Baker Hughes (BHI) and General Electric (GE) have announced its plan to merge their oil-and-gas activities into a new company.

General Electric will spin off its oil-and-gas unit into the new Baker Hughes (that will keep the BHI name), with GE's oil-and-gas CEO Lorenzo Simonelli as new CEO of the combined new company, with a predicted $32 billion annual revenue.

General Electric will own almost two-thirds of the new Baker Hughes, with GE CEO Jeff Immelt acting as chairman for the merged company.

The new Baker Hughes will be led by GE executives, but will keep its Baker Hughes name and trade on the New York Stock Exchange, with headquarters in Houston and London.

The old Baker Hughes has been a consistent dividend payer over the last decades, with a mostly flat payout. The dividend has been hiked just two times in the past nine years. In 2014 Baker Hughes hiked its dividend by 13.3% to $0.17 quarterly.

Baker Hughes is an oil and gas company. The Company is a fullstream provider of integrated oilfield products, services and digital solutions, including solutions for drilling and production (Upstream), power and compression efficiency for storage (Midstream) and refining, petrochemical and fertilizer production (Downstream).