentation business, carrying the Panametrics, Druck and Reuter-Stokes brands, to Crane Company, and formed a joint venture with a Cactus, Inc. subsidiary holding its surface pressure control business. On July 16, 2026 it completed a $13.6 billion acquisition of Chart Industries at $210.00 per share in cash, after paying $258 million to settle Chart commitments to a rival bidder. Chart, which reported $4.3 billion of revenue in FY2025 and serves customers in more than 50 countries, became a third reporting segment led by senior vice president Jim Apostolides, with a target of $325 million in annualised cost synergies within three years.
