Joseph M. Hogan letterhead
To Our Valued GE Medical Systems Customers,

On October 10th, GE announced plans to acquire Amersham plc, a world leader in medical diagnostics and life sciences. Amersham's imaging agents and life sciences businesses will add new, high-technology platforms to our diagnostic imaging, healthcare services and information technologies businesses. The expanded business entity, which will be called GE Healthcare Technologies, will endeavor to drive advances and bring exciting new technologies in molecular imaging and personalized medicine to market. I wanted to take a moment to share with you some specific thoughts on the proposed transaction.

Amersham has long focused on enabling molecular medicine. Headquartered in the UK, Amersham's strategy has been to be a leading provider of products and technologies enabling disease to be better understood, diagnosed sooner and treated more effectively, based upon a growing understanding of disease at the molecular level.

Amersham is organized into three businesses areas: Medical Diagnostics, operating as Amersham Health, and Discovery Systems and Protein Separations, operating as Amersham Biosciences, which provides instruments, reagents and software for drug development, discovery and manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals. These Amersham businesses will combine with our existing GE Medical Systems business unit to create the new GE Healthcare Technologies business sector. Both Amersham and GE Medical Systems will continue operating in much the same manner that we do today, with the same headquarters locations and leadership teams. The integration should be seamless in terms of visible impact to your organization.

Amersham and GE have both shared a long-term vision of innovation and efficacy in the healthcare market. Given the hyper-growth we see today in molecular biology and the future we perceive in molecular imaging, we're excited about the potential this acquisition has in helping to make the dream of personalized medicine a reality. Together, GE and Amersham mutually embraced this future when we began a joint development project in PET molecular imaging more than two years ago.

The acquisition of Amersham is consistent with GE's continued strategy to deliver clinically relevant technology to help our customers improve patient care and outcomes and optimize clinical workflow and efficiencies in their critical areas of focus. The proposed combination of GE and Amersham will position GE for a new chapter in medicine by creating a healthcare company with broad expertise in imaging, information technology, services, diagnostic pharmaceuticals and drug development and discovery. We believe this combination will help us bring about important advances in clinical diagnostics and molecular medicine to elevate medical certainty and healthcare productivity.

At GE, our success is a reflection of your success. We work hard to continually earn your trust and support. Our acquisition of Amersham and the creation of the new GE Healthcare Technologies business sector will further represent our commitment to provide you with the best technologies and levels of service and quality unmatched in the industry today.

We anticipate the Amersham acquisition to be completed sometime during the first half of 2004 and remain committed to providing you with the world-class products and services that you have come to expect from GE Medical Systems. We will continue to provide you with updates as appropriate. If you have questions, please contact us at amershamfeedback@med.ge.com.

Thanks for your business, and thanks for supporting both GE Medical Systems and Amersham.

Best regards,

Joe Hogan signature
Joseph M. Hogan
President & CEO
GE Medical Systems

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