Factbox: Excerpts from interview with GE's Jeff Immelt

General Electric Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt speaks during an interview with Reuters in his office at GE Corporate Headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut in this May 9, 2011 file photo. Even a casual look at the history of General Electric Co during its decade with Immelt at the helm reads like a chronology of the major crises of the start of the 21st century.

FAIRFIELD, Connecticut (Reuters) - Jeff Immelt admits to a few regrets over the nearly 10 years he has spent at the helm of General Electric Co, mainly not selling the company's former insurance arm quicker and allowing GE Capital to grow as large as it did.

But he also argues that the conglomerate he runs today - which aims to generate 60 to 70 percent of its profit from its core industrial businesses, making and maintaining heavy equipment, is in the best position to grow profit that it has been in a decade.

Below are a some quotes from a recent Reuters interview with Jeff Immelt.

* On restructuring the company:

"There was no second when I was CEO when I felt like insurance was a good fit for GE. It took us five years to exit it, but I don't feel that way about any of the businesses we're in today."

"Every day when we owned NBC, I woke up kind of paranoid that something was going to replace that business model. And in many ways the industry has proven to be much more resilient than I thought it would be. But even today, with our 49 percent investment, I look at the audience every night, I still get the ratings and I look at the dissipation of audience over time and it still freaks me out."

"We basically have a company today that best fits what I view as being GE core competencies and in some way all of them have some secular tailwinds that I think can propel them over the next five, ten, 15 years. So that's why I'm so positive about the portfolio."

"I've basically sold half the company that GE was when I became CEO.... The only confusion that investors can have today is does financial services fit with infrastructure? In the end I'm not the judge, they're the judge. But it's a much simpler company than it was ten years ago. Much simpler."

* On GE's underperforming shares:

"I don't like where the stock is today, I think being in financial services, particularly with the kind of the GE Capital business model during the financial crisis, clearly that has hurt us the worst and has been a source of frustration, I'm sure, for investors and the leadership team

...

"Maybe at one point in the history of GE we were overvalued. That's not true today.

"I work without a contract, I know I've got to perform. Over the last decade when I've been CEO we've earned the third most money of any company in the world. From an operating and execution standpoint we've done OK but I think we can do better in the future and we have the type of businesses that can help us do that."

"The burden is on us to be more transparent, which we've tried to do. The burden is on us to be as simple as we can be. But basically today if you take our earnings that are infrastructure we probably get the same P/E (price-to-earnings ratio) on that set of earnings that UTX (United Technologies Corp) does and if you take our earnings from financial services we probably get a slightly better P/E than the financial services industry does. I don't think we've been unfairly harnessed by a complexity factor. And our job is to grow earnings equal to or greater than the S&P 500 and let the rest take care of itself."

* On the decision to stop giving profit forecasts:

"Investors are smart. They don't really need guidance to judge your company. That's what I've learned the most is that the T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, people like that, they really don't need it. They can build their own models, they know when you're winning and losing and smart investors really don't need guidance."

* On scaling back GE Capital:

"Basically, we would do almost anything to make a buck in financial services, I'm going back 30 years here. We didn't do trading, we didn't take currency risk, we never did any of that stuff. But we went from being a big mid-market lender to being big in insurance. We built a big private equity book at one point in time. We expended more broadly in consumer finance. Almost all of those things over a decade or more got us too diluted from what we were really best at."

"The size was really what our biggest mistake was."

* On the role of M&A in growing GE:

"My view is that basically we shouldn't think about acquisitions as what's going to move the needle for GE. In the end what moves the needle for GE is technology, productivity. Big themes - China or Brazil or things like that."

* On getting his managers to take risks:

"One of the things that professional managers are worst at is investing. Your career gets built on momentum and things like that and sometimes we don't do as good a job of teaching people how to take swings. It's not infrequent that I'm a catalyst, to say, 'Why don't we do it this way or why don't we take this approach?'"

* On the move of Vice Chairman John Rice to Hong Kong:

"You can say, 'We need to decentralize,' but we're not going to take a big decision and let it be made by a low-level person. We're just not set up to do that. What we can do is have big decisions made by creditable and experienced people and we've now moved all those people to the regions."

* On GE's response to the Fukushima nuclear crisis:

"We're all going to learn a lot once the post-mortem is done but my sense is that the technology worked as it was designed to work. And people a long time ago - 30 to 40 years ago - actually did a pretty good job. We'll learn what to do with spent fuel pools or remote power. We'll learn a lot as we go through the industry. But I thought our team did a good job."

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Claudia Parsons)